futurist composition. But critics and imitators were not far behind, and
graphic style in Britain edged toward this neo-modernism.
By 1988 Brody’s career reached a turning point. The publication
of The Graphic Language of Neville Brody,written by Brody and his
collaborator Jon Wozencroft, coincided with an exhibition of his work at
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Both were misinterpreted as self-
congratulatory hoopla. Almost immediately afterwards, Brody, suffering
from a severe case of overexposure, stopped getting British work, which
triggered a financial crisis. At the age of thirty, the man who had been
called the first graphic design superstar needed to regroup. He found new
clients in Japan and Europe. He immersed himself in digital technology.
Testing entrepreneurship, he became a partner in FontWorks, the British
arm of FontShop, the international font-distributor started by Erik
Spiekermann. In 1991 he launched the experimental type magazine Fuse
with Wozencroft as editor. A quasipromotional tool for FontShop, each
issue of Fuse presented a set of typefaces in a digital format organized
around a theme, background material on the fonts and their designers,
printed style sheets, and an editorial essay.
In Fuse # 10 , Brody introduced Freeform, a collection of abstract
shapes. It was designed with the articulation of a typeface, it had a certain
rhythm, coloring, and repetition, but it abandoned the consensual meaning
of the alphabet in favor of pure emotional impact. Freeform was criticized
for its illegibility and dependence on a personal visual language. Brody
explained, “It’s moving from representational to expressive typography. I
think the parallel with what happened in painting is absolutely precise....
Putting desktop technology in the hands of the nondesigner liberates the
designer from the necessity of representation in the same way that the
camera liberated the artist.”
From The Face,whose typographic idiosyncrasies prefigured the
modern digital revolution, to Fuse,which attempts to describe the
intersection of the linguistic and the pictorial, Brody has been unwavering
in his quest for a new visual sensibility based on ideas. Always more
comfortable with questions than answers he asked, “In the West, the
Roman and Greek alphabets provide the basis of the consciously designed
letterform, but you can carry this further back to the ancient Egyptians’
use of hieroglyphs or even to ritualistic markings in caves. At what point
does true typography begin?”
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1