Gra

fik122

Journal of the best in internationalgraphic design

Grafik122 October 2004

03 Editorial By Caroline Roberts07 Roughs Inspiration and information08 Showcase The very best new design work14 Case Study Saville Associates’ sleeve for The Music

16 Profi le Neville Brody

27 Talent Charles Anastase28 Talent Lucas Nieuwehuys30 Letter Asset An exhibition of typographic posters

34 Special Report Experience

36 Beyond Our Ken Lucienne Roberts looks at the influence of Ken Garland40 Inside Stories Is the design press doing its job?44 Smith’s Rules Kelvyn Laurence Smith’s guide to surviving as a designer 46 Talking Shop Five design stalwarts reveal their experiences48 Age Limits? How age affects designers by Sandra Deeble

52 Review Energy Gallery at the Science Museum54 Review Eight new design books under fire 56 Review Handwritten reviewed by Angus Hyland58 Competition Winners of HP Inspire61 Insight Six image libraries give us their take on experience69 Viewpoint What are your best and worst graphic design experiences?70 Grafik Giveaway Win six new CDs and Lomo cameras

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Grafik122 ProfileNeville Brody

17Grafik122 ProfileNeville Brody

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ProfileNeville BrodyText by Adrian Shaughnessy

01 Poster for Interact1, Don’t Panic, London 200402 Page for Ergo Magazine, London 200403 Exhibition poster, Moscow 200404, 05 Catalogue pages for Beck’s Futures, ICA, London 2004

“Over the past two or three years I’ve seriously considered giving the whole thing up—just doing occasional freelance jobs and lecturing instead,” announces Neville Brody in his customary meditative way. It’s a typical Brody statement. He doesn’t do flippant. Everything he says is carefully weighed and considered. He’s not humourless, but he’s a serious guy with opinions and convictions, and he gives the impression that over the years he’s wrestled with some formidable internal demons. Yet I’m shocked by this statement: here is one of the most famous graphic designers in the world, with an era-defining body of work behind him, and he’s talking about ‘giving up’. But suddenly he changes tack and becomes more optimistic: “I feel that the mood of the times has changed for the better,” he says. “We’re working for people like the Royal Court Theatre, the BBC and the ICA, and I’ve been reinvigorated. I’ve gone back to type and image: back to where I started, really.”

Neville Brody has achieved a level of international fame and recognition that no other British graphic designer has ever experienced. He has published two monographs (he is talking to publishers about a third); in 1988 he held a one-man show at the V&A; he has been the subject of countless articles and profiles; his work is taught in art schools around the world; he is a frequent topic of discussion on design blogs; and he is often the only graphic designer whose name is known to non-designers. Neville Brody casts a long shadow over graphic design. And yet he remains a tangential, slightly awkward figure within contemporary design: he doesn’t quite ‘fit in’. Unusually for someone of his age, he’s still a doer, actively engaged in the process of design. He hasn’t joined the design establishment(“I tried once,” he says mysteriously), and while many designers are happy to be in thrall to branding and commercial culture, Brody retains the radical political convictions of his youth.

In a recent debate on Design Observer, that most patrician of design blogs, the writer and critic Rick Poynor wrote a passionate appraisal of Brody. He said: “I believe that when future assessments are made Brody will emerge clearly as one of the most considerable designers of the period, working anywhere.” Poynor’s post produced a fiery response (one of the largest generated by the site), from both admirers and detractors. When I mentioned this to Brody, a few weeks before interviewing him, he said that he’d heard about it but hadn’t read it. I wondered whether this was affectation on his part. Was he telling me that he was above such self-admiring gestures as reading about himself? But he really hadn’t read it, because when we meet a second time, to conduct this interview, he can’t wait to tell me that he’s now read all sixty-five posts and wants to talk about it. “I felt attacked by the Design Observer debate,”

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Very few graphic designers make it to household name status, apart from Neville Brody that is. Here Adrian Shaughnessy meets the man and brings you the inside information on his career, from the Stiff Records days to dealing with fame and nearly giving it all up...

1918Grafik122 ProfileNeville Brody

Grafik122 ProfileNeville Brody

he says. “I found it really strange that my work should be revisited in this way. I found it odd that people had the time to discuss my old work which had a particular historical role and came out of a particular context. I don’t read design magazines; I don’t read design books; I don’t take part in design forums, because it always makes me pissed off. Sometimes I think this industry is a bit like a hairdresser’s industry; there appears to be so much personal resentment, and there are a lot of people who should be on the same side, who spend their time working against each other.”

