March 14, 2025 • 57 mins
Neville Brody was told at art school that he had “no commercial potential.” Instead of conforming, he built a career on defying expectations, reshaping graphic design, typography, and branding in the process.
“You can’t be radical in every situation, but you can bring radical thinking into a commercial framework.” (Neville Brody)
From pioneering font design to creating some of the most distinctive record sleeves of the 1980s, Brody’s work has always operated at the intersection of rebellion and mass communication. His radical approach to typography at The Face helped define the look of a generation, blending punk’s raw energy with the emerging aesthetics of postmodernism.
But Brody has never been interested in nostalgia. In 2014, he founded Brody Associates, a creative studio dedicated to rethinking brand identity, design systems, and digital platforms.
A decade later, he continues to push forward, balancing experimental projects with strategic work for clients like Samsung, Coca-Cola, and The Times, while maintaining a deep commitment to questioning the role of design in an increasingly automated world.
In this episode, Brody discusses his influences, his belief in risk-taking, and why he left record sleeve design behind. He reflects on how punk shaped his creative philosophy, the tensions between commerce and radical thinking, and the challenges facing young designers today.
Four decades in, Neville Brody remains as restless as ever, challenging conventions, reshaping industries, and proving that design is not just about aesthetics but ideas, disruption, and the power to change culture.
-
Follow us on Instagram @destroypunkpodcast for the latest updates.
Or visit us online: https://destroypunkpodcast.com for transcripts, show notes, and more.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This episode is sponsored by Boost Mobile.
It's Jason Fuhad from Shits and Geese podcast, and we're here to
talk about Boost Mobile, the newest 5G network in the
country. With compelling deals for new
lines, Boost Mobile makes it easy to switch Today.
Boost Mobile's new network delivers customers the speed and
service that expect from the bigthree, plus groundbreaking
benefits you'd only get from a true challenger in the industry.
(00:23):
These include letting people trythe network risk free for 30
days and offering a $25 per month unlimited plan that's
guaranteed to never go up in price.
They have blazing fast 5G and plans for all the latest
devices. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile
store and find us.online@boostmobile.com.
This cold and flu season, Instacart is here to help
(00:44):
deliver all of your sick day essentials.
Whether you're in prevention mode and need vitamins, hand
sanitizer and that lemon tea your Nana swears by, or you're
in healing mode and need medicine, soup and a lot more
tissues, simply download the Instacart app and get sick day
supplies that reinvigorate or relieve delivered in as fast as
(01:06):
30 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0.00 delivery fees
on your first three orders. Excludes restaurant orders.
Service fees and terms apply. Getting engaged can be
stressful. Getting the right ring won't be.
At bluenile.com. thejewelers@bluenile.com have
sparkled down to a science with beautiful lab grown diamonds
worthy of your most brilliant moments.
(01:27):
Their lab grown diamonds are independently graded and
guaranteed identical to natural diamonds and ready.
To ship to your door, get $50 off your purchase of $500 or
more with codelisten@bluenile.com.
That's bluenile.com code Listen for $50 off.
(01:50):
Content comes and goes so fast, the old adage about today's
newspapers, tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper, That moment is
gone and brains are being rewired to chase these short
term thrills. The reward centre is well, if I
scroll, maybe there's something's better there.
And it almost never is. So you keep scrolling and I
(02:13):
think that a lot of our media experience today is based on
that sugar to feed the reward centers.
So that leaves graphic design ina quite an interesting position.
By the 1980s, England was culturally no longer as drab and
grey as it used to be. Energized by the shock waves of
punk, it was in the art schools of Chelsea St.
(02:34):
Martins, 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 andRough Trade, became the breeding
(02:54):
ground for designers such as Peter Savile, 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.
(03:16):
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 restlessneed to disrupt, redefined the
visual landscape forever, deconstructing type, breaking
the grid, and reshaping the language of design.
(03:37):
My name is Richard Smith, I'm anart director and a film maker,
and I'm your host. Welcome to Destroy.
They are. Pro.
Rockers raw, outrageous and crude.
The new craze, they tell me. More into chaos than anything
else, people really don't understand what kids want.
Worthless, nasty. They're a hero.
(04:00):
Welcome to Destroy, a podcast about how the punk movement of
1976 or the Cultural Revolution still being felt today.
You have to destroy in order to create.
Destroy is produced by B Right Back Studios.
Visit brightbackstudios.com/destroy to
learn more. If you're enjoying the show,
(04:21):
visit our website destroyedpunkpodcast.com to
learn more about every episode, including interview transcripts,
show notes, music videos, curated playlists, and more.
Thank you for listening. Neville Brody is probably one of
the most revered designers of both the 20th and 21st
centuries. After graduating from college,
(04:42):
he chose poverty over a safe joband 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're very busy right
(05:04):
now. You're very busy celebrating 10
years of Brody Associates. That's an amazing achievement.
You must be really proud of that.
Yes, thank you for the invite today, Richard.
Pleasure to see you again. If it wasn't busy, I think we'd
we'd all be worried, but it's finding that sweet spot between
frantic and asleep. I've been running a studio since
in 1979 nineteen 80 and the mostrecent iteration Brody
(05:30):
Associates has been running now 10 amazing years.
We continue to work on amazing projects.
How big is your agency now? It's always been about the same
size, including what we call satellites or associates, where
I've always had the philosophy that if you're too big to have
lunch together, you're too big. That's a good philosophy,
(05:52):
something I was just thinking about, because the work you do
is is very distinct. How much work do you do these
days? There's probably a lot of stuff
that's out there the we've done that you probably didn't know
was us at the same time. And it's not a thing again of
balancing stuff that's much moreexpressive, I guess with stuff
(06:17):
which is much more professional or engineering based.
Well, it's developing much more strategy based systems for
people and I'm pretty hands on in both axes.
On one hand are still doing a lot of personal stuff.
(06:37):
I've just designed a Korean typeface for Unsungxu in South
Korea along with a few other people.
And then at the other end of theextreme we've been working on,
so Shiseido, we did that whole brand of code which is a three
or four year project, the Samsung font which all the
(06:58):
screens and Princeton instructions all use the fonts
that we've designed. So that's system based building
rather than something which is more of a one off.
So yeah, we fluctuate between single statements and and
designer platforms. I think what's really
(07:19):
interesting, building off of what you said, something that
really struck me was that back at college, someone said your
work lack 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
(07:41):
an irony there that you constantly break 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're doing in
subversive in any way? Is that a mindset?
Richard, as you know, graphic design is always a place to
(08:03):
compromise inevitably in some form because we're professionals
for hire of one level and professionals for hire means we
we have clients. And when I was on foundation
course at Haunted College of Art, my tutor then said to me, I
should go into graphic design because I needed a brief to be
(08:27):
set by someone else. Whereas in art you set your own
brief. And he said that my reaction or
response is normally to an external stimuli like a brief.
And that's one of the other reasons I didn't go into
becoming an artist. And the secondly is, I think as
you pointed out, I think art wascertainly at that time was quite
(08:49):
elite and have the pretence of being a democratic folklore
culture that's reflecting mankind or humankind.
But the reality is that it's a business of value and the value
was more or less commercial rather than cultural.
So as a graphic design was a much more honest space.
(09:11):
Graphic designers, they have clients, they have customers.
You can't then be radical in every situation and you have to
find a way to bring thinking, but within a commercial
framework because at the end of the day, if you're doing
something that's outrageously off brief, you will very quickly
(09:32):
be off brief completely. So it's it's finding that
balance. And as you mentioned, when I was
at London College of Printing, the internal tutors failed me at
the end of the the BA the three years and said that I hadn't
followed the course, which is incorrect.
I've responded to every brief, but I just hadn't done it the
(09:55):
way they wanted me to do it. And then 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 Chenko being an
(10:18):
art school and someone saying, well, you have no commercial
potential? I love that you're failed.
You'll 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
(10:41):
culture, and it was everywhere. And actually, ironically, what
led me to this podcast was this idea that design is everywhere.
And I remember going to a graduation show and being like,
oh wow, this is impressive. Kids know how to design.
And when I was at school, nobodyknew what a design was or
graphic design was or. This episode is sponsored by
(11:05):
Boost Mobile. It's Jason Fuhad from Shits and
Goose Podcast, and we're here totalk about Boost Mobile, the
newest 5G network in the country.
With compelling deals for new lines, Boost Mobile makes it
easy to switch Today. Boost Mobile's new network
delivers customers the speed andservice that expect from the big
three, plus groundbreaking benefits you'd only get from a
(11:25):
true challenger in the industry.These include letting people try
the network risk free for 30 days and offering a $25 per
month unlimited plan that's guaranteed to never go up in
price. They have blazing fast 5G and
plans for all the latest devices.
Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store and find
us.online@boostmobile.com. Elevate your everyday drive at
(11:46):
Woodhouse Hyundai. Save up to $6000 off MSRP on the
2025 Hyundai Santa Fe Calligraphy.
And when you shop Woodhouse Hyundai, you can rest easy with
Hyundai's owner insurance. America's Best 10 Year 100,000
Mile Powertrain Limited WarrantyVisit
us.online@woodhousehyundai.com com or Woodhouse Place
hyundai.com today with a group credit, tax, title, license
(12:07):
extra must finance with Hyundai Motor Finance $299 dock fee do
its signing cannot be combined with any other offers.
Offer expires March 31st, 2025 to deliver details.
And somehow schools had managed to teach it, which is wonderful,
but I was always attracted to how unique it was.
(12:28):
I think we used to start the expression and then create
systems out of expression. But the change for me now is
we're mainly designing Adna likea graphic DNA and that might be
a logo, a logo type or an icon or a font or a colour set or an
(12:50):
approach to image direction. So we're creating platforms with
the clients because they're mainly interested in creating
content, right? And that's the big shift.
So when we were doing branding like 30 years ago, it wasn't a
content LED and it was an old fashioned monolithic IBM type
(13:13):
hierarchy where the Supreme being was the brand logo and
everything sat in a hierarchy under that.
Now it's a reverse triangle where actually 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 or
(13:33):
images or stories or user generated content.
And so the opportunity to express is somehow a little bit
out of the mix now because people aren't that interested in
graphic expression. And it's moved from what used to
be graphic art, graphic design, which came about with Dadaism,
(13:54):
Constructivism, Futurism, Bauhaus, etcetera.
And then now we're in the third part of that, which is we're
talking about design engineeringmore than anything.
So design studios tend to be either creating and engineering
the platforms with the DNA, which are really mechanisms then
(14:17):
for carrying and distributing and content.
But content comes and goes so fast.
The old adage about today's newspapers, tomorrow's fish and
chip wrapper, that moment is gone and brains are being
rewired to chase these short term thrills.
(14:38):
The reward centre is, well if I scroll, maybe that something's
better there. And it almost never is.
So you keep scrolling. So we're always chasing the next
better thing. And I think a lot of our media
experience today is based on that.
It's based on sugar to feed the reward centers, this being the
(15:01):
the scrolling. So that leaves graphic design in
a quite an interesting position because you is a shift into
content creation and then AI is moving in very fast into that
space. So it's content prompting rather
than creation. But the majority of brands are
(15:24):
chasing platforms and content. I read in Dizzine Magazine
magazine you said the 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.
That's a bit damning because I think we still do.
We still want to produce good solutions and dynamic engagement
(15:47):
and keep everything moving. But more and more the expression
is stripped away from an instance and becomes part of the
fabric. So more and more brands want the
freedom of a platform and the voice of a typeface.
So if you go to any art school now every designer is doing
(16:09):
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 hasbeen squeezed from all the other
areas, so it all has to go into that.
That. Typeface language.
It's interesting because I studied typography many years
(16:31):
ago and it's an area of design alot 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. But 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
(16:52):
enough risks these days? So at that time I was thinking
of the School of Communication, and from my perspective, the
only reason a student really should be an art school is to
experiment and to take risks andexplore new things.
You can only change the world bychanging the people who will
(17:13):
make the world. So students become really quite
critical in that the process of refreshing, of questioning, of
exploration, of taking risks that might fail because
obviously commerce is averse to to risk taking because the risk
of failure means that they won'tbe able to operate commercially.
(17:35):
But as a student, you should be grabbing that opportunity and
really questioning, coming back to the idea of questioning
everything. And the other side of that is
that how to make something has become so available to everyone,
everywhere in terms of being able to source that knowledge.
(17:56):
And then the role of education shifts because students
themselves can achieve the knowledge, technical knowledge,
but they're not necessarily clear on what to do with that
knowledge. So this is where the tutor role
comes in and it changes. And it used to be that the tutor
was at the top and imparted knowledge.
(18:18):
That was the role of the tutor or teacher that they owned
perspective to bring history in with technology, with making,
with research, etcetera. And then they would impart that
to the students. But that's shifting now because
the student is probably more adept of finding information
(18:39):
more quickly than any of their tutors.
So that role shifts. And actually in a way, it's a
liberation because it means thatthe tutor can then focus on the
more creative, the more strategic and even the more
existential side of communication.
So I think increasingly that's the case, but it's not been
(19:00):
clearly identified as such. And the RCA, that was what I was
trying to to put in place, but the tutor then becomes a guide
rather than a teacher in a sense.
There's a wonderful quote from your recent book, or rather, you
(19:20):
framed it in a in an article perhaps I read, which was that
it was an appeal for drama, expression and exuberance.
It seems what I cherish and takeaway so much about your approach
is this continual sort of push to reinvent.
(19:41):
Are you hoping that people will take it and push the boundaries
of their work? 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, of risk or
(20:04):
exuberance or, or questioning the brief.
And I think coming back to the thing you said about British
design, as a studio, we don't have work in the UK and we
haven't done for a few years. And the only work or other the
great work we get here tends to be for the England football
team. And we did the women's kit with
(20:27):
Nike Channel 4's front, or the BBC website, or the Royal
College of Art branding. I mean, we get that level of
cultural institution, but 95% ofour work is Japan, Korea and the
US But this is quite odd. It's interesting because each of
(20:49):
those examples goes to what A said a minute ago about how your
work is right there and it's being disseminated.
There's so many people now. The living room is now the
gallery that so that's massive. That metaphor really resonated
with me and the work you're doing.
People are seeing and maybe they're not questioning what
(21:10):
they're seeing, but you're putting something in front of
people that's got that heritage to it.
And to me, it's wonderful. You talked about the LCP London
College of Printing and I know you, you got into, let's say,
music designing work for bands through designing posters for
(21:31):
college gigs. I I wanted to get to what
motivated you back then. My foundation year at Hornzie, I
was sat next to someone called Mike Barson and Mike Barson
wrote all of the songs from Madness.
(21:53):
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's 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. And then LCP, the first year was
(22:14):
fairly conventional and then punk really hit me.
I cut my hair off leather jacket.
And then by the third year I wasliving in a squat in Covent
Garden. And the important thing about
punk really was that it said that anything is possible.
Up to that point, I've been heavily influenced by Dardos and
William Burroughs more than anything.
(22:37):
And that they were all about challenging the norm, making it
very clear that normality is just a, a, a construct that it
is put in place to maintain the status quo.
Which means that from Dada's point of view, it's all about
the bourgeoisie. With William Burroughs it's
(22:57):
much, much more about cultural dictatorships and how do we
break that sense of normality. And things like the cut up
technique that really developed with Brian Gison where they
called it the Third Mind becausethey said that you can't just
sit down, imagine something that's never existed before.
(23:20):
So that sort of serendipity of risk taking really embedded
itself in in my work and especially in the third year LCP
and then beyond, which of course, none of the tutors
understood. And one one day the tutor said
to me, oh, I get it now. You do punk graphics, don't you?
(23:44):
As if that's good explained everything.
But the thing that I loved aboutthe punk concept was that
anything is possible and you canrisk and fail and it doesn't
matter if something new will eventually come out of all of
that. I interviewed Stephen Mallander
recently, I know, you know, fromCalgary Voltaire, and he said
(24:05):
that he's not afraid of failure,He's always willing to take
risks and to this day he's stillof that mindset.
There's another headline in the recent book Protests Protect
Disrupt, which made me think of your time at Rocking Russian.
Al McDowell, who was the founderof Rocking Russian, he still
(24:26):
believes we should demolish boundaries, things like that.
How much was that time influential on your thinking?
I think it was all part of a wayof thinking.
I mean, Alan McDowell because I realized that my final year
dissertation, the only purpose of it was really to interview
the people that you wanted to work for.
(24:47):
And because my 30th thesis was on modern magazines for covering
people like Bazooka in Paris, who I think I just still so
incredibly influential. But deep down in the mix there
were big influence and Barney Bubbles, for instance.
And I was just enamoured by their work and their thinking.
(25:10):
And as part of it, there was a magazine called Grabuge, which
is garbage but upside down spellwrong.
And it was put together by Al McDowell, but in collaboration
with Eric Jones, who later did ID magazine.
And Terry introduced Al to to Constructivism.
So there's all of this stuff going on and they're in the
(25:31):
middle of Soho. And I started working for Al
after having interviewed him theday after my show came down.
So one, one minute I was being failed by the LCP and the next
minute I was getting a job. My first day of freedom.
Right. And it was an incredibly intense
period. And I was just coming at this
(25:52):
squatting the whole culture. That was amazing.
Soho was not gentrified, and it was really quite rough and edgy
and exciting in a very differentway to now.
There's no Soho House or shows. It was a very different
scenario. Don't forget this is a time when
(26:12):
the in Britain, the populist right wing was on 12% of the
vote. That was the National Front.
We had the collapse of the Labour government, followed by
the authoritarianism and unfairness of the Thatcher
government. So it was a really mad time.
