A)
2Job:01212 Title: Basics typography (AVA)
1st Proof Page:153001-184 01212.indd 153001-184 01212.indd 153 12/19/08 3:17:21 PM12/19/08 3:17:21 PM152—153
The Face – Neville Brody
Former art director of the fashion magazine The Face,
Neville Brody (see also pages 94–95), created aesthetic
tension – not by letting typographic elements emerge, but by
allowing them to dissolve. In summer 1984, both the title of
the magazine’s ‘styles’ section as well as the ‘contents’ logo
became increasingly unreadable from one issue to the next.
Typography was transformed step by step into a hermetic
code that remained decipherable only for those who had
followed the process of graphic abstraction from the
beginning. Here we can see clearly that human perception is
subjective and that it depends on the context within which
information is perceived. The end result of the ‘contents’
logo differed from the ‘styles’ logo, because its glyphs bore
little graphical coherence. In the end the glyphs even merged
into one another. The elements of the ‘styles’ logo, on the
other hand, sustained their individual position as well as their
visual coherence throughout the different stages of transition.
This is why even the most unreadable version of ‘styles’
remained recognisable as a linguistic code despite the fact
that one could no longer read it. However, the end result of
the ‘contents’ logo transformation must have appeared as a
random pattern to anyone unfamiliar with Brody’s concept of
typographic transformation.Job:01212 Title: Basics typography (AVA)
1st Proof Page:153001-184 01212.indd 153001-184 01212.indd 153 12/19/08 3:18:13 PM12/19/08 3:18:13 PM