I ask him if he doesn’t feel the need for a healthy critical discourse in design. Isn’t design strengthened by intelligent criticism? “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “There’s a place for design criticism, but what I’m saying is that I think there is a more important area relating to the designer’s social responsibility that’s largely untouched. I lecture on this constantly and the reaction I usually get is, well, all we want to do is design pretty pictures. In my view there’s been a big shift away from the idea of graphic design as public service, to what we have now which is graphic design as a toolbox for commercialism. We seem to have lost the idea that life can be improved by design. We don’t seem to care about the people who ‘experience’ our work, only about the people who pay for it, and what our peers think about it.” In the age of branding, Brody’s notions about design as ‘public service’ are deeply unfashionable.

Brody was born in 1957, grew up in the Sixties and went to college in the Seventies. His sensibilities were forged in the radical and anti-authoritarian climate of the years immediately preceding Mrs Thatcher’s rise to power, and while others from his generation have abandoned these ideals, Brody has clung on to them. He went first to Hornsey School of Art, which had been a hot-bed of student unrest in the Sixties, to study fine art. But he switched to graphics: “Although all my inclinations were towards

painting and collage,” he explains, “I thought fine art was, at the time, an elitist lie, and more about finance than anything else. And I felt if you had something to say, you should communicate it to as large an audience as possible, which for me meant graphic design. So I went to the London College of Printing. I went there because it was the most orthodox and disciplined graphics course in Europe at the time; I felt it would give me the tools and the training to do what I wanted to do. You see, at that time we had, on the one hand, the understated commercialism of fine art, and on the other, the overstated commercialism of advertising which permeated every aspect of our existence. I felt that my role was to help reveal the tools of manipulation. I was very politically and socially motivated. And I was influenced by Dadaism, Rodchenko, by the record covers of Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville, and, up until punk, by Hipgnosis.’

The LCP failed Brody (despite his external examiners awarding him a first), and he left without a degree. “They said I was uncommercial and the only advice they gave me was to wear a tie to interviews,” he says with no hint of bitterness. “I left and went into four years of real poverty. People urged me to get a job in advertising—but I stuck to what I believed in. And if you believe in something that’s what you must do. Not getting a job doesn’t mean that you are no good.” When he talks about this period—his formative years—Brody frequently uses the phrase “my message”. He talks about his work as “challenging perceptions”, and at one point during the interview says: “I can sum up what I was trying to do at this time; I was trying to use design to reveal, not conceal. And I was trying to put humanity back into the picture.”

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01, 02, 03 Catalogue pages for Beck’s Futures, ICA, London 200404, 06, 07 Adverts for Issey Miyake, Tribeca, New York 200205 Laser-cut invite for Issey Miyake, Tribeca, New York 2002

20 21Grafik122 ProfileNeville Brody

Grafik122 ProfileNeville Brody

These are lofty ambitions for a young man. And it is one of the great paradoxes of Brody’s career that, despite his political convictions, and despite the fact that almost alone among British graphic designers his work was underpinned by a personal credo, he would later be dismissed by his detractors as a mere stylist. In fact, Brody was an ideologue—but a modern ideologue who realised that to be heard you had to master the communication skills of the age. Accordingly, Brody produced work which was stylistically sophisticated and utterly beguiling. He also recognised that fame was the oxygen that energised the new media village. “If you sit on the fringe and make political statements people will treat you as a fringe player,” he states. “I had to move into the centre of things. My message needed to be put over to a larger public, and the only way to do that was to become famous; to have my name well known. But I never pursued fame or celebrity in itself; it was about getting my name known through my work so that people could get to the ideas behind it.”

It is significant that the two most famous British graphic designers worked for mould-breaking record labels early in their careers: Peter Saville at Factory and Brody at Stiff. Both labels were run by a new breed of music industry entrepreneur, Tony Wilson at Factory, Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera at Stiff. These men brought a knowing, ‘postmodern’ transparency to the running of record labels: they understood the mechanics of pop mythology and, for the first time, they exposed the wiring of stardom. Saville and Brody received masterclasses in the creation of pop mythologies, and both became famous in a pop star-ish way, even if in Brody’s case he was later to have misgivings about the benefits of fame. “I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams,” Brody states, as if twenty years later he still can’t believe it happened. “But I also failed beyond my worst nightmares. There was so much copying of the stylistic attributes of my work, and such a glossing over of the core

raison d’être of my work that I went into a period of depression. I felt that I’d failed miserably. In fact, my success got in the way of the message. So the only option I had was to go underground and continue plugging away, developing ideas and nurturing other people, and not to have any kind of public profile.”