And then behind all of that was the fact that there was hundreds
(26:34):
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
for a piece of Savile or Designers Republic or Malcolm
(26:56):
Garrett's 23 envelope. So without that, we wouldn't be
having this conversation today. I think you're right.
It's something I believe for a long time, how important record
cover design was, and I think you said it very articulately.
There's a bridge perhaps to a certain extent for many
designers coming from school, being able to respond to that
(27:20):
sense of wanting to change, makea difference and 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 rocking Russian?
I met Rod, who was running Fetish Records, because in the
(27:41):
squat I was in underneath it andthe room underneath mine there
was Living Tom, who was the singer of 23 Skidoo.
So I met 23 Skidoo through the squat and then 23 Skidoo just
signed to Fetish. So I met Rod and at the same
time I'd written to Cabaret Voltaire, a Rough Trade, and
(28:06):
went to meet with them and they liked what I was I was doing and
asked me to do a tour poster, a couple of tour posters for them.
And then out of that came a longterm relationship and it was
very much about just being in the right place at the right
time and 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. And then Rod and Fetish Records
(28:31):
were then also working with Stopping Gristle, Yeah, who also
were very close to Skidoo and Cabaret Voltaire.
So it was a community and there was a number of different ways
into that community. Hi there, sorry for the
interruption, but if you're enjoying the show, please leave
a review or a comment for the latest news and updates.
(28:52):
Make sure to also follow us on Instagram at Destroy Punk
Podcast. Thank you.
And now, back to the show. And we all used to, in the end,
hang out. A lot of us would hang out in
the French House in the middle of Soho, which is the pub on
Dean St. And that was where everyone was.
And it was Nana Cherry and it was Robbie Coltrane and it was
(29:13):
Derek Jarman. And it was.
So there was artists, architects, fashion designers,
musicians, actors, writers, They're all congregating in the
same place and sharing ideas and, and there was a community
of about 200 people or bouncing ideas and and alcohol off each
(29:35):
other. Of course it's changed.
And we were lucky then, because we have fanzines.
Did you do a fanzine ever? Yeah, yeah, I did a couple when
I was an art school. I didn't know that.
We'll hold a photocopier. So everything's been enabled by
technology and by the way we communicate.
(29:56):
It's always been driven by technological change.
Graphic design happened around the time that printing became
more available to people. But also they'd invented half
tone printing, so suddenly you could mass print images.
And that was a very sort of democratization of
(30:18):
communication. And then if you look at the
whole of the 20th century and upto now, it's always been driven
by technological revolutions andnow moving into AI, it's.
The device that's kind of leading the way in many ways for
communication. And each step of of technology
advance the audience. The potential audience grows at
(30:41):
each point exponentially. So now we've reached the point
with mobile and digital platforms where you can reach
billions of people, but the complexity of messaging has
decreased because people have toswipe too quickly and it's only
something that's quite iconic that'll catch someone's eye.
(31:02):
But it's so short and it's so small and it's so limited and
has to make sense. No one's going to watch a 2 hour
video. So my question is really how do
we re embrace complexity and difficulty and difference?
So that that's the big challengeof the day for me.
Maybe elaborate on that a littlebit for me.
(31:23):
That's an interesting statement.Complexity disappeared.
We live in a world that's drivena lot more by entropy now, which
is a big a global brand. Starbucks, for instance, they're
not going to have completely different menus in every country
they go to because it's economically unviolable.
(31:44):
So what they do is make sure that the menus are 90% the same
or 95% the same wherever they gowith a small amount of
localization. But what this is doing is it's
breaking down local complexity and replacing it with global
simplicity. And that process is continuing,
(32:08):
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. And these messages are not
highly complex because in order to appeal to a huge amount of
people, they have to be understood across a lot of
(32:31):
different cultures. So there's a flattening of
complexity and people are afraidto without things that might be
difficult, because if they're difficult, they probably will
attract less attention. And if they're different, then a
(32:51):
lot of people will just swipe past.
So they all end up sharing a little bit of the same communal
DNA. It's almost a truth, perhaps,
that the world is homogenizing in some ways.
There were two things I so you said what around AI.
(33:13):
One was that you thought it was a big issue, but you also said
that it was an exciting time fordesign.
Maybe the two are related that building off of what you were
just talking about. I remember when the Mac arrived,
everyone at that time, especially in graphic design,
said either they said it's irrelevant, it'll go away.
(33:34):
And 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 swiftly becamesomewhere you could publish
from. We thought it was a place to
(33:54):
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 realised it
was a place to receive stuff as well.
(34:17):
So then it became eventually theradio, TV, piano, cinema,
theatre thing that we would eventually live in, that became
shrunk down to the size of a mobile phone at some point.
This episode is sponsored by Boost Mobile.
It's James and Fuhad from Shits and Goose Podcast, and we're
(34:39):
here to talk about Boost Mobile,the newest 5G network in the
country. With compelling deals for new
lines, Boost Mobile makes it easy to switch Today.
Boost Mobile's new network delivers customers the speed and
service that expect from the bigthree, plus groundbreaking
benefits you'd only get from a true challenger in the industry.
These include letting people trythe network risk free for 30
(35:01):
days and offering a $25 per month unlimited plan that's
guaranteed to never go up in price.
They have blazing fast 5G and plans for all the latest
devices. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile
store and find us.online@boostmobile.com.
If you're a parent or share a fridge with someone, Instacart
is about to make grocery shopping so much easier.
(35:23):
Because with Family carts, you can share a cart with your
partner and each add the items you want.
Since between the two of you, odds are you'll both remember
everything you need. And this way you'll never have
to eat milkless cereal again. So minimize the stress of the
weekly shop with family carts. Download the Instacart app and
get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes.
(35:44):
Plus, enjoy $0.00 delivery fees on your first 3 the orders.
Service fees apply for three orders in 14 days.
Excludes restaurants. I think AI will have a similar
journey that at the beginning everyone's saying it's don't
worry, it's just a tool, but I think it's going to be much more
(36:05):
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 it
would be watching stuff someone else had done on a little screen
(36:30):
in our pocket. Someone had said that 30 years
ago you would have laughed at them.
What do you mean you think it will be a massive that you mean
it will be second nature to our lives?
100% it'll play a constant role in every aspect of our lives and
that's an inevitability. It's already making a very
(36:53):
strong statement within all of our technology.
And this happened so fast. A year, two years ago, none of
us would have imagined this. So it's been building up, but it
feels like it's happened overnight.
All the dreams of digital assistants, for instance.
Inevitably it'll become a robotic companion in some form,
(37:16):
even a friend. Who knows or.
Like the film Her? Or even an enemy, which is a bit
scary. And I think inevitably it will
melt with our physical lives in some form.
I think it that's an absolute inevitability where you're
headed. Something you you said that I
(37:36):
thought was interesting in relation to AI was for you what
was interesting about it was thereductive, minimalist, abstract
potential. That's where you saw the
opportunity, at least from what I read.
You said you were saying that it's so sophisticated and it's
all about virtuosity and sharinghow clever it is, and that you
(37:58):
can do sophisticated deep fake content, but it can't do the
subtle touch. I think at the moment it's being
used to produce stuff which feels quite kitsch right now.
And 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 and it is very virtuoso.
(38:22):
People do tend to want to produce quite flamboyant
statements. Look how wonderful this is.
It's sort of Disneyfication of our communication right now.
But then that'll I start mellowing down and I'm looking
to see what underground artists and creators will will make of
(38:44):
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
going to push this to something which glitches.
There's a correlation of sorts with a photocopier or the Xerox
machine as we call it in America.
(39:06):
You were using that in a way to push the boundaries,
particularly at the Face magazine, and it must have been
a very liberating but at the same time time consuming tool.
The face. I started off using Lecturesat
to make headlines. Oh wow.
And then because nearly all my record covers I was doing using
(39:29):
Lecturesat, I was literally setting whole sets of credits on
the back and. God forbid if you made a
mistake. 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 photocopy was that it was an
(39:51):
internal thing to keep a copy, and then suddenly realized,
people realized that if you rampup the copies, you could then
have a cheap home printing system.
Cassette players were the same. People were having cassettes to
record stuff for themselves or record conversations, and then
(40:12):
it quickly became a format for storing, distributing new music.
I'm wondering how AI will followthe same trajectory.
It happened with a personal computer.
It happened with digital photography and digital film
making. It happened with social media,
(40:33):
so I'm really quite fascinated to see what's going to happen
with AI now. What's interesting to me though,
is how punk really was a massiveinfluence and pushed many people
such as yourself and many others, even including myself,
in new directions. And here you are today having a
(40:54):
very successful career of those early days.
It's a long time ago, but it LEDus to where we are in many ways.
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 the Lovers rock, the reggae lovers rock
(41:19):
phenomenon, there was 200 singles being published to set a
Hackney alone every week. And now I still become so
industrialized and controlled. And the same has happened to
media and cultural content. And then something should break
it again. So I think what I'm saying here
is that we need constant vigilance and constant
(41:43):
reinvention and constant questioning because that thing
is something new quickly becomesa pattern.
