Alexey Brodovitch was an influential editorial designer in the 1950s. He was an artist, graphic designer and photographer. However, he was most famous for his art direction, primarily for the magazine Harpers Bazaar. He was an aesthetic entity whose permanent influence was perceived along the entire visual arts. His style of combining elegantly set typography with new and experimental trends in photography became widely popular in the 1940s and 1950s, helping to keep the magazine at the forefront of its field in a swiftly changing world. Brodovitch was the first art director to integrate image and text. Most American magazines at that time used text and illustration separately, dividing them by wide white margins. Brodovitch
ALEXEY BRODOVITCH
16 | HIGH END DESIGN
Kirsty Hair | Design Context
cropped his photographs, often offcenter, brought them to the edge of the page, and integrated them in the whole. He used his images as a frozen moment in time and often worked with succeeding pages to create a nice flow through the entire magazine. This brought a new dynamism in fashion layouts. The typeface he preferred was Bodoni, but when needed he switched to Stencil, Typewriter or a script. He matched the typeface with the feeling or with the need for an appropriate effect. Legibility was not his primary concern and his layouts are easily recognized by his generous use of white space. Colleagues at other magazines saw his sparse designs as truly elegant, but a waste of valuable space.
by Kirsty Hair
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