Neville Brody

Neville Brody is known as a graphic designer, typographer, art director and last but not least a brand strategist. In London, he went to College of Printing where he first studied graphics and typography. Brody's art is a mixture of typefaces with decorative elements. He first started by designing record covers and labels and then he works for several magazines. Some of his clients we can mention are City Limits, Dutch Postal Services, and German Cable Channel Premier. Brody is a also a font designer and he is responsible for typefaces such as Arcadia, Insignia, FF Blur, FF Gothic, FF Harlem and so on.
Brody along with Jon Wozencroft have founded Fuse, a digital typography magazine. Their goal through the magazine was experimentation. Brody also renamed his studio to Research studio and created Research Arts and Research Publishing.
In an interview with the designer, he reveals what research really means to him and his company; research is an analysis of structure and meaning. Brody also compares design to jazz music, both have to have a strong foundation before you can improvise. His art is structural. He combines science and art and creates in a modernist style.
Today Brody still works for his company creating visual language for publishing and motion picture but also does packaging and website design.


Heller, Steven. "Back talk: Neville Brody, graphic designer, type designer." Print (New York, N.Y.) 53.2 (1999): 36. Art Full Text. Web. 27 Oct. 2010.
Brody Goes Home." Creative Review 25.9 (2005): 19-20. Art Full Text. Web. 27 Oct. 2010
http://www.identifont.com/show?16X
http://www.art-directory.info/design/neville-brody-1957/index.shtml

Wim Crouwel

Crouwel is a remarkable, inspiring figure born in Netherlands and influenced by the Bauhaus. His art is mostly focusing on typography but he is also known as an expressionist painter. Crouwel's systematic approach and the ability to integrate both emotional and rational in his work brought him to the top of his game. He designs print works;catalogs and posters, postage stamps, phone books and also fonts. Very attracted to the neutral typefaces, Crouwel believes that the type should not have meaning in itself but to inform and inform quickly and clearly. He further states that text should be readable but still aesthetic.
"I am a modernist, you know, I was trained in the period. I lived in the period. I love modernism". (Wim Crouwel, Helvetica)
Crouwel is also well-known for his ability to carefully listen to the clients and incorporate their wishes in his work properly.


If you are already not familiar with his work, probably one of the most well-known font jobs done by Crouwel is the "New Alphabet", digital typesetting.
In one of the interviews with Crouwl, he gets the chance to talk about the debate that went on for almost a decade between two designers, Crouwel himself and Jan Van Toorn. The differences in design views between the two designers became very clear and soon became a debate. While Crouwel's work was clear, harmonious, using single typeface and almost uniform, Toorn dared to be messier and each new work different from the previous. Crouwel angered by Toorn's work, their relationship was confrontational for over a decade, but fortunately today they are in good terms. While Crouwel does not like to use many typefaces and believes that should be kept neutral and also informative, today his work is considered maybe simple but trendy.

"The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface, and that is why we loved Helvetica very much". (Wim Crouwel, Helvetica)


Complete Crouwel [type face designer Wim Crouwel]. Creative Review v. 17 (May 1997) p. 88
Poynor, R. Counter points. Print (New York, N.Y.) v. 62 no. 4 (August 2008) p. 31-2
http://www.iconofgraphics.com/Wim-Crouwel/

David Carson

1. Milton Glaser
2. Paul Rand
3. Saul Bass
4. Massimo Vignelli
5. David Carson

6. Stefan Sagmeister
7. Herb Lubalin
8 Tibor Kalman
9. Paula Scher
10.Margo Chase

According to the Graphic Design USA magazine, David Carson is one of the top most influential graphic designers of the era. He is considered the "Billy Idol of the graphic design" and a "popularizer." (Steven Heller)
Words mixed together in an odd way, overlapping each other with a mix of lower case and capitalized letters and sometimes blurred perfectly describe Carson's style. With little or no education in the design area, David Carson recognized what the audience was looking for and rapidly moved up among the greatest designers of the age.
At the age of 24, he was designing two surfer magazines, being a surfer himself. He soon got involved with bigger companies. The goal of his work was not legibility but communication.