But at that point we have to break it and and see what new
things come out of it. And I think that needs to be a
lifelong process. Do you think there are there are
anybody challenging culture today?
Probably. I'm probably not aware of it,
(42:04):
and it might not for the first time in a long while, it 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.
(42:24):
Do you do you think there's an inevitability with AI that it
could end in chaos? I think there's an inevitability
that humanity will end in chaos.We're doing a pretty good job of
that right now, packing up the planet whilst increasing plastic
sales or consumerism. We say the right thing, all of
us. We say the right thing.
(42:45):
But then our lifestyles are complicit with with the
destruction of the planet. Mine is yours is even you're
using technology, it's 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.
(43:07):
So there's an inevitable kind ofsigning up to this drive
towards, it's this exciting thrill of blowing the whole
thing up in a way. Then there's wars.
But the problem, the problem that was, is there's always
wars. And actually right now on the
planet, there's less war than they normally is.
(43:31):
But because it's it's so amplified and then the real
dangers and challenges that are happening in the world right now
are in places like Sudan where there's 10s of thousands of
people being pushed over the border this week to avoid
violence and famine. But those don't feature
strongly. So it's very curated.
(43:55):
Are you involved in any kind of activism?
Obviously I'm quite political and I think anyone that works in
communication is by the nature of the industry is political
because communication a tool forpersuasion or instruction no
matter what we say. And so inevitably we're shifting
(44:16):
people's mindsets. So it's a political role no
matter what. And we have two kinds, 2
clients, one is who's paying us and the other is who has to live
with what we we make. I don't tend to be the Super
activist directly. I'm working with a bunch of
musicians and DJs here for a fundraising thing called Artists
(44:40):
for Gaza because there's a lot of strong feeling about the
tragedy of the lives of the everyday Garzans.
Switching topics. Just wondered why you moved away
from doing so many record covers.
I think at the the end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s, up
until then, record covers had been part of the experience of
(45:02):
the music and it had been an extension of the expression of
the music. And that period, looking at
Vaughan Oliver's work and Peter's work and Malcolm and
Designers Republic, etcetera, there was some amazing covers
that came out at that time. I mean, really quite classic
(45:27):
now. Amazing statements that were so
unique then. There was nothing before that
looked like that stuff and in a way nothing since.
And what happened at the end of the 80s was that it became a
shift away from what the music was expressing to expressions
(45:48):
about the musicians themselves. So the shift came and moved
everything towards the art directors being responsible for
choosing makeup, hair stylist for what they were wearing, and
they became more and more like studio portraits.
(46:09):
When I suddenly realized that all I was doing was choosing a
someone to cut someone's hair, Ithought, well, that's it, I'm
out, it's not interesting. And that's it.
And I quit. And at the same time we stopped
getting commissions in music. So music industry itself had
shifted towards creating superstars.
That, that definitely was a big shift in the late 80s and then
(46:31):
into the 90's. The the what's the term
cannibalized. The initiative had cannibalized
itself a little bit. And it was all about creating
stars rather than creating greatmusic.
And I've grown up on bands like Wire and the Pop Group and Ubu
(46:51):
and 23 Skidoo and even Test departments, all of those kind
of 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 callistical training and Flora Saunders in jazz or
(47:13):
underground music like the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop
and and then progressive music like King Crimson.
And then somewhere in there by Nino and Box Music and Robert
Fripp and David Bowie. And so there was this great kind
of swelling of experimental stuff that by the end of the 80s
(47:34):
had become vanity. Right.
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 droppedall of that and decided that
(47:56):
actually it was about commercialism and conforming
etcetera. A minute ago you talked about
how in the world of culture everything has been squeezed out
from the conventional mediums. Then type faces and typography
comes this last bastion of I don't know whether it be
(48:17):
rebellion or change making. 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. And it wasn't about being anti
design at all, but it was about being anti.
(48:41):
What design culture had become, which was what we talked about
was 30 years of success culture where everything was measured in
in numbers. How many likes did you get?
How many tickets did you sell? And there was a 10 day thing
over 10 venues and in East London we had 20,000 people show
(49:01):
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 they just reminded us that we still need
platforms for risk experimentation and failure.
You said in a recent interview that you were morally against
(49:22):
the manipulative of advertising.Instead, you wanted to
manipulate people into querying things that it's obvious that
has stayed with you. I mean, obviously things have
mellowed a little, but the reason I went into graphic
design at the beginning was because I I used to operate with
(49:42):
the idea that design should be used to reveal, not conceal.
And I felt that advertising was very much about trying to
manipulate a response and that actually what we should be doing
in in graphics certainly was using the same tools to raise
(50:03):
awareness and questioning. And certainly the face and
working with music was all aboutthat revelation rather than
manipulation. And out of that, it was
interesting, came the idea that all published work or
(50:24):
communications should be a dialogue.
Northern monologue. The advertising was largely
monologue because it's all aboutpersuasion for a particular
standpoint or outcome, whereas culture should be about
dialogue. So we embraced ambiguity and we
(50:45):
embraced the unfixed possibilities so that when
someone would look at it, it would only make sense when they
decided what it was. So a lot of my early work and
some of the personal work still works around the idea of
fluidity and interpretation and ambiguity.
(51:06):
Adrian Shaughnessy described your work as structured chaos,
which I thought was a beautiful statement and.
And chaotic structure which is also.
I suppose, right? And how you know how you've
always been passionate about randomness and chance.
It seems that that Dada is William Burroughs mentality is
(51:29):
still with you. 100% I was goingto say, you can't bring that to
every project. That's that thing.
Again, the real world of graphicdesign is that you still have
clients and some of those are quite clear about what they're
looking for, some are much more exploratory, and some of you can
(51:50):
partner in creating very new thoughts and new ideas.
We're not artists, we're we're graphic designers and we take
our opportunities where we can to, to do stuff that's a bit
more edgy or dangerous and unexpected.
And at the same time, we need toservice and do hopefully great
design work for those clients that can help support the rest
(52:11):
of that by by commissioning. And 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. I do have a bunch of other
(52:32):
questions, but that's something I'm really curious about because
it's become a bit of an urban myth maybe.
Is that you did a cover for Cabaret Voltaire for free or you
offered to do it for free? No, I don't know, probably.
I mean, I did the 22 posters forfree.
I remember right in the background.
(52:52):
I used to do a lot of support design work for hypnosis.
And actually, a cover that I've never shown anyone is I designed
the cover for Pink Floyd's greatest hits and also for the
official biography of Barry Manilow at the time.
That's brilliant. I love it.
(53:12):
That's a great way to end. So yeah, you know, we all have
to compromise somewhere. You're 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. Great chatting, I appreciate
your time. Thank you so much, Richard.
Really good to see you again andgood luck.
(53:36):
Take care. Bye bye.
My name is Richard Smith and I'myour host.
I'm a filmmaker and art directorand Once Upon a time I was part
of the big 80s. I designed record covers for
Depeche Mode. I danced with Bono, discussed
art with Mick Jagger and drank tea with Susie Sue.
I also grew up during those turbulent times in England in
(53:57):
the late 70s and was driven by the do it Yourself ethos with
punk. I obsessed over bands like Joy
Division and New Order and went on to work for the album cover
designer Peter Savile. I believe that year, that moment
in 1976 when a bunch of foul mouthed jobs cursed and swore on
national television, changed thefuture of culture forever and is
what brought us to where we are today.
(54:19):
So where do we go from here? Will emerging new technologies
be the catalyst that tears down the walls of mediocrity,
throwing culture and society into chaos and revolution again?
We'll have to wait and see. This has been another episode of
Destroy. Thank you for listening
destroyistheberightbackstudiosproductionlearnmore@berightbackstudios.comand please tune in again for
(54:42):
another episode of Destroy the Influence of Punk podcast
wherever you listen or download.This episode is sponsored by
Boost Mobile. It's Jason Fuhad from Shits and
Goose Podcast, and we're here totalk about Boost Mobile, the
newest 5G network in the country.
With compelling deals for new lines, Boost Mobile makes it
(55:03):
easy to switch Today. Boost Mobile's new network
delivers customers the speed andservice that expect from the big
three, plus groundbreaking benefits you'd only get from a
true challenger in the industry.These include letting people try
the network risk free for 30 days and offering a $25 per
month unlimited plan that's guaranteed to never go up in
(55:24):
price. They have blazing fast 5G and
plans for all the latest devices.
Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store and find
us.online@boostmobile.com. There's one thing that will
forever change the way you sleep, and it's the softest 100%
organic cotton sheets from Bowlin Branch.
You'll fall asleep faster wrapped in the most luxurious
comfort. You'll never sleep hot again
(55:46):
with sheets that feel breathableto sleep in.
You'll experience the purest softness on night 1 and feel
your sheets get even softer withevery wash.
Discover the difference with 15%off your first set of sheets at
bowlinbranch.com with code BUTTERY exclusions apply.
