Neville Brody is one of the most celebrated graphic designers of his generation—a leading typographer and internationally recognized art director and brand strategist. He joins to discuss his third monograph, which showcases projects from the last thirty years of his illustrious career.
Debbie Millman:
Neville Brody is one of the most famous graphic designers of our time, and in the graphic design community, he’s a certifiable rockstar. In fact, you can say he helped create the rock scene of the 1980s when he famously designed album covers for bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Depeche Mode, Kurtis Blow, and 23 Skidoo.
He went on to become the art director of The Face magazine in the UK where his experiments in typography and design dazzled and delighted. His work of the ’80s and ’90s was collected in two books that became global bestsellers. Some of his work was seen as so groundbreaking that it’s included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
A third book, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 3, came out earlier this year, picking up where his 1994 second edition left off. Neville’s latest is essential reading if you want to understand the evolution of design over the last 40 years. And it’s also a wonderful opportunity to have him back on the show. Neville’s been joining me on the podcast since 2007. Neville Brody, welcome back to Design Matters.
Neville Brody:
Thank you so much, Debbie. It’s such a pleasure to be here again. I didn’t realize it was so long since we last spoke and since we first spoke.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Neville Brody:
I think a lot of things have changed in that time.
Debbie Millman:
It has. So I want to go back in time a little bit for those that might not have heard our previous interviews. You were born in Southgate, London and began drawing before you could even walk. So does that mean you were a young artist or a late walker?
Neville Brody:
I think both, to be honest, but I always had a creative interest. My father, whilst being quite technical and engineering based, was also a kind of inventor. The British tend to be inventors. We tend to invent things and then we tend to then get other countries and other industries to use that and develop it. But my dad was an inventor. He developed new ideas and so I was kind of born into that space. And yeah, I mean, I don’t know whether I was walking before the age of five. I hope so. But as soon as I could hold a crayon in my hand, I was using it.
Debbie Millman:
What kind of things did your dad invent? This I didn’t know.
Neville Brody:
Well, he spent his life as a camera technician, but during the Second World War, he was based in India where he was teaching the local community how to build radios. But this is something that he self-taught, so he never went to school to learn all of this. He learned everything himself, and eventually ended up running a business, repairing cameras, projectors and Super 8 and sound machines.
And had probably one of the first videotape recorders in the UK way back in the ’70s, and would be constantly inventing new tools, new circuitry, new ideas about how to use cameras. So he always had this incredible, inventive, imaginative mind that he allied to his engineering. And I think that’s something very much that I’ve picked up on.
Debbie Millman:
You said that you knew you were never going to be a train driver or a fireman as a little boy, so the only decision you had to make was whether you wanted to become a fine artist or a designer. And you’ve stated the reason you chose design over fine art was because you thought that fine art was a dishonest industry. So I have two questions. In what way did you think that, and do you still think that?
Neville Brody:
Well, I think at the time when I was going to art school, art was being promoted as something that was just about culture, as being a very pure form, and that advertising and design were the dishonest forms because they were based on persuasion as well as information.
And I felt that that was a dishonest portrayal of fine art, that in fact, fine art had long become a commodity, that it was all about investment. It was all about fame in order to drive further investment. And I felt that that was a very dishonest space where you almost had to have a hit single as a painting, or as a painter, and that then that would manifest as further sales, bigger shows, larger investments, et cetera.
And I just felt that there was something very dishonest about that, where fine art actually wasn’t touching the public. It was a very elite strand of rarefied intellectuals who largely engaged with the art world. Whereas I felt that design and advertising, using mass tools, would actually reach the public even though they were set up for very different reasons.
And the other thing that I understood, and my tutor at the time clarified for me, wonderfully, he said that if you’re an artist, you set your own brief. And without saying it, he was implying that I needed a brief to be set. So designers, advertisers all respond to briefs that are set externally, whereas artists set their own pace and challenges.
And then I took that and ran with it and realized that the challenge I was being set by design and advertising was you need to understand these tools in order to reveal them and in order to use them for different purposes. So taking a very fine art approach, which is a questioning one, but applying it to a field of mass media.
Debbie Millman:
In a very old interview, or actually it wasn’t really an interview, it was an assessment that Rick Poynor did of your career and your work. He said that while you weren’t a fine artist, you had an artist’s self-confidence. And I’m wondering if you would agree with that.
Neville Brody:
I don’t know what that is, and I think-
Debbie Millman:
I think it’s a certain kind of swagger maybe.
Neville Brody:
I think I need to ask Rick. I think that’s a projection. I think Rick has the swagger of an artist as a design critic. So I’ll figure out what he’s talking about there. But I don’t know, I think there was a lot of projection going on in design during the ’80s that people were thinking of designers increasingly as a rockstar, as you mentioned.
But that was never the intention. For me anyway, that was always hoist upon me. I was aware though that raising my profile would help create more exposure to the ideas behind it. So my work then became a shop window to the writing and the thinking. And I realized quite early on that actually the most important thing I could do is do lectures off the back of that, public appearances, talk to people, and use that platform to try and affect the way people were thinking about communication. So I didn’t welcome any of the celebrity positioning, but I felt it was important to use that as a vehicle.
Debbie Millman:
You attended Hornsey College of Art, which in 1968 was the birthplace of the first student sit-in, and it had to do with funding. You got there in 1975. Did the school still have a political undercurrent to it? And if so, did it influence your approach to design? Because you’ve always been, as you’ve just said, very vocal about the purpose or stance of graphic design in culture.
