Neville Brody - interview with Steven Heller
Michael Koninin
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CreativeSight.com
Neville Brody, Graphic Designer,
Type Designer
An Interview with Steven Heller
In the early 1980's Neville Brody, 42, was in the vanguard of modish graphic
Design. As art dirctor of The Face and London's City Limits magazines, his
distinctice typography was widely emulatted. two years after opening his own
studio with Fwa Richards in 1986, Brody published a monograph called The
Graphic Language of Neville Brody, and was given a retrospective by the same
name at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His need to push the limits of design
and type prompted him to found (with Jon Wozencroft) Fuse, a digital typography
magazine dedicated to experiementation, and the subsequent Fuse conference,
where he leads debate on experimental type and typography. In 1994, following a
period of burnout Brody changed the name of his design firm to Research Studios
and created Research Arts and Research Publishing. Research Studios works in
all media: its clients include Nike, British Airways, Armani, BMW and NBC.
Research Publishing specializes in publishing CD-Roms and designing Web sites
for the Internet. Over the years Brody's method and philosphy have shifted from
that of the rebel to someone who institutionalizes rebellion. This interview by
Steven Heller probes his development.
How did the name Research Studios come about?
We were originally going to call ourselves Research & Development. I enjoyed
the idea of putting _Design by Research & Development_ as a credit on pieces of
work, but it became a bit long, and the more appropriate approach was to
desribe the studio as _Research._
What does research suggest in this context?
Something that is based less on a gestural or fashionable approach than on
analysis of structure, of meaning; on building a framework before you start
responding intuitively. Like jazz music, you have to build solid structure
before you can improvise.
How do you balance structure and intuition?
_Intuition_ has become an easy excuse used by a number of names to justify
anything they do. We felt there was a need to re-focus people on the reason and
meaning behind what we work on. During the research phase, we'll work work with
a client looking at what it is they are, what it is they'd like to be, how they
want to be seen, and what they really want to communicate. Then we look at
context and messages and meaning and narritive, and we start to pull all this
together. Ideas start to be created as a natural process. It allows us to be
able to improvise within a very clear frame of reference.
Would you say that this approach comes from an earlier modernist sensibility?
We are purely modernist and we embrace completely the marriage of Science and
Art, updating both of those to a kind of a late - 20th-century sesibility,
trying to be aware that, ultimately, form follows fashion.
When you began you created a Neville Brody look, an approach that was emulated
by young designers. How would you describe your personal evolution?
When I was studying, there were clear rules, and fixed ways of doing things.
Opinions were the exclusive territory of the client, and the designer was
simply a vehicle for translating clients' ideas into tangible communications.
My argument_and that of others_was that design was actually a subjective
process, not an objective one. So at that point we said that personal
expression is very central to this, that you must follow a process by which you
internalize the brief and all the key elements instead of following a formula.
We're still pursuing the same kind of core philosphy. What happened in the
early days was that people felt I had created sytle with no substance. To be
honest, some of the superficial stylistic attributes were maintained
intentionally as a way of bringing attention to the work and to the ideas
behind it.
Was there a point where you announced you were departing from what you were
doing and you moved into another stylistic mode? For example, you began to use
Helvetica, of all things.
You have two ways of approaching design. One is by your choice of typeface. The
second is by what you do with the typeface. What I did was embrace a
modernistic European_especially British_sensibility, which is very classical.
It's taking a Helvetica or another kind of very fundamental font and using it
expressively, as opposed to choosing any number of the 15,000 fonts in the new
font book and doing nothing with them except displaying them. The work was
still extremely expressive, but the elements I was using were viewed as
conventional.
There was a time when you not only reflected the zeitgeist; you were the
zeitgeist. Did that weight heavily on you?
The difficult thing is, if the zeitgeist is to be new, then the desperate
struggle to maintain newness itself becomes old. It became very clear that we
had to stop reinventing_ that was the only reinvention that could hapen at that
point. So we stood stilll.We said that what's new is old, in a sense. Because
there was such a kind of feeding frenzy going on in design, people desperate
for the latest typeface or the latest way of putting their piece of type on a
page, and the surface was being stripped off so quickly, and used, that
actually the heart of the work was being missed completely.