See Sight for details. Acast powers the world's best
(56:09):
podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
How long was the original directors cut of the substance
it took how many days to shoot the sandworms in Dune Part 1 and
2? And why did Brighton Beach
become the location of this year's Best Picture winner,
Anora? Hi, I'm Daniela Teflin Nunberg
(56:29):
and I host Hollywood Gold, a podcast where I interview film
makers about their iconic films.Listen every Wednesday as we
uncover untold stories and fascinating trivia from this
year's Oscar nominees and other legendary movies like Apocalypse
Now, Scream, and The Devil WearsPrada.
All of a sudden I see Harvey Weinstein.
Marching towards me is over the table.
(56:51):
He grabs me by the collar. Oh my God.
Subscribe to Hollywood Gold wherever you get your podcasts.
Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their
podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.
This episode is sponsored by Boost Mobile.
It's Jason Fuhad from Shits and Geese podcast, and we're here to
talk about Boost Mobile, the newest 5G network in the
country. With compelling deals for new
lines, Boost Mobile makes it easy to switch Today.
Boost Mobile's new network delivers customers the speed and
service that expect from the bigthree, plus groundbreaking
benefits you'd only get from a true challenger in the industry.
(00:23):
These include letting people trythe network risk free for 30
days and offering a $25 per month unlimited plan that's
guaranteed to never go up in price.
They have blazing fast 5G and plans for all the latest
devices. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile
store and find us.online@boostmobile.com.
This cold and flu season, Instacart is here to help
(00:44):
deliver all of your sick day essentials.
Whether you're in prevention mode and need vitamins, hand
sanitizer and that lemon tea your Nana swears by, or you're
in healing mode and need medicine, soup and a lot more
tissues, simply download the Instacart app and get sick day
supplies that reinvigorate or relieve delivered in as fast as
(01:06):
30 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0.00 delivery fees
on your first three orders. Excludes restaurant orders.
Service fees and terms apply. Getting engaged can be
stressful. Getting the right ring won't be.
At bluenile.com. thejewelers@bluenile.com have
sparkled down to a science with beautiful lab grown diamonds
worthy of your most brilliant moments.
(01:27):
Their lab grown diamonds are independently graded and
guaranteed identical to natural diamonds and ready.
To ship to your door, get $50 off your purchase of $500 or
more with codelisten@bluenile.com.
That's bluenile.com code Listen for $50 off.
(01:50):
Content comes and goes so fast, the old adage about today's
newspapers, tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper, That moment is
gone and brains are being rewired to chase these short
term thrills. The reward centre is well, if I
scroll, maybe there's something's better there.
And it almost never is. So you keep scrolling and I
(02:13):
think that a lot of our media experience today is based on
that sugar to feed the reward centers.
So that leaves graphic design ina quite an interesting position.
By the 1980s, England was culturally no longer as drab and
grey as it used to be. Energized by the shock waves of
punk, it was in the art schools of Chelsea St.
(02:34):
Martins, 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 andRough Trade, became the breeding
(02:54):
ground for designers such as Peter Savile, 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.
(03:16):
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 restlessneed to disrupt, redefined the
visual landscape forever, deconstructing type, breaking
the grid, and reshaping the language of design.
(03:37):
My name is Richard Smith, I'm anart director and a film maker,
and I'm your host. Welcome to Destroy.
They are. Pro.
Rockers raw, outrageous and crude.
The new craze, they tell me. More into chaos than anything
else, people really don't understand what kids want.
Worthless, nasty. They're a hero.
(04:00):
Welcome to Destroy, a podcast about how the punk movement of
1976 or the Cultural Revolution still being felt today.
You have to destroy in order to create.
Destroy is produced by B Right Back Studios.
Visit brightbackstudios.com/destroy to
learn more. If you're enjoying the show,
(04:21):
visit our website destroyedpunkpodcast.com to
learn more about every episode, including interview transcripts,
show notes, music videos, curated playlists, and more.
Thank you for listening. Neville Brody is probably one of
the most revered designers of both the 20th and 21st
centuries. After graduating from college,
(04:42):
he chose poverty over a safe joband 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're very busy right
(05:04):
now. You're very busy celebrating 10
years of Brody Associates. That's an amazing achievement.
You must be really proud of that.
Yes, thank you for the invite today, Richard.
Pleasure to see you again. If it wasn't busy, I think we'd
we'd all be worried, but it's finding that sweet spot between
frantic and asleep. I've been running a studio since
in 1979 nineteen 80 and the mostrecent iteration Brody
(05:30):
Associates has been running now 10 amazing years.
We continue to work on amazing projects.
How big is your agency now? It's always been about the same
size, including what we call satellites or associates, where
I've always had the philosophy that if you're too big to have
lunch together, you're too big. That's a good philosophy,
(05:52):
something I was just thinking about, because the work you do
is is very distinct. How much work do you do these
days? There's probably a lot of stuff
that's out there the we've done that you probably didn't know
was us at the same time. And it's not a thing again of
balancing stuff that's much moreexpressive, I guess with stuff
(06:17):
which is much more professional or engineering based.
Well, it's developing much more strategy based systems for
people and I'm pretty hands on in both axes.
On one hand are still doing a lot of personal stuff.
(06:37):
I've just designed a Korean typeface for Unsungxu in South
Korea along with a few other people.
And then at the other end of theextreme we've been working on,
so Shiseido, we did that whole brand of code which is a three
or four year project, the Samsung font which all the
(06:58):
screens and Princeton instructions all use the fonts
that we've designed. So that's system based building
rather than something which is more of a one off.
So yeah, we fluctuate between single statements and and
designer platforms. I think what's really
(07:19):
interesting, building off of what you said, something that
really struck me was that back at college, someone said your
work lack 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
(07:41):
an irony there that you constantly break 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're doing in
subversive in any way? Is that a mindset?
Richard, as you know, graphic design is always a place to
(08:03):
compromise inevitably in some form because we're professionals
for hire of one level and professionals for hire means we
we have clients. And when I was on foundation
course at Haunted College of Art, my tutor then said to me, I
should go into graphic design because I needed a brief to be
(08:27):
set by someone else. Whereas in art you set your own
brief. And he said that my reaction or
response is normally to an external stimuli like a brief.
And that's one of the other reasons I didn't go into
becoming an artist. And the secondly is, I think as
you pointed out, I think art wascertainly at that time was quite
(08:49):
elite and have the pretence of being a democratic folklore
culture that's reflecting mankind or humankind.
But the reality is that it's a business of value and the value
was more or less commercial rather than cultural.
So as a graphic design was a much more honest space.
(09:11):
Graphic designers, they have clients, they have customers.
You can't then be radical in every situation and you have to
find a way to bring thinking, but within a commercial
framework because at the end of the day, if you're doing
something that's outrageously off brief, you will very quickly
(09:32):
be off brief completely. So it's it's finding that
balance. And as you mentioned, when I was
at London College of Printing, the internal tutors failed me at
the end of the the BA the three years and said that I hadn't
followed the course, which is incorrect.
I've responded to every brief, but I just hadn't done it the
(09:55):
way they wanted me to do it. And then 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 Chenko being an
(10:18):
art school and someone saying, well, you have no commercial
potential? I love that you're failed.
You'll 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
(10:41):
culture, and it was everywhere. And actually, ironically, what
led me to this podcast was this idea that design is everywhere.
And I remember going to a graduation show and being like,
oh wow, this is impressive. Kids know how to design.
And when I was at school, nobodyknew what a design was or
graphic design was or. This episode is sponsored by
(11:05):
Boost Mobile. It's Jason Fuhad from Shits and
Goose Podcast, and we're here totalk about Boost Mobile, the
newest 5G network in the country.
With compelling deals for new lines, Boost Mobile makes it
easy to switch Today. Boost Mobile's new network
delivers customers the speed andservice that expect from the big
three, plus groundbreaking benefits you'd only get from a
(11:25):
true challenger in the industry.These include letting people try
the network risk free for 30 days and offering a $25 per
month unlimited plan that's guaranteed to never go up in
price. They have blazing fast 5G and
plans for all the latest devices.
Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store and find
us.online@boostmobile.com. Elevate your everyday drive at
(11:46):
Woodhouse Hyundai. Save up to $6000 off MSRP on the
2025 Hyundai Santa Fe Calligraphy.
And when you shop Woodhouse Hyundai, you can rest easy with
Hyundai's owner insurance. America's Best 10 Year 100,000
Mile Powertrain Limited WarrantyVisit
us.online@woodhousehyundai.com com or Woodhouse Place
hyundai.com today with a group credit, tax, title, license
(12:07):
extra must finance with Hyundai Motor Finance $299 dock fee do
its signing cannot be combined with any other offers.
Offer expires March 31st, 2025 to deliver details.
And somehow schools had managed to teach it, which is wonderful,
but I was always attracted to how unique it was.
(12:28):
I think we used to start the expression and then create
systems out of expression. But the change for me now is
we're mainly designing Adna likea graphic DNA and that might be
a logo, a logo type or an icon or a font or a colour set or an
(12:50):
approach to image direction. So we're creating platforms with
the clients because they're mainly interested in creating
content, right? And that's the big shift.
