About the Book

The Graphic Language of Neville Brody is known to be the best-selling illustrated guide. It is a highly illustration generated book that contains 474 illustrations and 101 of those illustrations in color. The layout of the pages in this book appears to look similar to layout in magazines where the text are flushed either right or left and is very narrowed and justify. This book mainly talks about Neville Brody's opinions and original intentions on his work.

The book is strongly related to the famous UK magazine called The Face which Brody design the layout and its typography of its pages. Brody realizes that magazines have become a great importance to the advertising industry. Because of the success of The Face. Designs and work by Brodyhas become widely repetitive and reproduce multiple times which has vary from his original intentions of design. This book serves the purpose to restate and straightens out Brody's initial intention for his published works.

In the content of the book, Brody discusses about the graphic language in his work within typography, music, books, magazines, posters and language. Brody's published works are mostly pop adverts, album covers, logos, magazines covers, book covers, typefaces/ letterheads, etc. In this book review, the book will be critically evaluated with its likes and dislikes through my personal opinion and how much has this book taught me as a graphic designer which I can apply it to my own design and work. In addition to that, the book review is also going to clarify to other readers that may read this book in the future of how easy it is for readers to understand, and also discuss of who the target audience is for this book.

In this book review, one of the chapters; typography chapter will be further discussed because it strongly relates to the similar kind of work I have done in relate to my graphic design works. I have taken course in typography and experience in designing posters in my courses in Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

About the Author

Neville Brody is one of the best-known British graphic designers. He is best known for his work of "The Face", which most of his works are published in magazines. Neville Brody started of to be a fine art major. In The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, Brody said "I don't remember a time in my life when I was going to be doing something else. Ever since I had any self-awareness, I've wanted to do art or painting" (5). Brody went to Hornsey College of Art. Brody wanted to know more about mass communication in the aspects of what the images that he sees in every day life means in the sense of commercial art. He goes on and said "The big decision I took at this stage was whether to follow Fine Art, or to pursue Graphics. I felt that the Fine Art world had become elitist and would appeal only to a specific gallery market my time at Hornsey did nothing to dispel this feeling, so I thought Graphics would offer better possibilities. I thought "why can't you take a painterly approach within the printed medium?" I want to make people me aware rather than less aware, and with the design that I had started to do, I was following the idea of design to reveal, not to conceal" page 5.

What Brody said about intergrading painting within printed medium approach really was able to relate to myself as a graphic designer. I was originally a painting and drawing major but now adding graphic design to my concentration, often I struggle to find the definition of design being stuck between fine artists and graphic designer. Brody started off with a three year B.A degree in graphics. Starting 1976, Brody was a three-year B.A in graphics at the London College of Printing.

Critical Evaluation

In the typography chapter, many larger and small illustrated images of Brody's typography design are being presented. Brody designed corporate logos, posters, typefaces in magazines, etc. In this chapter, Jon Wozencroft and Neville Brody would engage in a interview-like conversation while Jon Wozencroft would ask Brody questions in relation to typography and various different type faces designers use in their work and Brody would respond it with his personal opinions on what he thinks of the typeset and how well does the type respond to its related images and its belonging context. Brody would discuss about what kind of type faces work for what kind of genre of work. He describes the different effect a design will turn out to look when using different size or different type of type faces. Brody critically discuss about the type faces like san-serif typefaces, Futura, Helvetica, Garamond, Times New Roman, and Baskerville. Brody expresses his personal likes and dislikes for each of these typefaces and he would provide a given explanation as to why some typefaces work well in a design but some can often over-dominate and makes the viewer pays too much attention on the type instead of the actual context and meaning.

The typeface for the magazine, "The Face" was designed by Neville Brody. There are a few pages in the typography chapter that discuss why Brody decide to use Letraset for "The Face". Brody wanted each letter itself to be more controllable then reliable on each of the other letters. He started to apply Letraset to all his headlines in the magazine, and then he later on found out that Letraset could be manipulated. He could manipulate each letter by combining letters from different typeface families. Brody was able to come up with a creative way while he execute on producing different typefaces for his design. He would take use of letters, symbols and hand-written or hand-drawn signs and combine it into lettering. He does this by cutting off parts of the letters in a text, by doing this Brody felt like he felt like he was more "in total control, and it was more like working with paints than with something normally seen as a mechanical form" (20).

Organization and Structure

Overall, the book has a very clear layout and presented in a organized manner. However, there are so many illustrations of Brody's design shown in this book; some of these images are being printed page right after another page. This means that there are a couple of pages that are just images and caption with no actually text from the book. It is easily to get distracted when the reader is following the reading and sometimes would not be able to continue to read what he/she just read from previous pages because they might get too distract by the overwhelming largely color-printed images of Brody's design. The illustrated images are very well printed and it always catches my attention.

The Good and the Bad

Good: Highly illustrated book incorporated with text. It really catches reader's attention. Easy reading: It seems like the reader is just listening to a dialogue or speech by Brody. Brody use of speech in this book is very casual and it keeps readers interested about graphic language in his opinions.

Bad: Images after images in many pages: often becomes distracting when trying to follow the text in the book.

Intended Readers

The intended readers for this book would be for graphic designer at any age that is not yet familiar with graphic art and wants to learn more about the graphic language itself before learning the techniques of graphic design. It is probably more helpful for college students who are learning about artists movement, typography and magazine design related courses. I think that his work is very interesting to view because he has produced a number of fascinating posters, logos design that really inspire me. I would also like to look further into combining letters by manipulating typefaces with different aspects of symbols, hand-drawn signs to incorporate with my design. It is right for Brody to say that "The belief in the truth of computer-aided typesetting is really a blind alley. The greater the belief in the truth of a tool, the less freedom you have in using it, because once you become a slave to technology, you're lost. A slave in the sense of the belief in the truth of technology. Technology, ultimately has to be a too. It is not an end in itself; it is not the content" (20).

Reviewed by Jenny Chang on October 14, 2009.