Carson believes that people today do not like, or have no time to read so he creates the images with the words that speak as an art form. As we learned this week in class,the media and advertising companies are greatly influenced by the teenage population, the biggest consumers on the market. Carson recognized the need and responded two this generation in a way that really worked. Beside the prints, the designer also works with moving images and finds them more interesting. Carson has his own studios in New York and Virgin Islands and some of his clients are Quicksilver, Nike, Nine Inch Nails and Neutrogena.


Even though well known and well respected by some, he was considered a designer who is doing everything wrong and was not accepted by design communities. The fact that Carson believes in making beautiful art by questioning all the rules, pissed off lots of educated designers. But, he moves to Charleston, and he disappears from the big city and also from the main stage. And as a result to all the criticism, he writes a 460 page book about his work, and also a "fuck you to the industry," according to Burgoyne Patrick, Creative Review. And while some people are criticizing Carson indeed, others believe he plays an important role in the world of graphic design(Alexander Gelman).

"He converted an abstract, somewhat dry area into something a little sexy. Briefly."
(Lewis Blackwell, former editor of Creative Review)














Newsweek, February 26, 1996 , UNITED STATES EDITION, THE ARTS; Design; Pg. 64, 1067 words, BY PETER PLAGENS AND RAY SAWHILL
Burgoyne, Patrick. "Where is David Carson?." Creative Review 24.4 (2004): 46-9. Art Full Text. Web. 26 Oct. 2010.
Folio: the Magazine for Magazine Management 24.n4 (March 1, 1995): pp50(4). (1981 words)
http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/
http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/

Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister is far one of my favorite graphic designers. His design is innovative, very original and nature inspired. He dares to bring something new in the design world, something different from all the today's computer-based art work.
He attended school in Vienna, at the University for Applied Arts. Even though never interested in drawing, he believes that the studies of nature offered at the school helped him developing his talent and style that he has today. One of the few people interested in graphics among his colleagues, Sagmeister decides to apply for a scholarship offered by the Vienna's theater director, Hans Gratzer.He did not know at that time, but Gratzer familiar with Sagmeister's work, gave the scholarship to him and so the opportunity for him to study in New York for a few years. Great opportunity for Sagmeister. The following years he travels back to Austria and than to Hong Kong. While some of us believe that he already showed his talent to the world, he believes that he was just lucky and that everything just fell in his lap while he was doing 0, the designer states. When he finally comes back to New York, he starts working with the Hungarian graphic designer Tibor Kalman. Today Sagmeister runs his own business and he is among the most talented and well-known designer. He is mostly known for his CD cover designs, poster designs but also for his books.Evan though very successful and busy with clients, Sagmeister decides to leave, escape for a period to clean up his thoughts since his work "becomes repetitive." You would thing that he would have angry clients, who are left behind but on the contrary, Sagmeister is being supported and does not loose any clients. He has other interesting methods mentioned in an interview; every Thursday morning from 9-12 he does a complete CD cover design and he calls it experimental. After that he schedules a period of "free thinking". The afternoons are filled with reading and other relaxing activities. The designer further states in the interview, that a secret to good design is to keep your old sketchbook and go over it and look for ideas that maybe did "not work for the past but might work for the future."
A great, interesting personality with an even greater talent, Sagmeister is one of the leading designers in New York.
"Everybody who's honest is interesting",Stefan Sagmeister.
























A conversation with Stefan Sagmeister and Lou Reed: Take a Walk on the Wild Side
Anonymous. Graphis. New York:May/Jun 2002. Vol. 58, Iss. 339, p. 124-135 (12 pp.)
http://designmuseum.org/design/stefan-sagmeister
http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/sagmeister.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_shares_happy_design.html