Designpedia

Neville Brody

British Art Director/Designer Neville Brody was born April 23, 1957 in London. He was the creator of the interactive type magazine FUSE, designed many album covers for Fetish Records, and Art Editor for The Face magazine. Brody is currently working under Research Studios launched in London in 1994 by himself and Fwa Richards. The studio has since opened offices in San Francisco, Berlin, and New York.

Brody is one of the best known graphic designers of his generation. His book, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, originally published in 1988 and at one time the best-selling graphic design book of all time with 125,000 copies sold, is a considered a bible in the world of graphic design, as well as the seminal expression of his early, ground-breaking typography.

Brody first made his way into the public eye through his record cover designs and his involvement in the British independent music scene in the early 1980s.

But it was his work on magazines that firmly established his reputation as one of the world’s leading graphic designers. In particular, his artistic contribution to The Face revolutionized the way in which designers and readers approached the medium. His unique designs soon became much-imitated models for magazines, advertising and consumer-oriented graphics. In fact, so infrequently has any one designer’s work been so widely imitated and absorbed into design practice that we have a tendency to look back at Brody’s innovations and see them as ordinary. But, in the 1980s, his work was radically new. In one example, Neville Brody reused a piece of his own layout from a prior issue’s feature on Madonna for an article on Andy Warhol, paraphrasing Warhol’s reuse of existing forms.

Brody won much public acclaim through his highly innovative ideas on incorporating and combining typefaces into design and he later took this a step further and began designing his own typefaces, thus opening the way for the advent of digital type design. As a newly-minted graduate of the London College of Printing, Brody had irreverently asserted that he hated type. However, as art director of the above-mentioned magazines, he designed several custom typefaces that were later released to the public including Arcadia, Industria, Insignia, Blur, Pop, Gothic and Harlem. His contributions to the world of graphic design and digital typography are invaluable. Often referred to as a “star typographer,” Brody has designed a number of well-known typefaces.