Editorial Research

For this project, I am tasked with designing a series of supplements for the Typographic Circle's magazine, Circular 17. To get inspiration, I researched two designers who were famous for their typographic and editorial work. I chose to research Neville Brody and Herb Lubalin.

Herb Lubalin & Neville Brody

Neville Brody

Neville Brody is a british Graphic Designer and Typographer famous for his work in two magazines, ‘The Face’ and ‘Arena Magazine' as well as designing record covers for Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode.

At College he was heavily inspired by Punk in the 70s which was criticised by his tutors who condemned experimentation and preferred to stick to tried and tested design methods.

Some of Brody's Album Covers 

Brody is also famous for his experimentation with typography, mixing typefaces together along with geometric shapes and pictures.

I am particularly inspired by the way Brody tried something different with typography, making us look at it in a completely different way to how we used too. This open up doors for others too go and be more creative and expressive with typography.

In 1987 Brody discovered the capabilites of the Mac to manipulate text and still get a high quality end product. to expand his creativity of Typography design. This was exhibited in magazines such as Arena and The Face. The typefaces he designed were distinctive and inspired magazine designers worldwide to try new things too.

Some of the Covers for 'The Face' and 'Arena' Magazines

More recently Brody has redesigned the BBC Website as well as create a new font for The Times Newspaper called ‘Times Modern. 

Im impressed how he can switch to working on non decorative typography based work such as this and still create work which is relevant and world leading as well as create work which challenges the boundaries of typography.


Herb Lubalin

Herb Lubalin was a leading American Graphic Designer. He famously designed a typeface the magazine ‘Avant Garde’ called ITC Avant Garde which is a post modern interpretation of Art Deco. The typeface heavily influenced logo design in the 90’s and 00’s with its sleek style. 

His work has been described as “profoundly influencing and changing our vision and perception of letter forms, words and language.” That font was part of ITC which created a number of new advertising designs distributed throughout all the major manufacturers of typesetters.

Examples of Lubalin's Typefaces

ITC introduced a number of new advertising designs which were widely distributed through all the major typesetters and manufacturers. 

In recent years ITC has released some more serious designs, but generally their portfolio of work is full of display faces. 

Lubalin viewed his work as designing with letters, rather than creating a number of seperate mechanical characters. For example these pieces of typography hold a lot of visual meaning, the ‘MOTHER’ has a child inside it, ‘Families’ depicts a family of three.

Examples of Lubalin's Logos

What I really admire Lubalin for is how he was able to push back the boundaries of the impact and perception of design so that people could realise that design could be a really powerful communication tool that could put big, ideas in peoples minds.

I also particularly like the variety of typefaces he created, from bold clean types to typefaces full of flowing of personality and intricacy.