JB OA nR aN tB h RNev i l l e a O B r o d y: nO K a n d
Culturally Expressive Type Designers
FontFonts
Industria Harlem
Dome Arcadia Gothic Neville Brody
“Type is more than just a few tricks to the eye. It’s a few tricks to the brain.”
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Originally called Manson, Mason was a serif released in 1992 by Emigre, the well known California based magazine and foundry. Emigre changed the slightly scandalous name from Manson to Mason after several complaints without telling Barnbrook himself. His intentions with the name wasn’t to upset but to play with the way people would perceive and use the letterforms
Nev ille Brody designed t he launch appearance f or Arena magazine a f t er mov ing on f rom T he Face. He creat ed dist inct i ve cust om t ypography f or t he magaizine including t he cover t it le f ont.
MR L o n d o n based type designers Jonathan Barnbrook and Neville
Brody both pushed the idea of type experimentation and looked more toward what was at large during the time period instead of the safe and tested economic strategies that were pushed in college work. These two designers, however, found different forms and outlets to experiment with type design that would ultimately be used, to them and many critics, as
a significant element in their graphic design. The digital age was beginning and experimentation wasn’t what most companies wanted for type. They preferred fonts that were the most readable. The sometimes lack of readability in Barnbrook’s and Brody’s typography was made up, however, through a new graphic language and a response to the culture and events of London.
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FUSE poster, FUSE is an influential publication on experimental typography that creates an outlet that allows type designers to challenge conventional thinking about the form and function of typography free from client and commercial constraints.
Many in Britain looked to Dutch Design. Barnbrook and Neville Brody looked at there own country that they were living in and brought to life the native design vocabulary. During the start of their career it was a time of economic recession and unemployment was on the rise. Coalition forces had invaded Iraq and big design firms were suffering and not offering jobs causing many young designers to move abroad. Barnbrook accomplished this by forging a connection with the past,
Type Design That’s understood
In te rna t i onalY with qualities such as permanence and excellence. His inspiration for this came from both the architecture itself and the typography in London, for example The London Underground. Brody on the other hand was interested in the Punk Rock scene happening in London. The subculture in a way formed the handcrafted type on work for record covers and posters and became an integral part of his image making process. I say in a way because they weren’t the only thing to influence his type. Dadaism and pop art aesthetics can be seen in the majority of his work (Barnbrook).
Culture was interpreted through their work defining both typographers as Post-Modernists. Work began around the beginning of the 1980’s for the two of them. After graduating from Royal College of Art in 1990, Barnbrook immediately opened up his own studio that was covering and still covers activism, graphics, typefaces, industrial design, and motion graphics with clients including John Foxx, White Cube, Damien Hirst, the British Heart Foundation and David Bowie (“Barnbrook”). During and after graduating from London College of Printing in 1976, Neville Brody worked for record labels and was not very focused on type as just typography but instead the combination of type and image. He didn’t start thinking about type by itself until he started working as an Art Director for The Face and Arena Magazine. Other magazines that he worked on the typography for include, New Socialist, City Limits, Vive, Actuel, and Per Lui.
Patriot Light
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Most projects that the two where given usually included some kind of hand crafted type specifically for the design. With hundreds of projects in their careers the list of letterforms is extensive, however, only so many of these became full typefaces while the majority didn’t become anything more than what they were for the design and concept. They both had a wide variety of typefaces from bold and graphic to artistic and blurry. Jonathan Barnbrook has a very long list of typefaces that have their own unique graphic context. In 1988, he developed one of his first, Bastard, an experimental blackletter he created on the computer because his school wouldn’t purchase any. It was important to him not to ignore the influence of blackletter while acknowledging their 20th century fascist association. To start he grabbed a pen and sketched out the letterforms that he then traced in a vector program. He didn’t like the results and ditched that idea; instead creating a grid and a kit of parts to generate every letterform (Barnbrook). An element to the typeface that was important to Barnbrook was the name which he commonly pushed the boundaries with. Originally called Manson, Mason was a serif released in 1992 by Emigre, the well known California based magazine and foundry. Emigre changed the slightly scandalous name from Manson to Mason after several complaints without telling Barnbrook himself. His intentions with the name weren’t to upset but to play with the way people would perceive and use the letterforms.
Neville Brody created type in the Japanese style of a Pachinko house for a culture house based in Barcelona named Armand Basi.
FF Tokyo by Neville Brody was originally specially drawn for the World Heavyweight Championship in Tokyo in 1988.