The design writer Stephen Bailey, in a recent article on celebrity designers, quotes novelist John Updike: “Fame is a mask that eats the face.” Neville Brody wasn’t destroyed by his fame, but he paid a price for it. “Being famous doesn’t make you rich,” he notes wryly. “Within six months of my V&A show we were bankrupted. We were dropped by every client in the UK, and forced to find work in Germany and Japan. I could have been destitute. I had to re-mortgage my apartment. It was a complete shock. It seems that in this country there is a sort of bitterness about success, or perceived success, and this gets in the way of any sort of critical appraisal. So, for the past ten-to-fifteen years we’ve been mainly working outside of the UK and not publicising work here at all.’

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01 Poster for Fuse18, Secrets, FontShop International 200002 Poster for Fuse exhibition, Tokyo 199903 Poster for Fuse94, London 199404 Poster for Fuse14, Cyber, FontShop International 199705 Cover of MacUser, London 200006 Poster for Freeform font, Fuse10, London 199407 Poster for Crash, Fuse7, London 199308 Poster for Underground Site, Creative Review, London 2001

2322Grafik122 ProfileNeville Brody

Grafik122 ProfileNeville Brody

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01 Core identity, stage 2, Salomon 200002 Main logo, Salomon 199703 Logo for Zyvex, Texas 199904 Packaging system, Salomon 199905 Core snowboard system, top and base, Salomon 199706 Exterior view of Citadium sports store, Paris 200007 Interior view of Citadium sports store, Paris 2000

08 Interior view of Citadium sports store, Paris 200009, 10 Bag, front and back Citadium sports store, Paris 200011 Business card front Citadium sports store, Paris 200012, 13 External views, Citadium sports store, Paris 2000

2524Grafik122 ProfileNeville Brody

Grafik122 ProfileNeville Brody

For keen Brody-watchers, it certainly appeared as if he’d vanished from the scene. But although his profile in the UK was zero-rated, Brody was working himself hard; so hard in fact that, aged thirty-nine, he had a nervous breakdown. “My breakdown was caused by incessant work,” he explains. “I had produced a huge body of work, which was only possible through total commitment. I sacrificed a lot for this, friendships and relationships, aside from the usual things like holidays and a social life.” Brody didn’t go to work for three months. The studio carried on without him and it was a year before he fully recovered. “When I got back I found that all the clients were driven by fear. They were afraid to take risks and everything was airport graphics,” he notes. I ask him what he means by “airport graphics”. “You know, Helvetica, white space, information graphics. It was something we’d done at Arena in 1986.”

Since 1994 Brody has worked under the studio name Research Studios, and opened satellite offices in Paris and Berlin. But he’s not empire-building: the offices are small, seemingly autonomous, and staffed by people who’d worked for himin London. Yet for all his restraint (only someone as confident as Brody would refrain from putting his name above the door), Brody still exerts a strong influence on young graphic designers. A friend of mine who teaches in a big design school tells me that when he invites his students to choose a designer to study, many of them pick Brody. My friend finds this odd: Brody was his original inspiration to become a designer, and here, twenty years later, young designers are still turning to him as a figure worth studying.

On a number of occasions during our conversation, I pull Brody back to the theme of this issue of Grafik: repeatedly I ask him to say how his own experiences have moulded him. But he avoids answering directly. Instead he talks about a new-found interest in Buddhism (he’s recently been on a retreat), about the gym, about the joys of not smoking (he used to smoke three packets a day) and about being a father of a young son. He tells me a wonderful story about being invited to lecture in Moscow at an art school and discovering that his host was the grandson of Rodchenko. Brody tells the man about his reverence for his grandfather, and Rodchenko’s grandson announces that he teaches Brody’s work to his young Russian students. Brody’s pleasure in the symmetry of this is palpable.

I try one more time: how has experience shaped you, Neville? “I’ve always felt that I had a destiny,” he says. “I’ve never questioned it or rationalised it, but I’ve felt I had to pursue it. It’s not a word many people use, but I’ve always had ‘intention’.” Are you evangelical then, I ask. “No, no, no,” he says. “Evangelism: that’s what’s wrong with advertising—it tells you what to think.”

01 Macromedia stage 2, Flash CD-Rom, San Francisco 200002 Macromedia stage 1, Dreamweaver box, Macromedia, San Francisco 199703 Macromedia stage 1, Freehand box, Macromedia, San Francisco 199704 Macromedia stage 1, Flash box, Macromedia, San Francisco 199705, 06 Hang-tag poster, back, Express, New York 200307 Magic logo, Macromedia San Francisco 199608 Shockwave logo, Macromedia San Francisco 199609 Macromedia stage 2, Fireworks box, San Francisco 2000

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10, 11 Members cards, ICA, London 200412 Members poster, ICA, London 200413 Season brochure, Royal Court Theatre, London 2004www.researchstudios.com