Past Episodes.
S1E10.
“We live in a world driven by entropy.”
Play Now
Neville Brody: leaving convention behind.
Published: Mar 15, 2025.
“The complexity of messaging has decreased because people have to swipe so quickly, and it’s only something that’s quite iconic that will catch someone’s eye.”
INTRODUCTION: By the 1980s, England was culturally no longer as drab and gray as it used to be. Energized by the shock waves of punk, it was in the art schools of Chelsea, St. Martin’s, Hornsey and Camberwell, where dissenting voices began to emerge. Radicalizing a new way forward.
Musically, bands like The Slits, Cabaret Voltaire, and Throbbing Gristle chipped away at the edges of music’s formalities, reshaping its trajectory. And the independent record scene, led by Factory, Fetish and Rough Trade became the breeding ground for designers such as Peter Saville, Malcolm Garrett, and Rocking Russian, who set about challenging every convention.
Then came The Face, the future style Bible of youth culture, and all of this converged into a new visual rebellion, one that rejected tradition, embraced experimentation, and redefined the aesthetic of a generation.
In episode 10, we meet a former art school rebel who took inspiration from Dadaism, William Burroughs, and the underground music scene, and armed with sheets of Letraset and a photocopier and a restless need to disrupt, redefined the visual landscape forever. Deconstructing type, breaking the grid, and reshaping the language of design.
“Everything has been enabled by technology and the way we communicate has always been driven by technological change. And with each step of technology’s advance, the potential audience grows exponentially.”
Richard Smith: Neville Brody is probably one of the most revered designers of both the 20th and 21st centuries. After graduating from college, he chose poverty over a safe job and has continued to break the rules to this day. His work is unique, it is iconic, and he is relentless in pursuing his belief that you should question everything.
I’m very grateful that he has made time to chat with me today. Please welcome to the show, Mr. Neville Brody. Neville, thank you for making the time to be on the show. I know You are very busy right now. You’re very busy celebrating 10 years of Brody Associates. That’s an amazing achievement. You must be proud of that.
Neville Brody: Thank you for the invite today, Richard. A pleasure to see you again. If it wasn’t busy, I think we’d all be worried, but it’s finding that sweet spot between frantic and asleep. I’ve been running a studio since 1979, 1980, and the most recent iteration, Brody Associates, has been running now for 10 amazing years, and we continue to work on amazing projects.
RS: How big is your agency now?
NB: It’s always been about the same size, including what we call satellites or associates. I’ve always had the philosophy that if you’re too big to have lunch together, you’re too big.
RS: That’s a good philosophy. Something I was just thinking about, because the work you do is very distinct. How much work do you do these days?
NB: There’s probably a lot of stuff that’s out there we’ve done that you probably didn’t know was us. At the same time, it’s a balancing act between stuff that’s much more expressive and stuff which is much more professional or engineering based, developing much more strategy based systems for people.
I’m pretty hands on in both axes. On one hand, I’m still doing a lot of personal stuff. For instance, I’ve just designed a Korean typeface, along with a few other people. Then, at the other end of the extreme we’ve been working on Shiseido, we did the whole brand code.
Which has been a three- or four-year project. The Samsung font, which will be on screens and printed instructions, will all use fonts that we’ve designed. So that’s system-based building rather than something which is more of a one off. So, we fluctuate between single statements and designing platforms.
“We live in a world that’s driven by entropy now where a big global brand is breaking down local complexity and replacing it with global simplicity. So, as technology spreads across the world, more and more people are signing up for the same cultures.”
RS: I think what’s interesting, building off what you said, something that really struck me was that back at college, someone said your work lacked commerciality, and you’ve always preferred this idea of using someone’s living room as a gallery so you can reach multiple people.
I think what’s really fascinating about that and the work you’re doing now is, there’s an irony there that you are constantly breakING the rules and you’re constantly questioning everything, but somehow that mindset is getting in front of people from The Times to The Guardian. You just mentioned Samsung.
Going back to punk. Do you see what you are doing as subversive in any way? Is that a mindset?
NB: As you know, graphic design is always a place of compromise, Inevitably in some form, because we’re professionals for hire on one level, and professionals for hire means we have clients. And when I was on my foundation course at Hornsey College of Art, my tutor then said to me, I should go into graphic design because I needed a brief to be set by someone else.