Neville Brody:
Hornsey College of Art at the time was a kind of an independent space, and it had lost its line of connection to those earlier sit-in days. I think that that had been sufficiently or effectively suppressed. But I went to Hornsey, I mean, for two reasons. One, it had a great creative reputation, a phenomenal kind of forward-thinking reputation in terms of experimentation. And at the same time, it was around the corner from where I lived. So it was a convenience and provenance more than anything, but it was a great time for me.
I was there for one year, a foundation course, and sat next to someone called Mike Barson. And Mike Barson later became the lyricist and keyboard player for Madness, the band. And whilst I was doing the course, he was off seeing punk because punk had just started at that point. And he would come in the morning saying, “I’ve seen this great band called the Sex Pistols. You have to go and see them.” And I just thought that was terrifying as an idea.
Debbie Millman:
Why did you think it was terrifying?
Neville Brody:
Well, because everything was quite innocent. This was the days of Genesis, Super Tramp, very middle of the road kind of culture that was going on in the early ’70s, mid ’70s, and David Bowie of course, Roxy Music of course, King Crimson. But these were fairly established nonthreatening bands, and then suddenly there was this band called the Sex Pistols that would go on stage, would be spat at and would spit at the audience, would not know how to play their instruments, were importing violence into their musical genre. And I rejected it. At the beginning I rejected it.
And then when I went to London College of Printing afterwards, in the second year, I suddenly realized what was going on and overnight became a punk. But one thing that became quite clear at the beginning of punk was that there were punks and there were people we called weekend punks. There was that kind of real punk and then copy punk.
And eventually it got reappropriated by advertising. So the cliche punk had all the danger stripped out of it, and it just became a model then that appeared in advertising and picture postcards of London where you’d have punks and mohawks with Westminster Abbey in the background. So it became, very quickly, a stereotyped genre.
But I was probably somewhere between the two, and the last year of art school, I had no income, living in a squat with a hundred other people in Covent Garden in the middle of Central London. Around the corner was the first Paul Smith store, which was at that time really super radical. I was working in a local restaurant washing up at night in order to pay for my student fees, et cetera. And it was probably the worst and the best year of my life. I thought it was amazing. Everyone should squat.
Debbie Millman:
Now, when you say squat, do you mean living in a place illegally without paying rent, or just living in a place that’s very low rent?
Neville Brody:
I mean living in a place illegally without paying rent.
Debbie Millman:
So you were, I believe, in the center of a collapsing, decaying space.
Neville Brody:
Well, it was actually an amazing building. It was 18th or 17th century townhouse in the middle of Covent Garden. And historically it’s where Nell Gwyn had lived once. So it was a beautiful piece of architecture which had gone to rack and ruin because they’d moved the markets out of Covent Garden.
And I remember one night, we had a fire and the roof burnt off, part of it, and in order to go to the bathroom, you had to actually use the bathroom in three foot of snow.
Debbie Millman:
Good thing you’re a man.
Neville Brody:
Well, exactly, exactly. It was quite challenging. And at those times, politically, London was very different. We had, of course, a lot of anti-immigrant action going on. We had the National Front that would frequently march past our squat, and it was quite a dangerous, edgy time. This was just before Margaret Thatcher came in. It was the beginning of the period of the miner strikes. In terms of stability, it was an incredible period of change and possibility as well as being very challenging in terms of living a comfortable life.
Debbie Millman:
What was your college portfolio like?
Neville Brody:
Well, I thought it was interesting.
Debbie Millman:
That’s not a good word.
Neville Brody:
Well, I took the college briefs and then interpreted them in a way that pushed them further. The college taught that there was one way to do everything. If you did a wedding invite or a theater poster or a book cover, in the ’70s, there was a way that you did all of this, and we were there to learn how to do it.
And the London College of Printing at that time had the reputation for being the most strict, extreme graphic design education in Europe, which is why I went there because I knew that if I was going to learn about it, I needed to learn the strictest rules and then I could improvise and use them for different purposes. But my tutors didn’t like that and they didn’t like my work, and they tried to throw me out on a couple of occasions.
In the second year, I’d put the queen’s head sideways on a stamp, and one tutor took such offense that he actually put in process the means to try and actually expel me because of that. And at the end of the three years, my internal tutors failed me. So I had an F on my degree, but the external assessors gave me a First. So there was an incredible contradiction between what was going on inside art education, what was going on in the real world, and ended up with a 2:2, which is sort of a mediocre mark somewhere in the middle.
But it actually came as a shock to the art school and the tutors following all of this. It wasn’t only me, it was a number of other people in my group. The art school had to reconsider everything about the way it was teaching, and it went into a kind of shock. And they did say to me that, A, I hadn’t answered any of the briefs on the course, and B, they said I had zero commercial potential. So thanks guys.
Debbie Millman:
Famous last words. How did you feel about that? At the time, did it bother you? Were you disappointed or upset with the grades that you were getting?
Neville Brody:
I think if they had given me a mediocre mark internally, I think that would’ve been more disappointing. But the fact that they’d failed me felt like a powerful, let’s say, catalyst for me to push forwards. And the fact that I was validated by the external assessors really helped.
And I had a job the day after I took my show down. I was working with Al McDowell at Rocking Russian. He had set up Rocking Russian, which was a record sleeve design agency with money from the band that was an offshoot of the Sex Pistols.
Debbie Millman:
With Glen Matlock, right?
Neville Brody:
Exactly. That was a great learning, going straight from failing my course at art school straight into a job. And I think I was one of the only people that had done that. What I’d realized is that the third year thesis isn’t about learning, it’s about interviewing everyone you want to get a job with.