So when we were doing branding like 30 years ago, it wasn't a
content LED and it was an old fashioned monolithic IBM type
(13:13):
hierarchy where the Supreme being was the brand logo and
everything sat in a hierarchy under that.
Now it's a reverse triangle where actually 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 or
(13:33):
images or stories or user generated content.
And so the opportunity to express is somehow a little bit
out of the mix now because people aren't that interested in
graphic expression. And it's moved from what used to
be graphic art, graphic design, which came about with Dadaism,
(13:54):
Constructivism, Futurism, Bauhaus, etcetera.
And then now we're in the third part of that, which is we're
talking about design engineeringmore than anything.
So design studios tend to be either creating and engineering
the platforms with the DNA, which are really mechanisms then
(14:17):
for carrying and distributing and content.
But content comes and goes so fast.
The old adage about today's newspapers, tomorrow's fish and
chip wrapper, that moment is gone and brains are being
rewired to chase these short term thrills.
(14:38):
The reward centre is, well if I scroll, maybe that something's
better there. And it almost never is.
So you keep scrolling. So we're always chasing the next
better thing. And I think a lot of our media
experience today is based on that.
It's based on sugar to feed the reward centers, this being the
(15:01):
the scrolling. So that leaves graphic design in
a quite an interesting position because you is a shift into
content creation and then AI is moving in very fast into that
space. So it's content prompting rather
than creation. But the majority of brands are
(15:24):
chasing platforms and content. I read in Dizzine Magazine
magazine you said the 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.
That's a bit damning because I think we still do.
We still want to produce good solutions and dynamic engagement
(15:47):
and keep everything moving. But more and more the expression
is stripped away from an instance and becomes part of the
fabric. So more and more brands want the
freedom of a platform and the voice of a typeface.
So if you go to any art school now every designer is doing
(16:09):
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 hasbeen squeezed from all the other
areas, so it all has to go into that.
That. Typeface language.
It's interesting because I studied typography many years
(16:31):
ago and it's an area of design alot 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. But 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
(16:52):
enough risks these days? So at that time I was thinking
of the School of Communication, and from my perspective, the
only reason a student really should be an art school is to
experiment and to take risks andexplore new things.
You can only change the world bychanging the people who will
(17:13):
make the world. So students become really quite
critical in that the process of refreshing, of questioning, of
exploration, of taking risks that might fail because
obviously commerce is averse to to risk taking because the risk
of failure means that they won'tbe able to operate commercially.
(17:35):
But as a student, you should be grabbing that opportunity and
really questioning, coming back to the idea of questioning
everything. And the other side of that is
that how to make something has become so available to everyone,
everywhere in terms of being able to source that knowledge.
(17:56):
And then the role of education shifts because students
themselves can achieve the knowledge, technical knowledge,
but they're not necessarily clear on what to do with that
knowledge. So this is where the tutor role
comes in and it changes. And it used to be that the tutor
was at the top and imparted knowledge.
(18:18):
That was the role of the tutor or teacher that they owned
perspective to bring history in with technology, with making,
with research, etcetera. And then they would impart that
to the students. But that's shifting now because
the student is probably more adept of finding information
(18:39):
more quickly than any of their tutors.
So that role shifts. And actually in a way, it's a
liberation because it means thatthe tutor can then focus on the
more creative, the more strategic and even the more
existential side of communication.
So I think increasingly that's the case, but it's not been
(19:00):
clearly identified as such. And the RCA, that was what I was
trying to to put in place, but the tutor then becomes a guide
rather than a teacher in a sense.
There's a wonderful quote from your recent book, or rather, you
(19:20):
framed it in a in an article perhaps I read, which was that
it was an appeal for drama, expression and exuberance.
It seems what I cherish and takeaway so much about your approach
is this continual sort of push to reinvent.
(19:41):
Are you hoping that people will take it and push the boundaries
of their work? 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, of risk or
(20:04):
exuberance or, or questioning the brief.
And I think coming back to the thing you said about British
design, as a studio, we don't have work in the UK and we
haven't done for a few years. And the only work or other the
great work we get here tends to be for the England football
team. And we did the women's kit with
(20:27):
Nike Channel 4's front, or the BBC website, or the Royal
College of Art branding. I mean, we get that level of
cultural institution, but 95% ofour work is Japan, Korea and the
US But this is quite odd. It's interesting because each of
(20:49):
those examples goes to what A said a minute ago about how your
work is right there and it's being disseminated.
There's so many people now. The living room is now the
gallery that so that's massive. That metaphor really resonated
with me and the work you're doing.
People are seeing and maybe they're not questioning what
(21:10):
they're seeing, but you're putting something in front of
people that's got that heritage to it.
And to me, it's wonderful. You talked about the LCP London
College of Printing and I know you, you got into, let's say,
music designing work for bands through designing posters for
(21:31):
college gigs. I I wanted to get to what
motivated you back then. My foundation year at Hornzie, I
was sat next to someone called Mike Barson and Mike Barson
wrote all of the songs from Madness.
(21:53):
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's 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. And then LCP, the first year was
(22:14):
fairly conventional and then punk really hit me.
I cut my hair off leather jacket.
And then by the third year I wasliving in a squat in Covent
Garden. And the important thing about
punk really was that it said that anything is possible.
Up to that point, I've been heavily influenced by Dardos and
William Burroughs more than anything.
(22:37):
And that they were all about challenging the norm, making it
very clear that normality is just a, a, a construct that it
is put in place to maintain the status quo.
Which means that from Dada's point of view, it's all about
the bourgeoisie. With William Burroughs it's
(22:57):
much, much more about cultural dictatorships and how do we
break that sense of normality. And things like the cut up
technique that really developed with Brian Gison where they
called it the Third Mind becausethey said that you can't just
sit down, imagine something that's never existed before.
(23:20):
So that sort of serendipity of risk taking really embedded
itself in in my work and especially in the third year LCP
and then beyond, which of course, none of the tutors
understood. And one one day the tutor said
to me, oh, I get it now. You do punk graphics, don't you?
(23:44):
As if that's good explained everything.
But the thing that I loved aboutthe punk concept was that
anything is possible and you canrisk and fail and it doesn't
matter if something new will eventually come out of all of
that. I interviewed Stephen Mallander
recently, I know, you know, fromCalgary Voltaire, and he said
(24:05):
that he's not afraid of failure,He's always willing to take
risks and to this day he's stillof that mindset.
There's another headline in the recent book Protests Protect
Disrupt, which made me think of your time at Rocking Russian.
Al McDowell, who was the founderof Rocking Russian, he still
(24:26):
believes we should demolish boundaries, things like that.
How much was that time influential on your thinking?
I think it was all part of a wayof thinking.
I mean, Alan McDowell because I realized that my final year
dissertation, the only purpose of it was really to interview
the people that you wanted to work for.
(24:47):
And because my 30th thesis was on modern magazines for covering
people like Bazooka in Paris, who I think I just still so
incredibly influential. But deep down in the mix there
were big influence and Barney Bubbles, for instance.
And I was just enamoured by their work and their thinking.
(25:10):
And as part of it, there was a magazine called Grabuge, which
is garbage but upside down spellwrong.
And it was put together by Al McDowell, but in collaboration
with Eric Jones, who later did ID magazine.
And Terry introduced Al to to Constructivism.
So there's all of this stuff going on and they're in the
(25:31):
middle of Soho. And I started working for Al
after having interviewed him theday after my show came down.
So one, one minute I was being failed by the LCP and the next
minute I was getting a job. My first day of freedom.
Right. And it was an incredibly intense
period. And I was just coming at this
(25:52):
squatting the whole culture. That was amazing.
Soho was not gentrified, and it was really quite rough and edgy
and exciting in a very differentway to now.
There's no Soho House or shows. It was a very different
scenario. Don't forget this is a time when
(26:12):
the in Britain, the populist right wing was on 12% of the
vote. That was the National Front.
We had the collapse of the Labour government, followed by
the authoritarianism and unfairness of the Thatcher
government. So it was a really mad time.
And then behind all of that was the fact that there was hundreds
(26:34):
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
for a piece of Savile or Designers Republic or Malcolm
(26:56):
Garrett's 23 envelope. So without that, we wouldn't be
having this conversation today. I think you're right.
It's something I believe for a long time, how important record
cover design was, and I think you said it very articulately.
There's a bridge perhaps to a certain extent for many
designers coming from school, being able to respond to that
(27:20):
sense of wanting to change, makea difference and 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 rocking Russian?
I met Rod, who was running Fetish Records, because in the
(27:41):
squat I was in underneath it andthe room underneath mine there
was Living Tom, who was the singer of 23 Skidoo.
So I met 23 Skidoo through the squat and then 23 Skidoo just
signed to Fetish. So I met Rod and at the same
time I'd written to Cabaret Voltaire, a Rough Trade, and
(28:06):
went to meet with them and they liked what I was I was doing and
asked me to do a tour poster, a couple of tour posters for them.