Whereas in art, you set your own brief. He said that my reaction or response is normally to an external stimulus like a brief, and that’s one of the other reasons I didn’t go into becoming an artist.
Secondly, I think art, certainly at that time, was quite elite and had the pretense of being a democratic folklore culture that’s reflecting mankind or humankind. But the reality is that it is a business of value, and the value is commercial rather than cultural. Graphic design is a much more honest space, graphic designers, they have clients, they have customers.
You can’t then be radical in every situation, and you must find a way to bring that thinking, but within a commercial framework. Because at the end of the day, if you’re doing something that’s outrageously off brief, you’ll very quickly be off brief, completely.
So, it’s finding that balance. As you mentioned, when I was at the London College of Printing, the internal tutors failed me at the end of my BA, the three years, and said that I hadn’t followed the course, which is incorrect.
I’d responded to every brief, but I just hadn’t done it the way they wanted me to do it. Secondly, they said I had no commercial potential, which means that they forgot that graphic design is constantly in a state of flow and change and should be both leading and responsive to the era that it’s being made in.
Can you imagine when Rodchenko was at art school and someone said, well, you have no commercial potential.
“People are afraid to put out things that might be difficult, because if they’re difficult, they probably will attract less attention – people will just swipe past. So, they all end up sharing a little bit of the same, communal DNA.”
RS: I love that, you failed. You can never be a commercial artist. Getting off topic a little bit, but one of the reasons I moved here was because I felt very disillusioned with England because design had become so prevalent, so much part of culture, and it was everywhere. And is what led me to this podcast, this idea that design is everywhere.
I remember going to a graduation show and being like, oh wow, this is impressive. Kids know how to design. When I was at school, nobody knew what graphic design was. Somehow schools had managed to teach it, which is wonderful, but I was always attracted to how unique it was.
NB: I think we used to start with expression and then create systems out of expression. But the change for me now is we are mainly designing a DNA. Like a graphic DNA, and that might be a logo, a logotype or an icon or a font or a color set, or an approach to image direction. So, we’re creating platforms with a client because they’re mainly interested in creating content.
That’s the big shift. So, when we were doing branding 30 years ago, it wasn’t a content led thing. It was an old fashioned, monolithic IBM type hierarchy, where the supreme being was the brand logo and everything sat in a hierarchy under that. Now it’s a reverse triangle where the brand just sits at the base.
The main exposure is to content, which is what you’re talking about, which is film or video. Images or stories or user generated content. So, the opportunity to express is somehow a little bit out of the mix now, because people aren’t that interested in graphic expression. It’s moved from what used to be graphic art.
Graphic design, which came about with Dadaism, Constructivism, Futurism, the Bauhaus, et cetera. Now we’re in the third part of that, which is we’re talking about design engineering more than anything.
So, design studios tend to be either creating and engineering the platforms with the DNA, which are really mechanisms then for carrying and distributing content, but content comes and goes so fast. The adage about today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper. That moment is gone, brains are being rewired to chase these short-term thrills.
The reward center is, well, if I scroll, maybe there’s something better there. And it almost never is. So, you keep scrolling, we’re always chasing the next better thing. I think that a lot of our media experience today is based on that.
It’s based on sugar to feed the reward centers. The scrolling. So, that leaves graphic design in a quite an interesting position because you either shift into content creation and now AI is moving in very fast into that space, so it’s becoming content prompting, rather than creation, but most brands are chasing platforms and content.
“I remember when the Mac arrived, and everyone at that time, especially in graphic design said, ‘It’s irrelevant, it’ll go away.’ The other group of people said, ‘It’s a great tool. It helps us make design easier.’ But what we didn’t realize at the time was that it swiftly became somewhere you could publish from.”
RS: I read in Dezeen magazine that you said, “Digital content is all fed through the same sausage machine.” I thought that was a wonderful description of the world in which we live in.
NB: It’s a bit damning because I think we still do it. We still want to produce good solutions and dynamic engagement and keep everything moving.
But more and more the expression is stripped away from an instance and becomes part of the fabric. More and more brands want the freedom of a platform and the voice of a typeface. If you go to any art school now, every designer is doing their own fonts, and that was just simply an extra little bit when we were studying.
But now it’s the main thing and all the creativity’s been squeezed from all the other areas. It all must go into the right typeface language.
RS: It’s interesting because I studied typography many years ago and it is an area of design a lot of people can’t relate to, but it has such a massive influence on what you’re looking at and what you’re taking in.