So I did my third year thesis on editorial design and went round and interviewed every agency that was doing interesting, radical magazine design and got offered a job as part of it. So it’s all about using the platforms that you have and being aware of that, and not listening to your tutors. Sorry, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
No, not at all. I actually want to talk a little bit about design education in a bit, and especially with your experience at the Royal College. But I do want to ask, was your job at Rocking Russian the job you were fired from because you weren’t apologetic enough for being late every day?
Neville Brody:
No, no.
Debbie Millman:
Or was that a different job?
Neville Brody:
So my job at Rocking Russian, I was there for about eight months or just short of a year. Ironically, Rocking Russian turned out to be the people that designed i-D magazine. So if I’d stayed, I’d have been working on i-D and not The Face. The Face magazine was literally 50 yards round the corner. So it was a very concentrated Soho at that time. There was punk clubs, 100 Club, there was punk stores and there were these record labels and startup magazines, but they weren’t run very well on a business perspective.
And I remember at one point it was all hand to mouth and I hadn’t been paid for eight weeks. And it didn’t look like I was going to be paid for a lot longer and realized I had to get a job where I could survive. So I applied for a job at Stiff Records, which was then a crossover from early ’70s rock through to punk, and got a job there for one year and was constantly late, even though I was getting all my work done every single day, and there was no problem with the work. But I got fired for not apologizing for being late.
Debbie Millman:
I love that story.
Neville Brody:
They didn’t care what time I turned up as long as I apologized.
Debbie Millman:
How did you first get the job at The Face?
Neville Brody:
Well, I had come across Nick Logan, who was the publisher and initial editor of The Face when he was working on a magazine called Smash Hits. Smash Hits was an incredibly popular magazine here that printed all the lyrics of all the songs, plus did interviews. And it was incredibly ironic, but not to the people that bought it. They thought they were buying into this pop culture, but it was actually very tongue in cheek. It had journalists like, I believe the Pet Shop Boys were working on it. And so there was a lot of interesting people working on it.
And before that, Nick had been working on New Musical Express, NME, which was the main rock and pop music newspaper that everyone would read on a weekly basis. So he was quite pioneering. And I went to see him to see if I could get a job working on Smash Hits. And he said, “Well, I think your work’s great, but it’s absolutely unemployable in terms of Smash Hits, but I’ll keep it in mind.”
So when Nick left Smash Hits, he then started up with about $5,000 of savings that he’d put away and launched The Face magazine. And I kept in touch with him and about a year in, he invited me in to try a sample layout, which I did, which was a Kraftwerk spread that I’d made very constructivist.
And he looked at it and said, “Ah, you can do something I can’t do. Do you want to be art director?” I said, “Sure,” not knowing what I was doing, never having been involved in magazine design before, actually hating typography at that point. So it was an interesting challenge.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, we need to talk about that. I’ll get to it in a minute because I have a whole series of questions about you hating typography back then. But at the time, The Face was a magazine that was run more or less democratically and “for yourselves above all,” in quotes. There was little external expectation of what sells, and as a result, you became interested in the idea that people don’t actually read words anymore, so much as recognize them. How did that influence your design work?
Neville Brody:
It was a kind of liberation. My whole thesis had been really to try and understand why things exist in our design environments. And my questioning boiled down to two key questions. One was, is it functional? Meaning do we need it in order to perform our actions in terms of reading or recognizing? And is it there for reasons of taste and tradition?
So what we did is we kept the practical side, for instance, you need to be able to know where an article starts, but the traditional thing would be it’s a drop cap or it’s a large word, or it’s a bold type. So that bit then, we said, “We need to know where we begin something, but it could be anything. It could be a road sign. It could be a hole in the paper. It could be a small image. It could be something running upwards.”
So we split the taste and the aesthetics away from the function, and it allowed us to build a completely new aesthetic on top of it. And that extended to the headlines as well, because the headlines then became part of what we call wayfinding signage. And we started to look at each page as a poster and understood that it was all about drawing the eye into different levels of meaning.
And at the very top level, we were able to then link into the last hundred years of graphic design really, and use that as our source of inspiration and then push it on, how could we experiment even further?
How could we collapse letter forms to the point where is it still legible or not?
So each month it became an experimentation. It was like publishing from a laboratory where experimental trials had been going on. Oh, okay, we’ve got to go to print now, so we were pushing that out, and then moving on again to the next set of experimentations.
Debbie Millman:
Did you have a sense at that time how radical your design was?
Neville Brody:
Not particularly. There were some other great magazines around at that time, a year into The Face is when i-D magazine launched. As I said, that was designed by Al McDowell and Terry Jones. We’d also had our experience of fanzines up to that point. So underground there was a lot of photocopied magazines that were going around. And then there was Malcolm Garrett and his very underrated New Sounds New Styles magazine where he was doing a huge amount of experimentation with typography.
So there was a kind of … especially in the middle of Soho. It was part of a culture, and The Face is one of the ones that broke out of that space. So I wasn’t consciously thinking, “I must make this radical.” What I was thinking is, “Here’s a platform and an opportunity to just experiment with editorial design and presentation and storytelling.” How do you take a reader on a journey in a different way? How do you look at juxtaposition of images in a different way? How do you work with photographers in a different way? How do you think of typography in a different way?
And when you talk about democratization, that also means that as designers, we actually had the ability to do the typeface designs ourselves or use Letraset or photocopy down type that we found and amended. So this was a golden age of handmade typography.
Debbie Millman:
Despite the enthusiastic, and that’s probably an understatement, response to the work that you were doing at the time, you felt that your work for the design of The Face was one of your biggest failures. Do you really still think that all these years later?
