It is entirely safe to say that Neville Brody is one of the most influential graphic designers of our time. His story begins in the U.K. music scene of the 1980s, when he designed record covers for legendary labels including Rocking Russian, Stiff Records, and Fetish Records. This led to his appointment as art director of the magazine Fetish, where he began experimenting with a new visual language that drew upon a striking combination of visual, architectural, and editorial elements.
But it was his groundbreaking work as art director for The Face magazine, from 1981 to 1986, that allowed him to thoroughly reinvent the way in which both designers and readers approach the idea and expectation of what a magazine should look like. This innovation became a much-imitated example. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, a monograph published in 1988, showcases that work as well as other projects both high- and low-profile.
Based in London, Neville now operates from the multidisciplinary design firm Research Studios. His contemporary design oeuvre includes everything from a redesign of the British newspaper The Times to typefaces to an identity for Dom Pérignon.
Neville was unguarded and uncensored in our interview. We talked about design celebrity, invented identities, the “eternal conundrum” of the design business, and the difficulty of doing anything truly rebellious in today’s visual culture.
Can you tell me about the first time you remember doing something creative?
Well, that’s really difficult. Because I was drawing before I was walking.
Could you be a little more specific about that?
Well, no, because I have no memory of it.
Really? So you know this because your parents told you that you were drawing before you were walking?
Yes, if I was walking at one or one and a half.
So what kinds of things were you drawing? Did your parents tell you?
No. I’ve no idea whatsoever, I’m afraid. All I can say is that from that point, there was never any doubt as to what I was going to do. I never spent my childhood thinking, “When I’m going to grow up, I’m going to choose a career.” It was there. It was chosen for me.
In terms of your career, a love of drawing might have led to a career in fine art.
I beg to differ on that. I think I am a fine artist.
In the U.K., we do a foundation course, which is a pregraduate course. Everyone does it here, it’s a year or two-year curriculum. It allows you to do everything from typography to drawing to pottery to photography. And it’s a fabulous thing. So everyone does it, and they use that year to figure out what they want to be doing.
One of the things we were taught was that if you had something to communicate, you should communicate to as many people as possible. I didn’t see the point in the elitist world of fine art, where you were communicating to a narrow few. Especially since that narrow few is self-elected. Furthermore, the fine-art world was largely a world of commerce. At the time, I felt very strongly that it was a fake culture.
Do you feel there is something more real about the graphic design culture?
I think that there is something more honest about it. It is a commercial industry. And I like the idea of trying to have something creative functioning within a commercial industry more than I like the notion of pretending you’re in a cultural industry—when it’s really all about money. Also, at that particular time, the world of painting was a hypocritical one. It was limited, it was elitist, and it was exclusive: all of the things I abhorred at the time.
Do you still feel that the fine-art world is an elitist, exclusive world?
Yes, even more so now.
When I first asked if I could interview you for this book, you responded that I could do a book like this without you. Why is that?
I mean, you could. I’m sure you have some very bright, clear-minded, inspiring people in the book. And I’m really happy if what I’ve done has made a contribution somewhere.
It is just bizarre, really. There are two Neville Brodys: There’s me, the person who gets up in the morning and showers and gets a bus and argues with the milkman and all of that. And there’s this other Neville Brody, which was not quite an invention, but who came into being because I felt I had something very strong to say in terms of messaging. And I felt very strongly that you can’t remain on the fringe and expect to be heard. I made a conscious attempt to use celebrity status as a communication tool.
In what way?
To draw people to my work in order for them to get in touch with the ideas behind it. The ideas behind my work are quite political—with a small p—and the message I convey is all about awareness. It’s all about the fact that, these days, graphic design is part of a heavily manipulative industry.
Do you feel that the work you’re doing contributes to that?
Of course. Totally. We work in a commercial service, and inevitably there’s compromise. It’s just a question of degree.
Do you feel that the invented Neville Brody is still very much a part of who you are, or do you feel the two Nevilles are more integrated now?
I think the public-domain version hasn’t been managed this year. I don’t have the time. But it always astonishes me when I go to school. Every year I try and do life-drawing classes—as a student, not as a teacher—and I always find it very ironic, that I can be in an art school studying life-drawing, and in the next room there might be a design-history class studying my work.
I imagine that this is a very heady experience.
It’s surreal.
When I interviewed Stefan Sagmeister, he and I talked about the idea of celebrity. He had a wonderful perspective on this. He said: “Being a famous graphic designer is like being a famous electrician.”
I think Stefan’s slightly wrong. In fact, he’s extremely wrong. Because an electrician isn’t an opinion former, but a graphic designer is. My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That’s our job. We take news or information or emotions like “hope” or “turn left” or “buy this” or “be sexy”—as well as notions of brand image as broad concepts—and we give that tangible form. We make it real for people.
Do you feel that your celebrity has impacted the quality of your work or your approach at all?
No, not at all. We keep a very low profile as a studio. These days, my work is largely about nurturing and supporting a young team here. I don’t feel that the quality or ideas have suffered. But I do think that it’s harder to do radical things in media now.
In what way?
In the way that anything’s possible. There was a time when anything that wasn’t seen as conservative was seen as quite rebellious and radical. But these days, anything goes. You can walk down the street naked in the middle of London, and no one would bat an eyelid. You can buy hardcore porn anywhere, and no one bats an eyelid. It’s no longer an issue. You can choose any font, use it in any way, and it’s all good. There’s no reason why one is more worthy than any other. There’s no shock value anymore.
Then how do you think messages best get through to people?
The problem is that there is a mediocrity born of generic culture right now. Any city you go to looks the same. I travel a lot. And whether I wake up in a hotel in Singapore or Toronto, the experience is the same, the culture is the same. Even the pictures on the wall are the same. And they are the same pictures I might find at the front of the British Airways cabin on the flight over. It’s all interchangeable. This signifies that a core meaning has gotten lost somehow.