I wanted to go back to something you touched on. I know you were Dean at the RCA and that you once said that you, “Really wanted students to embrace risk taking.” Do you think students take enough risks these days?
NB: At that time, I was Dean of the School of Communication, and from my perspective, the only reason a student should be in art school is to experiment. To take risks and explore new things. You can only change the world by changing the people who will make the world.
Students become quite critical in that process of refreshing, of questioning, of exploration, of taking risks that might fail because obviously commerce is averse to risk taking because the risk of failure means that they won’t be able to operate commercially.
But as a student, you should be grabbing that opportunity and really questioning, coming back to the idea of questioning everything. The other side of that is that is how to make something that has become so available to everyone, everywhere, in terms of being able to source that knowledge.
The role of education shifts because students themselves can achieve the knowledge, the technical knowledge. They’re not necessarily clear on what to do with that knowledge.
This is where the tutor role comes in and its changing. It used to be that the tutor was at the top and imparted knowledge. That was the role of the tutor or teacher, that they owned. Perspective, bringing history in with technology, with research, et cetera. Then they would impart that to the students.
That’s shifting now because the student is probably more adept of finding information more quickly than any of their tutors. So, that role has shifted. In a way it’s a liberation because it means that the tutor can then focus on the more creative, the more strategic, and even the more existential side of communication.
I think increasingly that’s the case, but it’s not clearly identified as such. At the RCA, that was what I was trying to put in place, that the tutor becomes a guide rather than a teacher, in that sense.
RS: There’s a wonderful quote from your recent book, or rather you framed it in an article I read, it was, an “Appeal for drama, expression and exuberance.” What I cherish and take away so much from your approach is this continual push to reinvent.
Are you hoping that people will take that idea and push the boundaries of their work?
NB: At the end of the day, it’s all contextual. Graphic design is still subject to forces beyond its control, which might be a budget or a timeline or a market constraint, but it’s always important to look for those areas of risk or exuberance or questioning the brief.
I think coming back to the thing you said about British design. As a studio, we don’t have much work in the UK, and we haven’t done for a few years. The only other work, or the great work we get here tends to be things like the England football team – we did the women’s kit with Nike – Channel Four’s font, or the BBC website, or the Royal College of Art brand.
I mean, we get that level of cultural institution, but 95% of our work is from Japan, Korea, and the US. Which is quite odd.
“Graphic design is always a place of compromise.”
RS: It’s interesting because each of those examples goes to what I said a minute ago about how your work is right there, and it’s being disseminated to so many people now.
The living room is now the gallery and it’s massive. That metaphor really resonated with me and the work you’re doing, people are seeing, and maybe they’re not questioning what they’re seeing, but you’re putting something in front of people that’s got that heritage to it. To me, it’s wonderful.
You talked about the LCP, the London College of Printing. I know you got into music by designing work for bands, through designing posters for college gigs. I wanted to get to what motivated you back then.
NB: During my foundation year at Hornsey, I was sat next someone called Mike Barson, who wrote all the songs for Madness.
He hated the art school thing, and he was a keyboardist, and he came in one day, he said, “Look, you just have to forget all of this. I just went to see a band called the Sex Pistols and it is going to change everything.” And I was like a bit scared of that. It took me a little while to move from something that was quite conventional.
Then at the LCP, the first year was fairly conventional, and then punk really hit me. I cut my hair off, I got a leather jacket. Then by the third year I was living in a squat in Covent Garden. The important thing about punk was that it said that anything is possible. Up to that point I’d been heavily influenced by Dada and William Burroughs more than anything.
They were all about challenging the norm, making it very clear that normality is just a construct that is put in place to maintain the status quo, which means, from Dada’s point of view, it is all about the bourgeoisie. With William Burroughs it’s much more about cultural dictatorships and how do we break that sense of normality
Things like the cut-up technique, that he developed with Brian Gysin, where they called it the Third Mind because they said that you can’t just sit down and imagine something that’s never existed before. So that sort of serendipity of risk taking really embedded itself in my work.
Especially in the third year at LCP and then beyond. Which of course, none of the tutors understood. One day the tutor said to me, “Oh, I get it now, you do punk graphics, don’t you?” As if that explained everything. But the thing that I loved about the punk concept was that anything is possible.
You can risk and fail, and it doesn’t matter if something new will eventually come out of all of that.