Neville Brody:
I think that the specific examples of experimentation we were doing in the first, say, four years of working on The Face was so exciting and challenging, really hard work, risking failure as well as something actually working. But with The Face, we had the opportunity to put it out there and see what would happen.
But what happened that we were so unprepared for was that advertising and other magazines would start copying what we were doing. Instead of recognizing what we were doing as something that was experimental and exploratory and unfixed trying to reveal new possibilities, they took this as style, and if they wanted to communicate to the same people who were reading The Face, they needed to copy the style of The Face.
But we never intended that to be a stylistic statement. Some of the content of The Face was talking about style, but it was also talking about reportage. It also had a lot of political opinion in there. And it did have fashion, it did have architecture, it did have design, it did have painting. It did have a lot of music. Actually, it was fundamentally a music magazine more than anything.
But people took the presentation of that to be a stylistic statement. So Wire, the band Wire, their first single was called 1 2 X U, and it was less than two minutes, and they said that they would never make a song more than two minutes at that time because they said, “Once we’ve stated something, we don’t see the point in repeating it. Once an idea is done, it’s done.” And The Face was very much like that. So each issue would take some of the unexplored ideas from the issue before and try and push it a bit further on the next issue, but it was never intended to be a toolbox for anyone.
So the failure was that we didn’t really anticipate the fact that people would take our experimentation and turn it into a stylistic opportunity and a language. In art, it’s called mannerism, where you just take the style of something and just repeat the style without understanding why and how it’s been created.
Debbie Millman:
So it became normalized in a way?
Neville Brody:
Not only normalized, there was a pressure for us to suddenly be inventive every issue. And if one issue we were exploring things which were less spectacular, eventually we were being criticized for this. People would say, “Oh, the new issue of The Face isn’t as radical as what I was expecting,” as if that was a form of failure.
Debbie Millman:
Ah. So it’s radical as performance as opposed to radical as exploration or investigation?
Neville Brody:
Yeah. People had turned it into a kind of fashion statement and change itself became a style, ironically. Then I moved on to doing Arena magazine, and in doing Arena, I took absolutely the opposite position, which was to create a template, a style template, a style guide, and everything would stick to that and it wouldn’t change from issue to issue. Unfortunately, I failed in that because after a while I got bored and started reinventing from issue to issue of course, as we would.
Debbie Millman:
I was going to say that didn’t last long, although I’ve read that you said that your work on Arena Homme, Men, was some of your favorite work of your career. How was that different in your mind?
Neville Brody:
The original Arena magazine, we reduced everything to have Helvetica and Garamond plus a couple of hand-drawn fonts, which we were still assembling by hand for headlines and section headers. But we wanted something that was stable. After the craziness of expectation on The Face, this was like finding a park bench to just sit down and feel stylish. That was a deliberately style-focused magazine with reportage.
And after a while I thought, “Well, hang on a minute, Helvetica is so boring. And we thought, “Well, how can we start to make Helvetica emotive and emotional?” So then we started treating headlines more as visual poetry and seeing how Helvetica could lock up and create new shapes and new meanings by how the words had been connected or scaled. That was one of my favorite periods actually doing that, some of those headlines.
And when I came to do Arena Homme + again, which was actually in 2010, a good 25 years or 24 years later, it allowed me to start from scratch, but using digital tools. We could actually create the typefaces digitally and then play with them on screen, sometimes print them out, cut them up, try again, and mixing that physical handcrafted thing with the digital.
Think about how space is used in magazines, using white space as an emotive force. Impact, rhythm, taking people on cinematic journeys. Again, juxtaposition of images. So all of that stuff was a joy for me.
Debbie Millman:
In addition to the many magazines that you’ve worked on, City Limits, Lei, Per Lui, Actuel, Arena, The Face, you’ve also worked on a number of newspapers. You redesigned many of the sections of The Observer, the website for The Guardian, the complete redesign of The Times. You’ve also worked with the BBC on their website. How do you regard those efforts and is there a difference when you can’t experiment with the form as much as you can with a magazine?
Neville Brody:
So the difference between those freeform, unbounded design approaches on magazines with something that’s far more staid, conventional mass public like a newspaper, is that the magazines that we did had a loose structure in terms of form and grid, but allowed a lot more freedom in terms of expression and the varied voice, whereas a newspaper is every day. So what you need to do is build in some theater, props basically.
So we said to The Times newspaper, every day you’re going out and it’s a new piece of theater, and you have to perform this drama of explanation and conversation and journalism, and what you need is a box of props and different set designs in order to express that difference.
So you roll your sleeves up and you go out and you put a story together, and you don’t know exactly how that story needs to fit together. So we’re going to give you a whole set of components and elements, and we’re going to give you a really clear structure of where they should sit. But then within that, you’re free to be able to scale or use elements as you choose.
So it wasn’t like everything in its place and a place for everything, which was a Victorianism in England. And in a way, at the time, The Guardian newspaper had a lot more of that. It was quite fixed in terms of what you could do, almost as a pre run of our digital spaces now, where it’s content management systems, you can change the words, you can change the image, but it’s still fundamentally the same layout for each story.
Whereas with The Times, we wanted to give them a lot more freedom and scope. So we really focused on differentiation between types of content, articulation of different types of content, and a really, really clear signage and wayfinding system. Once they had that as the base and they knew that they could rely on that, everything else became then much more drama-based in terms of how you told stories.
Debbie Millman:
How much is experimentation still a criteria for you and your work?
