Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

Although he rejected fine art as elitist, his early work centered on images,
and when he used typography it was in a similar, illustrative way. A decided
contrarian (if a teacher approved of his work, he redid it), Brody found a
catalyst and a philosophical home in the anticommercialism of the punk
movement. Just out of school, he joined designers like Barney Bubbles,
Malcolm Garrett, and Peter Saville in designing record sleeves. He first
worked for the design studio Rocking Russian, then for Stiff and Fetish
Records, two of the most popular independent record labels in Britain. Set
up by Jake Riviera, a friend of Bubbles, Stiff Records was a freewheeling
environment where outrageousness not only applied to sleeve design, but
also to marketing schemes. Stiff once printed a sleeve with the wrong band
on the cover hoping fans would then buy the corrected version. Brody
relished the creative freedom but became disenchanted with the
commercial manipulation.
Brody’s first few issues of The Facewere image oriented. “I hated
type,” he once confessed. In fact, in school he dismissed type as incredibly
boring. This admission belies the fact that under Brody’s art direction,The
Face was a wellspring of typographic quirkiness. Brody presented text in a
straightforward manner but surrounded it with compelling imagery,
headlines, lead decks, and subheads. He soon realized he could extract as
much emotive energy from the typography as from the imagery. Inspired by
the work of Russian constructivist Alexander Rodchenko, Brody began to
use heavy rules and hand-drawn, sans-serif typefaces, and to craft
letterforms that functioned like emblems and crests. Typefaces were custom
designed for headlines; letters were truncated, squashed, lopped off and
blurred; fonts were mixed within a word; icons replaced letters within
words, and headlines combined with symbols and functioned like corporate
logos. “I had no respect for the traditions of typography, because I had no
understanding of them,” Brody explained.
As his confidence grew, Brody used the magazine as a virtual
stage allowing himself more freedom to question the very core of visual
expression. He reframed the magazine as an ongoing dialogue with the
readership where idiosyncratic graphic signposts and icons, which may have
initially appeared incomprehensible to the reader, gained meaning through
consistent application over a series of issues. Brody, uninhibited by the edge
of the page, treated the magazine as a continuum where what happened on
page five connected to what happened on page fifty-five. He re-examined
the use of page numbers, considering symbols instead. Regarding the
contents page of a magazine he said, “You decide to have a contents page to
act as a key—it’s an advert for the magazine, a second cover, equivalent to
the back of a book jacket where you read the blurb.”