RS: I interviewed Stephen Mallinder recently, who I know you know, from Cabaret Voltaire, and he said that he’s not afraid of failure. He’s always willing to take risks and to this day he’s still of that mindset.
There’s another headline in your recent book, “Protest, Protect, Disrupt,” which made me think of your time at Rocking Russian. Al McDowell, who was the founder of Rocking Russian, still believes we should demolish boundaries, things like that. How much was that time influential on your thinking?
NB: I think it was all part of a way of thinking. I met Al McDowell because I realized that with my final year dissertation, the only purpose of it was really to interview the people that you wanted to work for. Because my third-year thesis was on modern magazines. So, covering people like Bazooka in Paris, who I think are still so incredibly influential, but deep down in the mix; they were a big influence on Barney Bubbles, for instance.
I was just enamored by their work and their thinking. There was also a magazine, called Garbage, put together by Al McDowell in collaboration with Terry Jones, who later did I-D magazine, and Terry introduced Al to Constructivism.
So, there was all this stuff going on and they were in the middle of Soho, and I started working for Al the day after my show came down. So, one minute I was being failed by the LCP and the next minute I was getting a job. My first day of freedom, and it was an incredibly intense period. I was just coming out of this squat and the whole culture was amazing.
Soho was not gentrified; it was really quite rough and edgy and exciting in a very different way to now. It was a very different scenario. It was also a time in Britain when the populist right wing had 12% of the vote. That was the National Front.
We had the collapse of the Labor government, followed by the authoritarianism and unfairness of the Thatcher government. So, it was a really mad time. Then behind all of that was the fact that there were hundreds of records being published and released every week.
People were recording them in their bedrooms, and then they were pressing 200 copies and selling them in Rough Trade, which meant that the record design industry provided an absolutely invaluable platform to support people like myself or Peter Saville, or The Designers Republic or Malcolm Garrett, or 23 Envelope.
So, without that. We wouldn’t be having this conversation today.
RS: I think you’re right. It’s something I’ve believed for a long time that how important record cover design was. I think you said it very articulately, it was a bridge for many designers coming out of school and being able to respond to that sense of wanting to change things. Change the world and then perhaps find your own way as it were.
You started working with Fetish Records. Was this around that time when you were at Rocking Russian?
“On my foundation year at Hornsey, I sat next to Mike Barson, who wrote all the songs for Madness. He came in one day and said, ‘You must forget all of this. I just went to see a band called the Sex Pistols and it’s going to change everything’.”
NB: I met Rod who was running Fetish Records because in the squat where I lived, in the room underneath mine, there was Tom, who was the singer of 23 Skidoo.
I met 23 Skidoo through the squat, and 23 Skidoo had just signed to Fetish. So, I met Rod, and at the same time I’d written to Cabaret Voltaire at Rough Trade and went to meet with them, and they liked what I was doing, and asked me to do a tour poster, a couple of tour posters for them.
Then out of that came a long-term relationship and it was very much about just being in the right place at the right time. I was so lucky. It’s all about being in the right place at the right time, and I was just incredibly lucky with that.
Then Rod and Fetish Records were then also working with Throbbing Gristle, who also were very close with Cabaret Voltaire. So, it was a community and there were several different ways into that community.
We all used to hang out in the French House in the middle of Soho. Which is the pub on Dean Street. That was where everyone was, Neneh Cherry, Robbie Coltrane, Derek Jarman, so there were artists, architects, fashion designers, musicians, actors, writers all congregating in the same place and sharing ideas and, and there was a community of about 200 people all bouncing ideas, and alcohol, off each other. It’s changed but we were lucky then because we had fanzines.
RS: Did you do a fanzine ever?
Yeah, I did a couple when I was at art school. So, everything’s been enabled by technology and the way we communicate has always been driven by technological change. Graphic design happened around the time that printing became more available to people.
They’d invented half tone printing. So suddenly you could mass print images, and that was a huge democratization of communication. Then if you look at the whole of the 20th century, and up to now, it’s always been driven by technological revolutions. Now it’s moving into AI, it’s the device that’s leading the way in many ways for communication.
With each step of technology’s advance, the audience, the potential audience grows at each point exponentially. So now we’ve reached a point with mobile and digital platforms where you can reach billions of people, but the complexity of messaging has decreased. Because people must swipe so quickly and it’s only something that’s quite iconic that’ll catch someone’s eye.