Neville Brody:
I think experimentation is vital for everyone. I’ve actually just had a conversation with my design team here and how things have shifted a bit that in the times when I was developing as a designer, experimentation was absolutely critical for me. I would frequently work 16, 20 hours a day of which only a certain amount of hours was about getting client work done. The rest was experimenting and exploring and trying things that failed.
And I think that’s still so critically important, but our cultures have tended to shift towards a kind of 10:00 to 6:00 or 9:00 to 5:00 approach to design and a lot of younger designers tend to see it as a job more than a creative opportunity to explore new, potentially dangerous creative ideas.
So that shift has been quite considerable, and we’ve seen it for the past couple of generations. What happened in the ’80s was a shift away from culture as something cultural and threatening towards culture as something that you consume. And as soon as it became something that you consume, it became far more financially aligned and its worth was based much more in terms of financial value than creative, cultural or social value.
And so a lot of designers are graduating thinking about, “Okay, I need to get a job. I’m going to be professional. I’m really good at getting a job and selling myself,” often more than their capability. So selling yourself, presenting yourself has become, I think a far more significant thing than going away and risking not getting a job by experimentation.
Debbie Millman:
Do you see that impacting the overall quality of not only the state of design, but also the possibilities for design?
Neville Brody:
I think design has changed, and I’m not necessarily critical of that standpoint that younger designers are taking. I think design as an industry has changed. I think designers for its role in society has changed. We don’t have those kind of underground punk movements now. Governments have been really good at keeping activism down, suppressing protest, almost criminalizing protest.
So we don’t have those sort of platforms out there anymore, and the kind of media that we use, increasingly things like social media or digital spaces or mobile-centric media, tend to be so engineering based that there isn’t much room for experimentation except in the content you develop to put on those platforms.
So the layout and the context for where the content sits is much more rigid and regimented and doesn’t allow that sort of freedom we had with layout that we used to have in magazine design or poster design or record cover design. So the majority of people now are engaging with content via social media and via mobile, and there’s no thinking about the environment in which that’s being presented. What people want is just the simplest possible environment that is actually seamless with the machine that you’re looking at it on.
So it’s become highly mechanized, highly engineering focused, and I’m just wondering if there are possibilities out there still where we can be much more experimental with the layout. And of course, you can’t deliver 2 million global pieces of content in a minute by experimenting with layout, that’s never going to happen. Is there somewhere within our space, is it fashion brands or media brands? How do we think about that digital space as something that has the potential to be experimented with?
Debbie Millman:
It seems as if Instagram and Facebook and Twitter or X as it’s now being called, are highly, highly restricted in terms of the way in which you can share “content,” content in quotes, a word I loathe almost as much as assets. You’ve said that they feel like hospitals or airports. Do you see a way in which that can be overtaken? Is there a way to begin to experiment in those environments?
Neville Brody:
I think those environments, probably not. I think that we are restricted to what we can put in those small windows. We can change the curtains or we can put on a bright shirt or we can do a funny dance, but those windows are highly restricted and our behaviors are highly restricted as well. The swipe means that things have changed in terms of a temporal or time basis. We spend less time engaging with content. Excuse the C word there, but-
Debbie Millman:
The C word. Absolutely.
Neville Brody:
Exactly. So we swipe, we’re looking to reward the reward centers in our brains. We’re looking for content that’ll grab us, but not for too long because then we want to move on to the next reward. So it’s all about reward.
I heard an amazing quote the other day, and I can’t remember where it’s from, but it was quoted in The Guardian where they said that technology companies now trade in attraction. So what creates the attraction is a secondary concern, but the framework for creating that bait as it were, has to be fairly reliable and not interesting in itself. And then it’s all about how much content can you deliver, how quickly can you do it? And so how many people can you attract?
I’m not being critical in terms of saying yes, airport or hospital, I’m just likening it to that kind of sense of efficiency more than anything else. Instagram is not a sad place and it’s not a threatening place. An airport is a bit more interesting because actually these are gateways to places, but I wonder how many of these windows actually take you to other places now, whereas we used to get lost on the internet. I don’t know if you remember, Debbie, but we would click a link and then we’d go to another link and then we’d get lost in this-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. The wormholes.
Neville Brody:
… the wormholes and we’d be gone. It’s less easy to do that now because things are being clustered and these are kind of closed spaces quite often now. So our experience has changed completely in that sense.
What I’m saying is that there may be other spaces that we can start thinking about this idea that historically graphic design is friction and we need this friction, whereas most of our modern communication spaces are based on graphic engineering, which creates seamless journeys highlighted by some billboards.
Debbie Millman:
I read a really fascinating interview with you from 1992, which gave great insight into your early vision for graphic design, and one of the things that you talked about was typefaces and how everyone in the future would have their own. And it seems to me you were predicting the notion of a visual selfie in many ways. I’m wondering if that might be an antidote to the sort of highly engineered spaces that you’re talking about.
Neville Brody:
I think I was talking about this the other day actually when I was in New York and met with Dave Crossland, who’s the director of Google Fonts, and we were talking about what happens in the future and how does AI get included and incorporated.
And we’re talking about maybe one day we’ll have our personal AIs that’ll just produce our own typefaces that will be responsive to the mood we’re in when we’re creating content or talking, or even that the message itself will change typeface depending on the mood of the viewer. So AI probably will lead to the ultimate in customization as well as the ultimate in control.
Debbie Millman:
Why did you hate typography while you were in school?
Neville Brody:
I hated typography at school because it was being taught as something that had very, very strict rules, that it was an elite profession that you had to study for years and years on how to cut metal type by hand, that it wasn’t democratic, that you couldn’t change the rules and explore different forms of communication. Therefore, it wasn’t possible to make it contemporary at any point.
