Virtual Typography

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Job:01212 Title: Basics typography (AVA)

2nd Proof Page:9 5

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94—95

Various works – Neville Brody

Brody’s career as a designer was jump-started only two

years after completing his studies at the London College of

Printing (now London College of Communication), when he

became art director of the British fashion magazine The Face

in 1981. Like much of his early work, type and layout were

defi ned here through sharp angles and geometric shapes.

Brody’s design of the ‘Astropolis’ logo (opposite, above left)

for the cover of a book by Taruho Inagaki in 1991 still refl ects

these aesthetic principles.

At the turn of the decade Brody’s design began to change

signifi cantly. Shapes became softer, contours sometimes

blurred, and overlapping elements often remained

translucent. Brody’s font FF Blur (opposite, above right),

which characterises the cover of Jon Wozencroft’s second

volume of The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (opposite,

bottom left), illustrates this change in direction.

Brody’s exploration of visually challenging type was taken

further when he reversed FF Blur to create the poster

Autosuggestion (opposite, bottom right) for Fuse issue 9.

Here, reading is turned into a guessing game even for the

visually trained eye.

This attempt to communicate on the borderline of legibility

was taken even further when Brody developed the brand

identity for Digitalogue (this page, left), a Japanese CD-ROM

publisher, in 1992. Here Brody manipulated ink blobs to

make each letter appear like a liquid shape. Where the letters

overlap the visual turns into a colourful chaos. Only when

seen next to one another can the letter shapes be recognised

as typographic symbols.

FF Virtual (this page, above), a font Brody designed for Fuse

issue 5, is completely illegible. The dot pattern in some of

the letters such as the upper case ‘A’ reminds the viewer

of Braille. The lower case shown here in red is simply the

reversal of the upper case printed in dark grey. The black

glyphs are the numbers 1 to 9 with 0 at the end.

Job:01212 Title: Basics typography (AVA)

2nd Proof Page:9 5

001-184 01212_C1.indd 95001-184 01212_C1.indd 95 1/16/09 11:47:47 AM1/16/09 11:47:47 AM