But it’s so short and it’s so small and it’s so limited and must make sense. No one’s going to watch a two-hour video. So, my question is how do we re-embrace complexity and difficulty and difference. So, that’s the big challenge of the day for me.
RS: Maybe elaborate on that a little bit for me. That’s an interesting statement.
NB: Complexity has disappeared. We live in a world that’s driven a lot more by entropy now, which means a big a global brand, like Starbucks for instance, they’re not going to have completely different menus in every country they go to because it’s economically unviable. So, what they do is they make sure that the menus are 90% the same, or 95% the same wherever they go with a small amount of localization.
But what this is doing is it’s breaking down local complexity and replacing it with global simplicity. That process is continuing, especially with access to Instagram and TikTok. So as technology spreads across the world, more and more people are signing up to the same cultures, and that’s an entropic process.
These messages are not highly complex because to appeal to a huge amount of people, they have to be understood across a lot of different cultures. So, there’s a flattening of complexity. People are afraid to do things that might be difficult, because if they’re difficult, they probably will attract less attention.
And if they’re different, then a lot of people will just swipe past, so they all end up sharing a little bit of the same communal DNA.
RS: It is almost a truth, perhaps that the world is homogenizing in some ways. There were two things I saw you said around AI. One was that you thought it was a big issue, but you also said that it was an exciting time for design.
Maybe the two are related, but building off what you were just talking about.
NB: I remember when the Mac arrived and everyone at that time, especially in graphic design, said either they said, “It’s irrelevant, it’ll go away,” and the other group of people said, “It’s a great tool, it helps us make design easier.” What we didn’t realize at the time was that it swiftly became somewhere you could publish from.
We thought it was a place to make stuff we would print. We didn’t think that we’d be making stuff that would stay on the computer. At the very beginning, it was making stuff to print, and then it became quite clear that we could publish from there, we can send stuff to another computer, and then we realized it was a place to receive stuff as well.
Then it became the radio, TV, piano, cinema, theater thing that we would eventually live in, that became shrunk down to the size of a mobile phone at some point. I think AI will have a similar journey to that. At the beginning everyone was saying, “Don’t worry, it’s just a tool.” But I think it is going to be much more immersive in our lifetimes in the future than that.
It certainly has the potential to be a living actor within our cultural experience, not just something that we use to make other stuff. I think we don’t know what it looks like yet.
We could never have imagined that we would be watching stuff someone else had done on a little screen in our pocket. If someone had said that 30 years ago, you would’ve laughed at them.
“As a student, you should question everything.”
RS: What do you mean? You think it will be immersive? Do you mean it will be second nature to our lives?
NB: 100%. It’ll play a constant role in every aspect of our lives. I think that’s an inevitability. It’s already making a very strong statement within all our lives.
This happened so fast. A year, two years ago, none of us would’ve imagined this. So, it’s been building up, but it feels like it’s happened overnight. All the dreams of a digital assistant, for instance, inevitably it’ll become a robotic companion in some form. Even a friend who knows.
RS: Like the film, Her.
NB: Or even an enemy, it’s a bit scary. I think inevitably it will meld with our physical lives in some form. I think that’s an absolute inevitability of where we’re headed.
RS: Something you said that I thought was interesting in relation to AI was that for you, what’s interesting about AI is the reductive, minimalist, abstract potential. That’s where you saw the opportunity. At least from what I read, you said, “That it’s so sophisticated and it’s all about virtuosity and sharing how clever it is and that you can do sophisticated, deep fake content, but it can’t do the subtle touch.”
NB: I think right now it’s being used to produce stuff, which feels quite kitsch. I’m not comparing it to the airbrush, but that’s what it feels like a little bit.
It’s about how polished can you make something. It is very virtuoso. People do tend to want to produce quite flamboyant statements. “Look how wonderful this is.” And it’s dominating our communication right now, but then that’ll start mellowing down.
I’m looking to see what underground artists and creators will make of it. How can we make it go wrong? Which is where new ideas form when things go wrong. There’s always a mutation of some sort. I’m waiting to see where artists are going to push this to something which glitches.
RS: There’s a correlation of sorts with the photocopier or the Xerox machine, as we call it in America. You were using that in a way to push the boundaries, particularly at The Face magazine. It must have been a very liberating, but at the same time, time consuming tool.