So it was always dragging down our need for expression to something that was more archaic and traditional, and I hated that. So I thought at that time, well, if I’m going to be working in communication and I went into record covers, I was an image maker, so I would make images for the front and I would treat type as image. So for me, the type became something more iconic and the words became more iconic and they became part of the image communication.
This then really informed how I eventually moved back to working with typography. As we talked about with The Face magazine, I was still approaching it from the point of view of type as image, and then looking at the layout as image construction itself.
Debbie Millman:
Do you still feel that typography is a hidden tool of manipulation within society?
Neville Brody:
Typography is inevitably a manipulative form because the choice of typeface inevitably changes your response to any message. We seem to be going through a standardization right now where everything becomes Helvetica or even more extreme, everything becomes Arial, and this is because of the ubiquity and the need to reach everyone with every message means that you can’t risk something going wrong. So it uses the lowest common denominator in terms of typography, which is Arial.
So I think that there’s going to be less and less experimentation going on on that kind of level, but still the design of a typeface will completely influence how you respond to what’s being written in that typeface.
Debbie Millman:
Recently, Johnson & Johnson redesigned their long used script logo for a sans serifs somewhat generic looking identity. One of the reasons I read that this change occurred was that younger people don’t use or can’t read script any longer. What do you think of that redesign?
Neville Brody:
Honestly, I think I’m almost embarrassed to agree with everyone on this. I’ve seen a lot of posts about this. It seems like a little bit of an easy target right now. So many other brands have done the same thing.
So the people that have commissioned that have made, I think a gross error because people don’t read Johnson & Johnson, they recognize Johnson & Johnson. It’s the same as the Coca-Cola script. You’ll know what it is without having to read it. The brain connects it straight away. So I think that there’s been a major mistake there.
Burberry went from quite a complex logo to a Helvetica-ish logo and has since created another version now, which has a lot more personality built in. Because if you always try and use the lowest common denominator as the thing that’s driving your aesthetic decisions, you will only ever be as present as the lowest common denominator. So I think all brands should redesign themselves in Arial.
Debbie Millman:
Do you think that changing a logo has the same impact or relevance it once did?
Neville Brody:
I think logos are secondary anyway these days.
Debbie Millman:
Secondary to what?
Neville Brody:
Secondary to the C word. The asset, which you’re talking about, one of which might be the logo, really are buried further down in the mix. The current idea of a brand, historically, it used to be a triangle with the logo at the apex, and now it’s a reverse.
So the content is your shop window now, and somewhere deep down there’s a logo that validates that content. But you’re not buying a brand logo anymore, maybe in street wear or some other specific cases, but fundamentally, you’re buying a brand narrative. And that brand narrative is almost inevitably going to be using the most commonly available tools that it can use.
So it’s a fully understandable situation as a response to the way people consume communication and content, but I do feel the loss of diversity in graphic form. It’s the same as we’re doing to the world in natural form, globally in language and cultural form, and in our industry in terms of brand complexity.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk about your new book, it’ll cheer me up. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 3.
Neville Brody:
Oh, no, no, I’m super happy. I’m just going to cut across this, Debbie. No, I’m super happy. I mean, these are all challenges, but we do need to be constantly aware of some things that are going on in order to think about ways that we can mitigate them and bring creative, experimental-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I’m like, how can we experiment with these platforms that we all seem to be kind of obligated to be on now or confront the possibility that we’ll no longer be relevant if we’re not on them? So we’re kind of forced to participate on some level for our businesses or for our awareness, but most of the time it feels icky.
And you mentioned before something about Instagram being happy. I mean, I don’t know anybody that comes away from scrolling on Instagram for a half hour and feels good about themselves, so I’ll push back on that one. But how can we participate in these frameworks in a way that doesn’t feel so performative?
Neville Brody:
Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. It’s what I talk about, the shift to instance from substance. And where do you get substance now? It’s a very granular thing that’s been happening. So the platforms have to be as personality-free as possible, otherwise they become stronger than this granular content.
So then the question is, where can we find those spaces to really be exuberant and joyful and experimental and adventurous? It might be in books. So my new book, which took six years to put together, is something where I feel that I’ve really been able to push the limits of what a book design can do at this point.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
Neville Brody:
I’ve deliberately blurred the boundary between what is content in terms of images and what is content in terms of layout.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide 30 years after the publication of The Graphic Language Of Neville Brody 2, that the time was right for 3?
Neville Brody:
When book 2 came out, it was at a really, really interesting juncture. We’d only been working with the Mac, certainly in my studio for say, five years at the point where we started putting the book together. And the previous book was 100% non-digital. It was all manual. All the fonts were hand drawn, everything was physical layout, and that came out in 1988. But from 1988, we shifted completely then to Mac digital production.
So in 1994, it was the first opportunity to really look back on that and look at the changes, look at the opportunities that had given us. FUSE had been launched in that time We’d published-
Debbie Millman:
And FUSE was your conference/publication.
Neville Brody:
Exactly. And it was a laboratory for experimenting with typography because typography had become democratized and less elite. So it was such an exciting time that five years. And looking back on it, a lot of the stuff that was done in graphic design at that time was actually far more radical and experimental than nearly everything that’s going on now. And that five years, I think was a really critical juncture.
FontShop had been launched as the first mass independent typeface retail space. Magazines were becoming independent because you could produce a magazine more easily. Digital printing was coming into the space. We still didn’t know at that point that the computers would be places to receive communication as well as to create communication. So this was sort of before the internet had taken over. This is way before social media, although-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. It was before email, really.
