Neville Brody is one of the most influential graphic designers of the last 30 years. His groundbreaking work for The Face magazine in the eighties played a key role in the development of British Graphic design and, for many, showed the possibilities of what a creative mind could achieve with words and images. After his role as art director of the magazine from 1981 – 86 he founded his own agency, Research Studios, and has gone on to grow rather impressive client list. Redesigning The Times newspaper and the BBC website – not bad work if you can get it. If that wasn’t enough, in March this year The Royal College of Art announced that Brody was to head up their Communication Art and Design course.

On Friday evening, we braved the freezing cold and trekked down to the V&A in South Kensington to attend ‘Neville Brody: In Conversation’, a talk in which Design Week editor Lynda Relph-Knight spoke to Brody about his predictions regarding the direction of design, his past work, his thoughts on design education and how the recent government spending cuts are going to affect our industry.

The talk was a casual (and slightly chaotic) affair, with the conversation jumping from topic to topic along with occasional input from the audience towards the end of the evening. The subject which took the majority of the limelight was the aforementioned spending cuts and how they’ll affect all of us moving forward. Parallels were drawn between the current climate and that of the early eighties, with Brody quoting former Labour leader Neil Kinnock to warn us ‘Be afraid if you’re young, be afraid if you’re old, be afraid if you’re ill and be afraid if you’re poor’.

The atmosphere was far from bleak with a fair few laughs and the announcement that Brody had recently been awarded a Special Commendation by the Prince Philip Designers Prize, this is one of the first time that this hugely esteemed prize has been awarded to anyone in the graphics sector and high praise indeed as Philip himself has a great deal of personal involvement in the final choice.

‘Design is Dead’ was one of the many slogans projected onto the backdrop on the stage. Initially a slightly foreboding statement, Brody went on the explain his thoughts on the role of traditional graphic design needing to change to suit our current digital age. Viewing design as branding, print and layout is not enough, he argued, and to move forward and develop we need to bring in as many disciplines as are required. He expanded on this point saying in his new RCA role he would be involving every other department in Graphic Design to give students an understanding of film, motion graphics, photography, fashion design, illustration and fine art. Lynda Relph-Kinght spoke of design being the ‘glue’ that holds all of these different disciplines together.

My main criticism of the night would be the slightly haphazard nature of the event. The night was billed as a conversation, not a presentation but there was very little explanation on the concepts or thinking behind the slides Brody was showing. What could have been a fascinating insight into the thought process of an interesting a passionate designer ended up being a slightly directionless wander through Brody’s hard drive in little or no context. As a big fan of Brody’s older work, it was hard to see past the fact that there didn’t appear to be a great deal of new thinking or boundry pushing ideas in what we were shown. There was plenty of magazine layouts from his latest magazine project, Arena Homme +, and lots of (slightly dated?) typography at funny angles but in all honesty, I left the evening feeling like I hadn’t seen anything new.

Brody spoke of his position in the industry as an outsider and was described as the enfant terrible of graphic design. He’s clearly proud of his punk credentials from early in his career but it turns out I’m not the only one who felt a certain sense of irony to hear this from a guy sipping red wine, eating a piece of cake and having rubbed shoulders with Prince Philip earlier in the week.

All in all, it was an interesting evening and certainly gave us enough to talk about on the tube journey home. Brody seemed like a nice bloke and it was inspiring to see someone maintain the same degree of passion for what they’re doing throughout a career which has spanned three decades.

Still not a fan of the ponytail though.

Mat.