NB: At The Face, I started off using Letraset to make headlines. Back then nearly all my record covers I was doing were using Letraset, I was Letraseting whole sets of credits on the back.
RS: God forbid if you made a mistake.
NB: The thing for me is that when new technologies come along, they’re always first seen as production tools and then they always become communication tools. The photocopier was that. It was an internal thing to keep a copy and then suddenly people realized that if you ramp up the copies, you could then have a cheap home printing system.
Cassette players were the same. People were using cassettes to record stuff for themselves or record conversations, and then it quickly became a format for storing, distributing new music.
I’m wondering how AI will follow the same trajectory. It happened with the personal computer. It happened with digital photography and digital filmmaking. It happened with social media. So, I’m quite fascinated to see what’s going to happen with AI.
RS: What’s interesting to me is how punk really was a massive influence and pushed many people such as yourself and many others, including myself in new directions, and here you are today, having a very successful career off those early days. It’s a long time ago, but it led us to where we are in many ways.
NB: Thank God for what was going on at that time. It was a nascent magazine industry, the ubiquity of self-published record labels and music at one point. The Reggae Lovers Rock phenomenon. There were 200 singles being published just in Hackney alone every week.
Now it’s all become so industrialized and controlled, and the same has happened to media and cultural content, but something should break it again. So, I think what I’m saying here is that we need constant vigilance and constant reinvention and constant questioning because that thing quickly becomes a pattern.
We must break it and see what new things come out of it. I think that needs to be a lifelong process.
RS: Do you think there is anyone challenging culture today?
NB: Probably. I’m probably not aware of it. It might not, for the first time in a long while, it might not come from an older generation. It might come from a newer, younger generation in that kind of bigger cycle who will just blow it all up and create some new stuff.
“The thing that I loved about the punk concept was that anything was possible. And you can risk and fail. And it doesn’t matter if something new will eventually come out of all of that.”
RS: Do you think there’s an inevitability with AI that it could end in chaos?
NB: I think there’s an inevitability that humanity will end in chaos. We’re doing a pretty good job of that right now, fucking up the planet whilst increasing plastic sales or consumerism. We say the right thing, all of us, we say the right thing, but then our lifestyles are complicit with the destruction of the planet. Mine is, yours is, even using technology is complicit.
We can’t be sure that this recording is being done using clean energy. We all have bank accounts; we don’t know exactly where our money is being invested. So, there’s an inevitable signing up to this drive towards this exciting thrill of blowing the whole thing up in a way.
Then there are wars, but the problem about wars is there’s always wars. And right now, on the planet, there are less wars than they normally are, but it’s so amplified.
Then the real dangers and challenges that are happening in the world right now are in places like Sudan, where there’s tens of thousands of people being pushed over the border this week to avoid violence and famine, but those don’t feature strongly. So it is all very curated.
NB: Are you involved in any kind of activism?
Obviously, I’m quite political. I think anyone that works in communication is by the nature of the industry, is political because communication is a tool for persuasion or instruction, no matter what we say. So, inevitably we’re shifting people’s mindsets. It’s a political role no matter what.
We have two kinds of clients. One who is paying us and the other who must live with what we make. I’m not heavily involved in activism directly. I’m working with a bunch of musicians and DJs here for a fundraising thing called “Artists for Gaza,” because there are a lot of strong feeling about the tragedy of the lives of the everyday Gazans.
RS: Switching topics. I just wondered why you moved away from doing so many record covers.
NB: I think at the end of the eighties, beginning of the nineties, up until then, record covers had been part of the experience of the music, and it had been an extension of the expression of the music. That period looking at Vaughan Oliver’s work and Peter Saville’s work and Malcolm Garrett and The Designers Republic, et cetera.
There were some amazing covers that came out of that time, I mean, quite classic now, amazing statements. They were so unique. There was nothing before that, that looked like that stuff and nothing since. And what happened at the end of the eighties was there became a shift away from what the music was expressing to expressions about the musicians themselves.
So, the shift came and moved everything towards the art director being responsible for choosing makeup, hair, the stylist for what they were wearing. They became more and more like studio portraits.
I realized that all I was doing was choosing someone to cut someone’s hair, I thought, well, that’s it. I’m out. It’s not interesting, that’s it. I quit. At the same time, we stopped getting commissions in music. So, the music industry itself had shifted towards creating superstars.