But the generation I’m part of thought the work we do could help make society a better place. And that ended. Reagan and Thatcher destroyed that. They believed that culture is not about identity, but rather is about coding, which can be then exploited for advertising use. It turned everything upside down. In the U.K., it even turned colleges into financial institutions.
Do you feel that you can make a difference with your work now?
What I love about this business is that it’s an eternal conundrum—an eternal paradox. If you’re working in the commercial world, how do you work for the benefit of people? Commercial work largely means that you’re being commissioned. And this means that you’ve been commissioned by someone who wants to benefit from that commissioning, and 99 percent of the time, it’s for financial gain.
And how do you navigate through that?
You have to look for opportunities. The problem right now is that radical design is just a fashionable space. There’s nothing really radical out there. Radical, for instance, would be non-commercial.
Do you feel like people don’t pay attention unless they’re shocked?
I think people have become immune.
How do you reach people now? Have you thought about how things stand out?
Yes. A non-commercial space. A space devoid of advertising would be a shock.
How do you know when something you’ve created is good?
The work that I try and achieve, and the kind of work I’ve always tried to achieve, has a high degree of invested ambiguity.
What does that mean?
In the advertising business, it’s not in the interest of advertisers for people to think about what they’re presented with. It’s in the interest of advertisers that people choose to think in the way the advertisers intend them to. It’s a formulaic thing, where there’s only one possible outcome in advertising. That creates a space where the “right to thought” is taken away from people.
I’ve always tried to approach my work as being open-ended and with a degree of abstraction or ambiguity. This prevents it from being a monologue, because it is a dialogue. The work is only completed when a viewer has looked at it and made his or her own decision as to the full meaning of the piece.
How do your clients respond to that intentional ambiguity?
You can’t always do it. There are clients who resist it. We’ve done branding exercises where things have ended up very fixed. And that is part and parcel of working in the commercial design industry.
What do you think are the long-term ramifications of that for designers?
Well, it’s a gloriously healthy industry. And it looks beautiful these days. My biggest obsession at the moment is that nothing is difficult.
Tell me what you mean by “difficult.”
I don’t mean “difficult” as in raising a child is difficult, or keeping a dog is difficult. We’ve gone into a realm of fear wherein we try to make things as easy as possible.
No one’s prepared to engage with difficult ideas anymore. It is very rare that graphic design is a difficult, engaging space these days.
Even fine art is not difficult anymore. It’s sensationalist, but it’s not difficult.
When do you think the last moment of “difficulty” was?
I think some of Stefan’s work is difficult.I think some of Tibor’s work was difficult, but highly entertaining. And then you have to go back awhile. In terms of fine art in the U.K., we’ve had a “Brit Art” thing going on, a pop-art thing. It’s all been very sensationalist. It’s what I call post-production art.
What does that mean?
Basically, you start with a sensation you want to achieve, and then work backwards and plot how to achieve it—in the same way that advertising does. It’s exactly the same. Art these days is like an advertising industry. The point is:
There is nothing really different. There’s nothing really dangerous, there’s nothing really difficult out there right now. And I think we need some things to start galvanizing people. I think we need things that allow people to think in non-commercial ways.
Do you feel that you had any failures in your career?
Oh, totally. One of my biggest failures was The Face magazine.
How do you see that as a failure?
Well, the whole message of The Face was that you don’t have to accept conditioned rules. You can go out and challenge things and create new spaces and new expression.
How would you view this as a failure?
Well, the failure was that people copied it, if you see what I mean.
Did they copy it, or were they trying to—
No, they copied it, especially in the U.K. It became a copycat culture here.
But how do you see that as a failure?
Because people missed the message, they just took the stylistic attributes. And it wasn’t about stylistic attributes. It was about the idea that language is organic, that language can evolve as society evolves. It should be individual, and it shouldn’t be in the control of the few. It should be a constant, living process—not a dead thing, which is what we’ve been taught at college.
So do you see that as a failure of the work that you did, or do you see that as a failure in the way that society—
I’d say it was just a personal failure, and that I misjudged it. The Face was an open laboratory, really. And each issue of The Face was the result of another month’s experimentations. And none of these were supposed to be fixed points; they were all supposed to be evolutionary.
Why do you think it became so copied?
Because at the time, there wasn’t anything else out there like it.
Really? Do you think that’s the only reason?
No, what happened was also because it was new.
But there are a lot of new things that don’t speak to people to the extent that they want to copy the design, or to use it to express themselves.
Maybe. My problem is I can’t seem to distance myself from what I perceive to be a failure. This is why I did Arena magazine afterwards, in which nothing changed. When I was at The Face, there were only a few of us, and we worked late at night; but it was not a massive movement of any kind. Nevertheless, there was a distinct pressure of expectation that everything should be new all the time. So new became our norm. People expected things to be new. When we did an issue that was similar to the previous month’s issue, we were criticized for it. And I ended up feeling that the only way to react was to do something that never changed.
And do you feel that was more successful?
Well, in the end, it became something else. When I started up in design, I was in this manic search for the new. This desperate search for the new was a futile process. This was my attempt to sit down and take stock. I see Arena more as a park bench than as a magazine. It was time to take stock, check my shoes, buy nice clothes, live comfortably for a while, and see the world again. And then, of course, I couldn’t sit still, and we tried to make Helvetica seem emotional, which is why some of the later work was much more expressive.
At the end of the day, I think we must always try to expand our spectrum. The more people we try to communicate with, the more generic our messages have to become. And as our messages become more generic, it’s less likely that people will have access to anything that’s different. I know this is slightly negative, but it’s not meant to be. It’s a plea for humanism.