Since the feeding frenzy days, has your client base changed?
Yes. One of our major clients is Deutche Bank, which I would have said is a far
cry from The Face magazine. And Macromedia, which is a major corporate player.
There was a lot of resistance initially to the ideas we were trying to
introduce there. Somehow, it's kind of easy to do it on a record cover, but
it's much harder to do it with a bank.
How have you, in these two specific instances balanced your creative needs and
the functional/informational requirements of these relatively conservative
clients?
We've always seen the conveyance of information as being one of the core
reasons why we're able to do what we do, so we've never challenged information.
One of the things that we do is include the client as part of our team.
Do you believe, as the modernists did, that good design will make a substantive
difference in the culture?
I think design for the sake of design is indefensible, but I think intelligent,
questioning design that can somehow help extend and open up people's awareness
is valid. I don't justify any vehicle for doing that. I wouldn't justify
working for cigarette or oil companies, or even alcohol. I would find it
immoral to have my persuasive skills used to encourage people to start smoking.
Some of your social and ethical agenda, and your esthetic issues, are addressed
through Fuse the magazine and Fuse the conference. Why did you start these?
With the personal computer, there was an opportunity to democratize the fiefdom
of typographic design. Finally, we could work with a number of people and
explore ideas that challenged our core notions of what typographic language
should be. So we said,_Let's separate the words out, and let's isolate the
content matter, and look at the form and see to what degree the form is
affecting the content, and let's set up a kind of experimental workshop where
we can invite people in to persue that exploration and experimentation._
Did you have a utilitarian goal in mind?
The goal was never to create usable fonts. The goal was simply to create a kind
of forum for debate and exploration. And to be honest. Fuse as a purely
typographic exploration, I think, is coming to a natural close.
When will you end Fuse?
We're going to review this at issue 20, and we're at issue 18 now. If we feel
that as a catalyst it's done its work in typography, then we will say,_Okay, we
will close the door on that particular laboratory,_ and start developing
another.
How far can you push with Fuse before it gets to be pretense and artifice?
Well, there are failures of course. And it's not always easy to work with
designers, to get them to the heart of the idea raher than respond
decoratively.
What kind of criteria do you use to insure appropriate results?
The only criteria is to be as questioning of convention as possible. But beyond
that, it's impossibe to police. We've put out very bad fonts; we've put out
very good fonts. But these are all research papers, and to be judged as fonts
is, I think, a mistake.
How do you feel the design environment and practice have changed_for better or
for worse?
Well, I think you would probably concur that on the up side is a public whose
visual awareness is far greater then it ever has been. On the down side is, I
suspect, an inability to judge on the basis of quality.
Do you mean a lack of standards?
It's not so much a lack of standards as an inability to isolate originators.
With digital distribution, ideas become distributed alongside the actual items.
With a computer it's easy to sample, and it's easy to take someone else's core
thought and enhance it, and add your name. And as with sampling, as we
progress, it becomes harder and harder to find the original signature.
Are you in favor of the current melange of diversity, or would you rather see a
kind of tightening of the reins of graphic design?
I think Bruce Mau said that in America, broadcasters are desperately searching
to fill over 12,000 hours of television drama time a week. I think typography
and graphic design and media are on a similiar bend. In some ways, nothing
matters. It doesn't matter whether we're doing something that's 50's Retro, or
future Science Fiction, or Techno, or Minimalist. There seems to be no reason
why you should choose one style over the another anymore. All core reasoning
has gone in this process of sampling.
What would you like to see?
Things where it's quite clear that the creator has entered into some immersion
or struggle with the content and message and the way it's going to be
communicated. I suppose it's a return to a more humanistic artistic approach to
design. The 50's was a golden era in graphic design, certainly in the States,
where there was a very intuitive artistic-scientific process going on, where
design was much more of a craft as opposed to a reproduction. I hate to sound
sentimentalist about it, but I miss emotive content and emotive communication.
c STEVEN HELLER| COURTESY OF PRINT MAGAZINE
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