Neville Brody:
Well, yeah, it was sort of around the same time because-
Debbie Millman:
Same time, yeah, ’94-ish.
Neville Brody:
… Netscape was there, Mozilla, and people would be putting pictures of their cats and back gardens and mums and announcing their birthdays.
Debbie Millman:
Well, we’re still doing that on Facebook and Instagram.
Neville Brody:
We’re still doing it, but we had more freedom in 1994 than we do now. And then we had Myspace, which was the end of personal expression in terms of layout. And we’re seeing some of that Myspace aesthetic and ethic coming into TikTok, people decorating videos and putting their own fonts. And so in a way, TikTok is the new Myspace in that sense, and bring it on. I think it’s sort of a joyful explosion.
But then 30 years later, deciding to publish this new volume, there’s a couple of reasons. I mean, I’d always wanted to do it. I felt like the story wasn’t complete. So A, never had the time, B, felt I didn’t have enough work to do a third volume, and three, we really were not clear on what the narrative was in graphic design.
This is a moment where it became quite valid to look back, when I started the book, over that 25 years. It was then, but 6 years later, it’s now 31 years or 30 years. And what’s changed in that time is, as I said before, a shift from graphic design to graphic engineering plus graphic art. So we’re sort of looping to what was at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century before graphic design really launched, and it was very technology driven.
All our big cultural changes have been technology driven from the advent of halftone printing, which happened around the end of the 19th century, color printing, and then through moving image, film, sound recording, all of these things created incredible explosions of creativity. And then coming all the way up to the Mac, then that was a new explosion, hence book 2.
And then now we’re in this new phase of engineered environments and leading into AI. So it was important to go and put a flag in the sand and say, “Well, where are we right now? How have we got here? What possibilities are there? What can we take forwards?” So in a way, it’s an attempt to start to try and understand some of that, like the history, the present, and the possibility.
Debbie Millman:
In the book, you state that in your practice now, you’ve wanted to communicate to as many people as possible, but to also make a popular form of art that was more personal and less manipulative, and I’m wondering if that’s possible. How do you make something more personal and less manipulative?
Neville Brody:
I think by making it more ambiguous and more open, and a lot of my work is exploring the edge between something concrete and solid and something that has collapsed or is unclear or unstructured. So I’m always looking for that line between chaos and order because I think that’s the line where things happen. That’s the border zone. And those are constantly shifting, so our design practice has to constantly shift.
And at the moment, the engineering space is so large that we’re crying out for this other stuff that can actually question it and challenge it. So finding out where that edge is still where my practice sits. And for me, it’s a conversation rather than something with an intent.
Debbie Millman:
I’m surprised to hear that for some time after book 2, that you didn’t feel like you had enough work for another monograph, because it feels like book 3 at 300 pages or so, is actually still leaving out quite a bit of the work that you did in that 30 years. And it’s really a full book. It is overflowing in the best possible way. What do you mean by enough work?
Neville Brody:
I think it was more, I couldn’t find enough reason to publish. Certainly there’s a lot of work, but what was the criteria for assembling it? What was the criteria for the clustering and the journey and the textual thinking behind it? And it would’ve just been a book of work, and that for me wasn’t at all interesting.
Debbie Millman:
So what was the criteria? Talk about that, the narrative arc of the book, because I think it’s such an interesting way of presenting your work. The narrative arc is as interesting as the work.
Neville Brody:
Well, my work has always been presented, or sorry, created as something that people could use to open up questions. I was never going to say, “This is what it should be.” I was always, “Let’s think about what is, and let’s think about what could be.” So I was always trying to use my work as maybe a catalyst for conversation.
And certainly the arc of the book starts with a historical piece from Adrian Shaughnessy following a really interesting viewpoint from Steven Heller. And then the book launches with something that’s quite abstract, which is the piece on speak that immediately follows the introduction.
And then from there, it’s straight into editorial design. And editorial design, for me, is a key point around how we can make our environments more expressive, and how can we tell stories that extend outside of the boxes and the frames. And then from that into FUSE, which is very much thinking about the languages we use as being embodiments of possible thinking and experimentation and other ways of thinking, and so on.
The next chapter is around typographism, which is the name we’ve come up with to explain what these experimental, super graphic pieces of work throughout history can be bought under. And some of those possibilities there, they’re like visual poetry or jazz for me. And it really does start posing this new question of what could graphic art be?
And then through various other spaces, typography, political design, commercial design, trying to explore all the different facets of what it might be to be a graphic designer. And it’s not as simple as it was when I was at art school. There’s a lot of very different possibilities out there right now. And in a way, the book itself is a cry for exuberance and failure and experimentation and embracing the accident and seeing where that leads.
Debbie Millman:
I think that one of the best descriptions that I’ve read of the book is you saying that you approach the design as something poetic and unfixed, blurring the lines between fixed space and abstract fluidity, and I think that’s exactly what it does. And I think that’s why it is so exuberant and optimistic in a lot of ways, despite the notion that design has become more engineering. I think you’ve been able to share the potential that design still has.
Neville Brody:
Well, I did a talk at AIGA last week, week before, which I know you were very present at, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Neville Brody:
And my lecture was focused on the idea of, what can we embrace? What can we touch or incorporate or hug in order to bring back the sense of exuberance and possibility and joyful experimentation? Where can we spark new life in our industry?
It’s very easy to become the equivalent of insurance brokers in design or electricians or plumbers. I’m not denigrating those jobs, but a graphic designer was always there to bring imagination to systems. So where could we start bringing that imagination back?