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“They are so about him that they are difFcult to use without appearing like a piece of his work�
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EMAv ODjl EKXL NADW The Why Nots [about Jonathan Barnbrook]
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The typeface as a whole references the century old tradition of stone carving, elements of classical architecture and letterforms found in mediaeval manuscripts, but also the headstones of desolate North London cemeteries, the crosshairs used in aiming firearms, and the infamous serial killers of the 20th century (Barnbrook). It was a typeface visibly influenced by many different materials .
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Neville Brody developed FF Blur in 1991 by blurring a grayscale image of an existing grotesque, and then making vectors from the results. Being deceptively simple, his process was often poorly imitated. Nevertheless, FF Blur became one of the quintessential typefaces of the early and mid-1990s, and has remained popular to date.
A pictogram font called Apocalypso was created in 1997 by Barnbrook to comment on the madness in contemporary society but unfortunately the context changed negatively after September 11th. He questioned if a typeface could make a difference. Later he created Infidel in 2003 that made a response to September 11th intentionally.
Using the visual languge of his period Jonathan Barnbrook designed type for the poster, Is Economic Progress Killing the Planet?, 1999. This poster was for the G7 summit for Adbusters magazine and was graphically compex compared to their regular style.
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Exocet by Jonathan Barnbrook has letterforms that come from Greek and Roman stone carving. Its name revealed the danger of language and the possibility to soothe or vilify with words. Exocet was named after a missle and to Barnbrook’s surprise, people didn’t complain like they did with Mason.
Post-Mod ernists Upsetting
Type’s mainstream
conventions Tokyo One
It was an attempt to contrast the religious forms to the increase in negative thoughts that spread throughtout peoples attitude toward religion at the time. His fonts continue to use their title and form to create a reaction intentional or not about the events and society of the time (Barnbrook). A contemporary sans-serif typeface released in 2013 by Barnbrook is Doctrine. It was originally created for the album artwork and other merchandise for David Bowies newest album. The type has an agreeable character by blending elements of twentieth-century neo-grotesque, humanist and geometric styles to be more human and less clinical than many modernist faces. The rounded, lighter weights speak with graceful composure whilst the large x-height, low contrast and squarer, heavier weights give Doctrine an affable charm and a persuasive voice (“Barnbrook”).
As part of his graphic design process Neville Brody created many of the typefaces for the magazine The Face but many others including FF Blur, FF Tokyo, and Arcadia, and Times Modern. Typefaces for The Face were named Typeface One, Two, Three, Four and so on. Each version changed drastically, changing with it the feel and dynamics of the magazine. Brody felt that there was no typeface at the time that suited the specific mood he sought for The Face. Another font created for a specific project was FF Tokyo. Originally it was specially drawn for the World Heavyweight Championship in Tokyo in 1988 (Wozencroft).
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Brody has a long list of international projects and often influence his style of type. In 1993 FF Tokyo was released as a display type ideally suited for posters, sports, and billboards. FF Blur is one of the more famous fonts of Neville Brody, and derives from photographic processes NB used for making type in the early 1980s. Created in 1991, it was to emphasize the process inherent in the technology with which it was created by projecting a sense of humanity and demystifying the authority of printed words and rejects the coldness and precision of digital language (Wozencroft). Another magazine associated font was Arcadia. It was made by Brody for the banner for Arena magazine in 1986, and released as a font by Linotype GmbH in 1990. Borrowing elements from Art Deco styling, Arcadia is a tall and striking geometric design with extremely condensed and contrasting forms. The alternate font has more pronounced ascenders and descenders for use at smaller point sizes. Arcadia lends eye-popping elegance to display settings for advertising, packaging, invitations, or logos. In 2006 Times Modern was created as part of the project for redesigning The Times. The typeface shares many visual similarities with Mercury designed by Jonathan Hoefler. It was the first new font at the newspaper since it introduces Times New Roman in 1932. Brody hated Times New Roman but respected it for it being one of the only capable font for newspapers so its no wonder that he took on the chance to bring something new to the table for newspapers “Research Studios�. It was the beginning of the digital age when Jonathan Barnbrook and Neville Brody began their work with type. The computer became standard for typographers and graphic designers as prices began to drop for personal computers. Hand drawn type that was then converted to digital type was the preferred method that both typographers took. This gave them the freedom to create type for an intended use. If they didn’t they would have to choose from what is purchasable by other typographers.
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Corprate Fascist Limited Edition Lamboa Print, 2001. Jonathan Barnbrook
Magazine advert for Torchsong by Neville Brody in 1984. It is Composed of only type, the background being formed by text reproduced out of focus.