And then out of that came a longterm relationship and it was
very much about just being in the right place at the right
time and 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. And then Rod and Fetish Records
(28:31):
were then also working with Stopping Gristle, Yeah, who also
were very close to Skidoo and Cabaret Voltaire.
So it was a community and there was a number of different ways
into that community. Hi there, sorry for the
interruption, but if you're enjoying the show, please leave
a review or a comment for the latest news and updates.
(28:52):
Make sure to also follow us on Instagram at Destroy Punk
Podcast. Thank you.
And now, back to the show. And we all used to, in the end,
hang out. A lot of us would hang out in
the French House in the middle of Soho, which is the pub on
Dean St. And that was where everyone was.
And it was Nana Cherry and it was Robbie Coltrane and it was
(29:13):
Derek Jarman. And it was.
So there was artists, architects, fashion designers,
musicians, actors, writers, They're all congregating in the
same place and sharing ideas and, and there was a community
of about 200 people or bouncing ideas and and alcohol off each
(29:35):
other. Of course it's changed.
And we were lucky then, because we have fanzines.
Did you do a fanzine ever? Yeah, yeah, I did a couple when
I was an art school. I didn't know that.
We'll hold a photocopier. So everything's been enabled by
technology and by the way we communicate.
(29:56):
It's always been driven by technological change.
Graphic design happened around the time that printing became
more available to people. But also they'd invented half
tone printing, so suddenly you could mass print images.
And that was a very sort of democratization of
(30:18):
communication. And then if you look at the
whole of the 20th century and upto now, it's always been driven
by technological revolutions andnow moving into AI, it's.
The device that's kind of leading the way in many ways for
communication. And each step of of technology
advance the audience. The potential audience grows at
(30:41):
each point exponentially. So now we've reached the point
with mobile and digital platforms where you can reach
billions of people, but the complexity of messaging has
decreased because people have toswipe too quickly and it's only
something that's quite iconic that'll catch someone's eye.
(31:02):
But it's so short and it's so small and it's so limited and
has to make sense. No one's going to watch a 2 hour
video. So my question is really how do
we re embrace complexity and difficulty and difference?
So that that's the big challengeof the day for me.
Maybe elaborate on that a littlebit for me.
(31:23):
That's an interesting statement.Complexity disappeared.
We live in a world that's drivena lot more by entropy now, which
is a big a global brand. Starbucks, for instance, they're
not going to have completely different menus in every country
they go to because it's economically unviolable.
(31:44):
So what they do is make sure that the menus are 90% the same
or 95% the same wherever they gowith a small amount of
localization. But what this is doing is it's
breaking down local complexity and replacing it with global
simplicity. And that process is continuing,
(32:08):
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. And these messages are not
highly complex because in order to appeal to a huge amount of
people, they have to be understood across a lot of
(32:31):
different cultures. So there's a flattening of
complexity and people are afraidto without things that might be
difficult, because if they're difficult, they probably will
attract less attention. And if they're different, then a
(32:51):
lot of people will just swipe past.
So they all end up sharing a little bit of the same communal
DNA. It's almost a truth, perhaps,
that the world is homogenizing in some ways.
There were two things I so you said what around AI.
(33:13):
One was that you thought it was a big issue, but you also said
that it was an exciting time fordesign.
Maybe the two are related that building off of what you were
just talking about. I remember when the Mac arrived,
everyone at that time, especially in graphic design,
said either they said it's irrelevant, it'll go away.
(33:34):
And 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 swiftly becamesomewhere you could publish
from. We thought it was a place to
(33:54):
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 realised it
was a place to receive stuff as well.
(34:17):
So then it became eventually theradio, TV, piano, cinema,
theatre thing that we would eventually live in, that became
shrunk down to the size of a mobile phone at some point.
This episode is sponsored by Boost Mobile.
It's James and Fuhad from Shits and Goose Podcast, and we're
(34:39):
here to talk about Boost Mobile,the newest 5G network in the
country. With compelling deals for new
lines, Boost Mobile makes it easy to switch Today.
Boost Mobile's new network delivers customers the speed and
service that expect from the bigthree, plus groundbreaking
benefits you'd only get from a true challenger in the industry.
These include letting people trythe network risk free for 30
(35:01):
days and offering a $25 per month unlimited plan that's
guaranteed to never go up in price.
They have blazing fast 5G and plans for all the latest
devices. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile
store and find us.online@boostmobile.com.
If you're a parent or share a fridge with someone, Instacart
is about to make grocery shopping so much easier.
(35:23):
Because with Family carts, you can share a cart with your
partner and each add the items you want.
Since between the two of you, odds are you'll both remember
everything you need. And this way you'll never have
to eat milkless cereal again. So minimize the stress of the
weekly shop with family carts. Download the Instacart app and
get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes.
(35:44):
Plus, enjoy $0.00 delivery fees on your first 3 the orders.
Service fees apply for three orders in 14 days.
Excludes restaurants. I think AI will have a similar
journey that at the beginning everyone's saying it's don't
worry, it's just a tool, but I think it's going to be much more
(36:05):
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 it
would be watching stuff someone else had done on a little screen
(36:30):
in our pocket. Someone had said that 30 years
ago you would have laughed at them.
What do you mean you think it will be a massive that you mean
it will be second nature to our lives?
100% it'll play a constant role in every aspect of our lives and
that's an inevitability. It's already making a very
(36:53):
strong statement within all of our technology.
And this happened so fast. A year, two years ago, none of
us would have imagined this. So it's been building up, but it
feels like it's happened overnight.
All the dreams of digital assistants, for instance.
Inevitably it'll become a robotic companion in some form,
(37:16):
even a friend. Who knows or.
Like the film Her? Or even an enemy, which is a bit
scary. And I think inevitably it will
melt with our physical lives in some form.
I think it that's an absolute inevitability where you're
headed. Something you you said that I
(37:36):
thought was interesting in relation to AI was for you what
was interesting about it was thereductive, minimalist, abstract
potential. That's where you saw the
opportunity, at least from what I read.
You said you were saying that it's so sophisticated and it's
all about virtuosity and sharinghow clever it is, and that you
(37:58):
can do sophisticated deep fake content, but it can't do the
subtle touch. I think at the moment it's being
used to produce stuff which feels quite kitsch right now.
And 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 and it is very virtuoso.
(38:22):
People do tend to want to produce quite flamboyant
statements. Look how wonderful this is.
It's sort of Disneyfication of our communication right now.
But then that'll I start mellowing down and I'm looking
to see what underground artists and creators will will make of
(38:44):
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
going to push this to something which glitches.
There's a correlation of sorts with a photocopier or the Xerox
machine as we call it in America.
(39:06):
You were using that in a way to push the boundaries,
particularly at the Face magazine, and it must have been
a very liberating but at the same time time consuming tool.
The face. I started off using Lecturesat
to make headlines. Oh wow.
And then because nearly all my record covers I was doing using
(39:29):
Lecturesat, I was literally setting whole sets of credits on
the back and. God forbid if you made a
mistake. 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 photocopy was that it was an
(39:51):
internal thing to keep a copy, and then suddenly realized,
people realized that if you rampup the copies, you could then
have a cheap home printing system.
Cassette players were the same. People were having cassettes to
record stuff for themselves or record conversations, and then
(40:12):
it quickly became a format for storing, distributing new music.
I'm wondering how AI will followthe same trajectory.
It happened with a personal computer.
It happened with digital photography and digital film
making. It happened with social media,
(40:33):
so I'm really quite fascinated to see what's going to happen
with AI now. What's interesting to me though,
is how punk really was a massiveinfluence and pushed many people
such as yourself and many others, even including myself,
in new directions. And here you are today having a
(40:54):
very successful career of those early days.
It's a long time ago, but it LEDus to where we are in many ways.
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 the Lovers rock, the reggae lovers rock
(41:19):
phenomenon, there was 200 singles being published to set a
Hackney alone every week. And now I still become so
industrialized and controlled. And the same has happened to
media and cultural content. And then something should break
it again. So I think what I'm saying here
is that we need constant vigilance and constant
(41:43):
reinvention and constant questioning because that thing
is something new quickly becomesa pattern.
But at that point we have to break it and and see what new
things come out of it. And I think that needs to be a
lifelong process. Do you think there are there are
anybody challenging culture today?
Probably. I'm probably not aware of it,
(42:04):
and it might not for the first time in a long while, it 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.
(42:24):
Do you do you think there's an inevitability with AI that it
could end in chaos? I think there's an inevitability
that humanity will end in chaos.We're doing a pretty good job of
that right now, packing up the planet whilst increasing plastic
sales or consumerism. We say the right thing, all of
us. We say the right thing.
(42:45):
But then our lifestyles are complicit with with the
destruction of the planet. Mine is yours is even you're
using technology, it's 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.