RS: There definitely was a big shift in late eighties and then into the nineties. What’s the term, the industry cannibalized itself a little bit and it was all about creating stars rather than creating great music.
NB: I’d grown up on bands like Wire and the Pop Group and Pere Ubu and 23 Skidoo and even Test Departments, all of those people. Where vanity was so not part of the mix. It was all about expression and that was following on from other great experimental music, which was going on at the time, like Coltrane and Pharoah Saunders in Jazz, or underground music like the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop.
Progressive music like King Crimson, and then somewhere in there, Brian Eno, Roxy Music, and Robert Fripp and David Bowie. So, there was this great swelling of experimental stuff that by the end of the eighties had become vanity more than anything.
RS: It became the opposite to perhaps where so much of it began with punk, which was somewhat anti commercialism, anti-consumerism, and then I guess through the machinery of the record industry, they dropped all of that and decided that it was about commercialism and conforming, et cetera.
A minute ago, you talked about how in the world of culture, everything has been squeezed out from the conventional mediums and typefaces, and typography has beome this last bastion of whether it be rebellion or change making.
“I think there’s an inevitability that humanity will end in chaos.”
NB: In 2010, we did the Anti-Design Festival. The London Design Festival approached us to do something as part of that, and I said, no, I’d rather do an anti-design festival. And we ended up doing an anti-design festival. But it wasn’t about being anti-design at all, it was about being anti what design culture had become, which was what we talked about.
It was 30 years of success culture, where everything was measured in numbers. How many likes did you get? How many tickets did you sell? And this was a 10 day thing over 10 venues, in East London, and we had 20,000 people show up for that week.
We didn’t charge for anything; anyone could bring something along and put it in our exhibition. So, it was a completely democratic space, and it just reminded us that we still need platforms for risk, experimentation, and failure.
RS: You said in a recent interview that you were morally against the manipulativeness of advertising. Instead, you wanted to manipulate people into querying things, it’s obvious that that has stayed with you.
NB: I mean, obviously things have mellowed a little, but the reason I went into graphic design at the beginning was because I used to operate with the idea that design should be used to reveal, not conceal. I felt that advertising was very much about trying to manipulate a response and that actually what we should be doing, in graphics certainly, was using the same tools to raise awareness and questioning.
Certainly, at The Face and working with music, it was all about that revelation rather than manipulation. Out of that came the idea that all published work or communication should be a dialogue, not a monologue. Advertising was largely a monologue. Because it’s all about persuasion for a particular standpoint or outcome, whereas culture should be about dialogue.
So, we embraced ambiguity, and we embraced unfixed possibilities, so that when someone would look at it, it would only make sense when they decided what it was. A lot of my early work and some of my personal work still works around the idea of fluidity and interpretation and ambiguity.
RS: Adrian Shaughnessy described your work as structured chaos, which I thought was a beautiful statement.
NB: And chaotic structure.
RS: You’ve always been passionate about randomness and chance. It seems that the Dadaist and William Burroughs’ mentality is still with you.
NB: Hundred percent. I was going to say, you can’t bring that to every project. That’s the thing, in the real world of graphic designers, you still have clients. Some of those are quite clear about what they’re looking for. Some are much more exploratory and some you can partner with in creating very new thoughts and new ideas.
We’re not artists, we’re graphic designers. We take our opportunities where we can to do stuff that’s a bit more edgy or dangerous, unexpected. At the same time, we need to service and hopefully do great design work for those clients that can help support the rest of that.
I’m sure artists historically, like in the Renaissance, they must have been in a similar position. They were paid to do these grandiose portraits, but at the same time would go off and do quite interesting personal portraits, which were far more risk-taking.
RS: Something I’m curious about because it’s become a bit of an urban myth, is that you did a cover for Cabaret Voltaire for free, or you offered to do it for free.
NB: No, I don’t know. Probably. I mean, I did the tour posters for free, if I remember rightly. In the background I used to do a lot of support design work for Hipgnosis, and a cover that I’ve never shown anyone is I designed the cover for Pink Floyd’s Greatest Hits and for the official biography of Barry Manilow at the time.
RS: Brilliant. That’s a great way to end.
NB: So, yeah, you know, we all must compromise somewhere.
RS: You are still doing amazing work and I really appreciate you making the time today. I know you’ve got a lot going on, so thank you. It was great chatting.
NB: Thank you so much, Richard. Really good to see you again and good luck.