Debbie Millman:
One thing that I noticed on your website, which both surprised and excited me was your reference to being a brand strategist now. I’m wondering, have you always considered yourself a brand strategist or is that something new?
Neville Brody:
I’ve always considered myself a brand strategist. Right from the beginning, actually, when I was seven or eight years old, I would play at home. This is after I actually learned to walk finally. So I was walking. I could use a pencil, and I-
Debbie Millman:
Had the whole world in front of you.
Neville Brody:
Everything was possible then. And I actually, without knowing what I was doing, I was creating brands at home. I was making paper lorries and transport trucks and buildings, and I was writing a brand name on them. So somehow branding was so deeply embedded in me and it connected for some reason.
And I think I’ve always been thinking about that, that a brand is a piece of storytelling, that it gets expressed as a visual symbol or nowadays, in terms of a set of components. So what is the DNA of a brand? That DNA now is the typeface. It’s the color system you use. It’s your tone of voice. It’s the way you scale or use your language visually and orally. So branding has shifted back from being a logo to all the other elements you use in order to tell your stories.
And we start at the other end, of course. So I’ve always been interested in starting off with a lot of research. You have to research. And then you have to stress test that, and then you have to look at the ambition and then bring those two together. And out of that comes your strategic thinking.
We used to be much more focused on the expression, which was at the far end as the last thing you did. But now our center of gravity has moved much further back on that chain of delivery where we’re thinking much more about strategy, system and component. And the expression then comes, well, how does that all come together?
Debbie Millman:
We’re living at a time where street brands are aspiring to become luxury brands, and luxury brands are aspiring to become street brands. And I’m wondering how that impacted the work you did for the brand Supreme. That’s some of my favorite of your recent work.
Neville Brody:
Well, Supreme came to us who’d always been fans of The Face magazine. But what they took from The Face magazine was quite interesting. They took the political undertones of The Face that it was a call to action, it was a call to rebellion. So what they took was that kind of ’80s statement of express yourself, be different, riot through how you present yourself to the world. And then they wanted somehow to link that to the underground sense of The Face magazine, but in a very modern way. So it was kind of reenacting that in a modern world.
And street wear is quite interesting. Yes, you’re right, it wants to be luxury, and luxury wants to be street wear. And it’s interesting, my son is launching his own street wear brand and he doesn’t want to be luxury. He wants to bring it back to the idea of personal expression, experimentation. And yeah, he’s doing his first pop-up shop next month. So I’m a proud father. And he won’t let me design any of it.
Debbie Millman:
That was what I was going to say, who designed his logo?
Neville Brody:
Nope, he won’t let me near it.
Debbie Millman:
What is the name of the brand? Can you tell us?
Neville Brody:
It’s called Resha.
Debbie Millman:
Can you spell that?
Neville Brody:
R-E-S-H-A. But this is, I mean, obviously a bit premature. He’s still setting all this stuff up, but-
Debbie Millman:
Of course, of course. But it’ll be very, very interesting to see. Neville, I can’t let you leave without asking you about something that I learned for the first time reading your new book. I didn’t know before it was revealed in Adrian Shaughnessy’s essay that in 2003 you were flown first class to meet with Steve Jobs, who was considering you for the position of Apple’s first ever global executive creative director. And it goes on to describe how when you first met with Steve, he asked you if you had any work to show him. So I’m wondering if you can talk about what that experience was like and then what happened after?
Neville Brody:
Well, I was obviously incredibly honored to be flown out. This was all very short notice, getting on a plane, landing in San Francisco, being at Apple’s office the next morning. I’d met Jony Ive a number of times before, but had never met Steve Jobs. And then was ushered into a small room with one table, and then Steve Jobs walks in.
I was like, “Hello, Steve.” And he sat down, he said, “Have you bought any work to show me?” And I said, well, you’ve flown me out here first class from London, and you haven’t seen any of my work. And he said, “No.” So I said, “Well, I happen to have a book of work with me,” which was my second book.
I gave it to him to look at, and he spent 5 to 10 minutes looking through it and then leaned up and leaned into my space and said, “This is just so much design masturbation, isn’t it?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “Well, Apple would never have used any of this.” And I said, “Well, thank God you haven’t paid for any of this.” And we got on then like a house on fire.
We had a great conversation for an hour where we talked about having children, because he offered me the job and I said, “Well, I can only come out two weeks a month because my child is in London.” Then we had a conversation where he said to me something amazing, which was, he said, “Having a child is like discovering the color blue.”
And that’s stayed. It’s such a magical thought. We know it’s there, but we’ve never seen the magical qualities of it. So we had a great hour and it seems that he was just testing my resolve. Then they flew me back first class.
Debbie Millman:
And any regrets not taking that job?
Neville Brody:
To be honest, I think at that time, and I did ask Steve Jobs what the role of graphic design was at Apple, and he said, “Well, it’s simply to be very clean and sell the product.” And I thought, “That’s not really my journey right now.” So I think it would’ve been a financial bullet, one, but a creative bullet dodged in terms of where I don’t think I would’ve had book 3 to be honest.
Debbie Millman:
And I think that the world would be missing quite a lot if we didn’t have, not just book 3, but the 30 years of work that is contained in book 3.
Neville Brody:
Thank you, Debbie. You’re very kind.
Debbie Millman:
Neville Brody, thank you so much for making so much work that matters to so many, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Neville Brody:
Thank you, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Neville Brody’s new book is titled The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 3 with text by Adrian Shaughnessy. You can read lots more about Neville at brody-associates.com.
This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.