Neville Brody is a highly influential English graphic designer known for revolutionizing magazine, advertisement, and album cover designs in the 1980s. He graduated from the London College of Printing and Hornsey College of Art. Brody is renowned for his work with The Face magazine from 1981-1986, where he created a custom font for the publication. His album cover designs for artists like Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode exemplified the post-punk style through handcrafted elements.

1. 90’s Postmodernism

2. Neville Brody
Neville Brody (born 23 April 1957) is an English graphic
designer, typographer and art director.
Neville Brody is one of the most influential graphic designers of the late 20th
Century. His work in the 1980’s revolutionised the look of magazines,
advertisements, album covers and packaging.
Neville Brody is an graduate of the London College of Printing and Hornsey
College of Art, and is known for his work on The Face magazine (1981–1986)
and Arena magazine (1987–1990) as well as for designing record covers for
artists such as Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode.
He created the company Research Studios in 1994 and is a founding member
of Fontworks. And he is now the new Head of the Communication Art &
Design department at the Royal College of Art.

3. Album cover designs by Neville Brody are
good examples of the post-punk style and
show the highly individual approach taken by
this designer. Many contained handcrafted
elements such as paintings or drawings,
collage or rubbings.

4. Inspiration
Members of the Dada movement decided that art should
not be such a serious subject and be dominated by
painting, so they used everyday images and found objects
or (ready-mades) and declared them ‘ART’. This radical
approach influenced Neville Brody. You can also see the
influence of the Art Deco design movement in his work.
It was his strong interest in art movements such as Dada,
Futurism and Constructivism which influenced much of
his work.

6. Style
Brody is mainly known for his use of typography. Brody’s
opinion was that people read magazines in a different
manner from the way they read books. When reading a
magazine people tend to browse; they don’t read it
straight through from the beginning to the end. Readers
tend go back and forth picking out the interesting bits.
Brody decided to use this idea as a basis for his designs.
To highlight the most interesting parts of an article and to
attract the attention of the reader, he used contrasting
sizes, shapes or colours of type.

7. The Face Magazine
The Face magazine was a monthly independent music publication
launched in May 1980 providing a totally new slant on modern dance
music, incorporating a photo-laden style more often seen in the
middle class ladies magazines of the day.
It’s style changed immensely during it’s lifetime, originating from a
showcase for the popular independent music acts of the time, before
evolving into a lifestyle magazine focusing more on fashion and style
trends of youth culture.
Beset by imitators, a loss of direction and identity, The Face began to
lose its influence in a crowded market and was closed in May 2004.

8. Its best selling period was in the mid-1990s, when
editor Richard Benson brought in a team that
ensured the magazine's written content reflected
developments in music, art and fashion and
changed the visual direction of the magazine to
showcase new photography.
To give ‘The Face’ magazine a corporate identity,
Neville Brody designed a new font exclusively for
their own use. It was a tall, slim and elongated style
with no serifs but modern, curved ends.
The Face Magazine