VirusFonts
Echelon NixonScript
Nylon Prototype
PROZAC Priori Sans Jonathan Barnbrook
“to be able to use the exact contemporary tone of voice I felt I needed to control the drawing of the font as welL.�
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The new technology also gave them the means to distribute their fonts through foundries like FontShop, Emigre, and VirusFonts. It was in 1997 that Barnbrook established his own font company, VirusFonts, releasing well-known fonts such as “Bastard” and “Tourette.” Before this most of Barnbrooks fonts were released through Emigre. Neville on the same note, became a founder, alongside Erik Spiekermann, of two online type foundries, FontShop and FontFont. The digital age also allowed for Barnbrook and Brody to work internationally on a regular basis.
TV
On March 20, 1988, Mike Tyson successfully defended his world championship title against Tony Tubbs. The poster for the event at the Tokyo Dome was designed by Neville Brody. Full alphabets based on the letters that Brody hand-drew for the poster were completed and digitized in 1993 as FF Dome and FF Tyson .
Neville Brody commonly used Letraset once he started working for The Face magazine to have more immediate control of what each individual letter looked like. He could easily combine letterforms from different type families and alphabets. Over time it became more of a creative process than a mechanical or digital one.
In 1995, BBC commissioned him to do three advertisements for Radio Scotland, their spoken word station. There were three sound bits of people talking chosen by BBC. Barnbrook used his own type, techniques of drawing type on film negatives, and breaking up type phonetically to prodauce three different and primarily type animations
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Jonathan Barnbrook’s Newspeak was named after the term used in the novel “1984” by George Orwell. This is a type speciman page from his book Barnbrook Bible
Brody thinks “The belief in thrth of computer-aided typesetting is a blind alley. Technology, ultimately has to be a tool. It is not an end in itself; It is not the content. The eye is a much better judge of letter spacing than a set computer instruction”. Barnbrook became a pioneer of motion graphic typography for UK advertising, during which he continued to learn to evolve his typography through time. In 1995, BBC commissioned him
Hand Drawn type for the
to do three advertisements for Radio Scotland, their spoken word station. There were three sound bits of people talking chosen by BBC. Barnbrook used his own type, techniques of drawing type on film negatives, and breaking up type phonetically to produce three different and primarily type animations (“Barnbrook”).
Brody had other accomplishments and became a major contributor to FUSE, beginning in 1990. It is an influential publication on experimental typography that creates an outlet that allows type designers to challenge conventional thinking about the form and function of typography free from client and commercial constraints. He published the work on FontShop to gain the most publicity (Wozencroft).
digital era FF Pop
Barnbrook’s work has been exhibited in solo shows in London, Paris, Tokyo and Seoul, including the retrospective ‘Friendly Fire’ at the Design Museum in 2007, followed in 2009 by ‘Collateral Damage’, a show focused on his more political output (“Barnbrook”). Brody’s work was shown in a exhibition hosted by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. D&AD President’s Award in 2011 (“Research Studios”).
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The reason that Barnbrook and Brody became successful in their career was due to them both embracing the culture and the technology of the time while adding the out of the computer feel that was absent in other works from type designers when type was becoming overly dehumanized. Neville Brody believed that people shouldn’t feel limited to the range of typefaces made available to them. The two experimental typographers are still working because they were able to expand their style to match the needs and aesthetics of a crowded market. In the last 500 years of typographic history, the most significant changes have taken place in the last 30 years.
Work Cited “Barnbrook.” Barnbrook. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2013. Barnbrook, Jonathan. Barnbrook Bible: The Graphic Design of Jonathan Barnbrook. New York, NY: Rizzoli, 2007. Print. Brody, Neville, and Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988. Print. “Research Studios.” Neville Brody. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2013. Wozencroft, J. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody: Vol. 2. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Print.
Neville Brody worked on the type and graphics alongside John Critchley for an art-sponsered-project that drew attention to the switch from state funding to the corprate sponsership of the arts
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Colophon Design name: Shane Sullivan Photography: Shane Sullivan Typefaces: Industria, Priori Sans OT, FF Pop, Industria, Tyson, Prozac, Prototype, Nylon, Nixon Script, Echelon, Tokyo, Blur, Mason, FF Gothic, Typeface Six, Typeface Seven, Arcadia, Dome, Harlem Project: Typographers Book Design Course: Typography 3 Faculty: Francheska Guerrero College: Corcoran College of Art + Design
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