(43:07):
So there's an inevitable kind ofsigning up to this drive
towards, it's this exciting thrill of blowing the whole
thing up in a way. Then there's wars.
But the problem, the problem that was, is there's always
wars. And actually right now on the
planet, there's less war than they normally is.
(43:31):
But because it's it's so amplified and then the real
dangers and challenges that are happening in the world right now
are in places like Sudan where there's 10s of thousands of
people being pushed over the border this week to avoid
violence and famine. But those don't feature
strongly. So it's very curated.
(43:55):
Are you involved in any kind of activism?
Obviously I'm quite political and I think anyone that works in
communication is by the nature of the industry is political
because communication a tool forpersuasion or instruction no
matter what we say. And so inevitably we're shifting
(44:16):
people's mindsets. So it's a political role no
matter what. And we have two kinds, 2
clients, one is who's paying us and the other is who has to live
with what we we make. I don't tend to be the Super
activist directly. I'm working with a bunch of
musicians and DJs here for a fundraising thing called Artists
(44:40):
for Gaza because there's a lot of strong feeling about the
tragedy of the lives of the everyday Garzans.
Switching topics. Just wondered why you moved away
from doing so many record covers.
I think at the the end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s, up
until then, record covers had been part of the experience of
(45:02):
the music and it had been an extension of the expression of
the music. And that period, looking at
Vaughan Oliver's work and Peter's work and Malcolm and
Designers Republic, etcetera, there was some amazing covers
that came out at that time. I mean, really quite classic
(45:27):
now. Amazing statements that were so
unique then. There was nothing before that
looked like that stuff and in a way nothing since.
And what happened at the end of the 80s was that it became a
shift away from what the music was expressing to expressions
(45:48):
about the musicians themselves. So the shift came and moved
everything towards the art directors being responsible for
choosing makeup, hair stylist for what they were wearing, and
they became more and more like studio portraits.
(46:09):
When I suddenly realized that all I was doing was choosing a
someone to cut someone's hair, Ithought, well, that's it, I'm
out, it's not interesting. And that's it.
And I quit. And at the same time we stopped
getting commissions in music. So music industry itself had
shifted towards creating superstars.
That, that definitely was a big shift in the late 80s and then
(46:31):
into the 90's. The the what's the term
cannibalized. The initiative had cannibalized
itself a little bit. And it was all about creating
stars rather than creating greatmusic.
And I've grown up on bands like Wire and the Pop Group and Ubu
(46:51):
and 23 Skidoo and even Test departments, all of those kind
of 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 callistical training and Flora Saunders in jazz or
(47:13):
underground music like the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop
and and then progressive music like King Crimson.
And then somewhere in there by Nino and Box Music and Robert
Fripp and David Bowie. And so there was this great kind
of swelling of experimental stuff that by the end of the 80s
(47:34):
had become vanity. Right.
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 droppedall of that and decided that
(47:56):
actually it was about commercialism and conforming
etcetera. A minute ago you talked about
how in the world of culture everything has been squeezed out
from the conventional mediums. Then type faces and typography
comes this last bastion of I don't know whether it be
(48:17):
rebellion or change making. 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. And it wasn't about being anti
design at all, but it was about being anti.
(48:41):
What design culture had become, which was what we talked about
was 30 years of success culture where everything was measured in
in numbers. How many likes did you get?
How many tickets did you sell? And there was a 10 day thing
over 10 venues and in East London we had 20,000 people show
(49:01):
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 they just reminded us that we still need
platforms for risk experimentation and failure.
You said in a recent interview that you were morally against
(49:22):
the manipulative of advertising.Instead, you wanted to
manipulate people into querying things that it's obvious that
has stayed with you. I mean, obviously things have
mellowed a little, but the reason I went into graphic
design at the beginning was because I I used to operate with
(49:42):
the idea that design should be used to reveal, not conceal.
And I felt that advertising was very much about trying to
manipulate a response and that actually what we should be doing
in in graphics certainly was using the same tools to raise
(50:03):
awareness and questioning. And certainly the face and
working with music was all aboutthat revelation rather than
manipulation. And out of that, it was
interesting, came the idea that all published work or
(50:24):
communications should be a dialogue.
Northern monologue. The advertising was largely
monologue because it's all aboutpersuasion for a particular
standpoint or outcome, whereas culture should be about
dialogue. So we embraced ambiguity and we
(50:45):
embraced the unfixed possibilities so that when
someone would look at it, it would only make sense when they
decided what it was. So a lot of my early work and
some of the personal work still works around the idea of
fluidity and interpretation and ambiguity.
(51:06):
Adrian Shaughnessy described your work as structured chaos,
which I thought was a beautiful statement and.
And chaotic structure which is also.
I suppose, right? And how you know how you've
always been passionate about randomness and chance.
It seems that that Dada is William Burroughs mentality is
(51:29):
still with you. 100% I was goingto say, you can't bring that to
every project. That's that thing.
Again, the real world of graphicdesign is that you still have
clients and some of those are quite clear about what they're
looking for, some are much more exploratory, and some of you can
(51:50):
partner in creating very new thoughts and new ideas.
We're not artists, we're we're graphic designers and we take
our opportunities where we can to, to do stuff that's a bit
more edgy or dangerous and unexpected.
And at the same time, we need toservice and do hopefully great
design work for those clients that can help support the rest
(52:11):
of that by by commissioning. And 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. I do have a bunch of other
(52:32):
questions, but that's something I'm really curious about because
it's become a bit of an urban myth maybe.
Is that you did a cover for Cabaret Voltaire for free or you
offered to do it for free? No, I don't know, probably.
I mean, I did the 22 posters forfree.
I remember right in the background.
(52:52):
I used to do a lot of support design work for hypnosis.
And actually, a cover that I've never shown anyone is I designed
the cover for Pink Floyd's greatest hits and also for the
official biography of Barry Manilow at the time.
That's brilliant. I love it.
(53:12):
That's a great way to end. So yeah, you know, we all have
to compromise somewhere. You're 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. Great chatting, I appreciate
your time. Thank you so much, Richard.
Really good to see you again andgood luck.
(53:36):
Take care. Bye bye.
My name is Richard Smith and I'myour host.
I'm a filmmaker and art directorand Once Upon a time I was part
of the big 80s. I designed record covers for
Depeche Mode. I danced with Bono, discussed
art with Mick Jagger and drank tea with Susie Sue.
I also grew up during those turbulent times in England in
(53:57):
the late 70s and was driven by the do it Yourself ethos with
punk. I obsessed over bands like Joy
Division and New Order and went on to work for the album cover
designer Peter Savile. I believe that year, that moment
in 1976 when a bunch of foul mouthed jobs cursed and swore on
national television, changed thefuture of culture forever and is
what brought us to where we are today.
(54:19):
So where do we go from here? Will emerging new technologies
be the catalyst that tears down the walls of mediocrity,
throwing culture and society into chaos and revolution again?
We'll have to wait and see. This has been another episode of
Destroy. Thank you for listening
destroyistheberightbackstudiosproductionlearnmore@berightbackstudios.comand please tune in again for
(54:42):
another episode of Destroy the Influence of Punk podcast
wherever you listen or download.This episode is sponsored by
Boost Mobile. It's Jason Fuhad from Shits and
Goose Podcast, and we're here totalk about Boost Mobile, the
newest 5G network in the country.
With compelling deals for new lines, Boost Mobile makes it
(55:03):
easy to switch Today. Boost Mobile's new network
delivers customers the speed andservice that expect from the big
three, plus groundbreaking benefits you'd only get from a
true challenger in the industry.These include letting people try
the network risk free for 30 days and offering a $25 per
month unlimited plan that's guaranteed to never go up in
(55:24):
price. They have blazing fast 5G and
plans for all the latest devices.
Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store and find
us.online@boostmobile.com. There's one thing that will
forever change the way you sleep, and it's the softest 100%
organic cotton sheets from Bowlin Branch.
You'll fall asleep faster wrapped in the most luxurious
comfort. You'll never sleep hot again
(55:46):
with sheets that feel breathableto sleep in.
You'll experience the purest softness on night 1 and feel
your sheets get even softer withevery wash.
Discover the difference with 15%off your first set of sheets at
bowlinbranch.com with code BUTTERY exclusions apply.
See Sight for details. Acast powers the world's best
(56:09):
podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
How long was the original directors cut of the substance
it took how many days to shoot the sandworms in Dune Part 1 and
2? And why did Brighton Beach
become the location of this year's Best Picture winner,
Anora? Hi, I'm Daniela Teflin Nunberg
(56:29):
and I host Hollywood Gold, a podcast where I interview film
makers about their iconic films.Listen every Wednesday as we
uncover untold stories and fascinating trivia from this
year's Oscar nominees and other legendary movies like Apocalypse
Now, Scream, and The Devil WearsPrada.
All of a sudden I see Harvey Weinstein.
Marching towards me is over the table.
(56:51):
He grabs me by the collar. Oh my God.
Subscribe to Hollywood Gold wherever you get your podcasts.
Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their
podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.