Neville Brody

Born 1957, London.

Graphic Designer, Typographer and Art Director, Neville Brody is an alumnus of the London College of Communication and is most well known for his work on The Face magazine.

While he was art director for The Face magazine, Brody questioned similar rules which David Carson did, such as the why be controlled by the edges of the paper? He tryed to make the magazine as visually interesting for the reader as possible and strived to make them look twice at each page. He was concerned with pushing the boundaries of conventional magazine design and this originality benefited The Face with popularity.

www.researchstudios.com
www.wikipedia.org
www.designobserver.com

David Carson

Born 1956, Texas.

An American graphic designer, David Carson is most famous for his use of experimental type and innovative magazine design.

Carson was the founding art director for the alternative rock and roll magazine Ray Gun.The magazine was important because it abandoned the conventional rules of publishing by discarding headlines, columns and page numbers. This created an original and abstract style and was soon mimicked on album covers and posters.

This pushing of boundaries and originality is hard to be influenced by because if you try to push boundaries I always find the results are thin and without meaning, what I have learnt from David Carson is that rules are not set in stone and sometimes the best results are when you do not follow them.

www.davidcarsondesign.org
www.wikipedia.org

The Designers Republic

Founded 1986, Sheffield

The Designers Republic is a group of graphic designers who work in contrast to the current understanding of design, "TDR is a declaration of independence from what we perceive to be the existing design community".

TDR have designed record covers for many bands including Aphex Twin and Age of Chance, visuals and packaging for computer games such as Wipeout and everything from websites to music video production.

TDR have created an easily recognisable style using flat vector graphics and anti-establishment images and corporate logos with a hint of irony, this constant style helps them to communicate their "motto" through what ever medium they are using.

www.thedesignersrepublic.com
www.wikipedia.org
www.creativematch.co.uk

Edward Tufte

Born 1942, Kansas City.

Edward Rolf Tufte is a Professor Emeritus of Statistics, Graphic Design and Political Economy at Yale University, the New York Times described his as the "Leonardo da Vinci of Data".

His best-known books are Envisioning Information and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.His books include hundreads and hundreads of devices and techniques for showing complex information via visual means, some include statistical graphics, timetables, data maps and relational graphics.

The level of his knowledge and expertise is astounding and without some of his communicative devices the world would be a very different place.www.edwardtufte.com

www.wikipedia.org
www.salon.com

Chris Ware

Born 1967, Nebraska

Chris Ware is a comic book artist, best known for Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth and Acme Novelty Library.

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is seen my many as his best work, the book uses many different techniques to communicate lots of information and trys to portray a convincinging illusion of life. Thousands of drawings are helped along by pull-out instructions and paper cut-outs and his outstanding draftmanship easily helps the viewer to gain an understanding of his book.www.randomhouse.com

www.wikipedia.org
www.fantagraphics.com

Saul Bass

Born 1920, New York.

Saul Bass can be described as one of the first designers to realize the creative potential of the opening and closing credits of a film, he worked on films such as Casino, Goodfellas, Vertigo, Psycho and The Man with the Golden Arm. He was also an incredible logo and designed logos for hundreads of companys throughout his life.

Saul Bass used large blocks of colour and negative space to create simple but effective title sequences, this immediately gave the viewer an impression of the film. The Man with the Golden Arm was one of Bass' famous sequences, it uses an animated paper cut out arm to help portray the topic of the film which was heroin addiction, as you can imagine it caused quite a sensation in 1955.

This succesful use of simple colours to communicate alot of information has inspired me in my work to develop my own images to their full potential.

www.saulbass.co.uk
www.wikipedia.org
www.designmuseum.org

Edward Gorey

Born 1925 Chicago.

Some clasify Gorey as a writer who drew, and others as an artist who wrote. He was a master of pen and ink illustrations and used his ironic and offbeat humour to gain fans all across the world. Using a small colour palette and simple illustrations he managed to communicate alot of information to the reader, this enabled him to create many wordless books using only his illustrations to talk to the reader.

This has interested me greatly because I have tried to use the images in my book to communicate the information to the reader, using as few words as possible.

www.goreyography.com
www.edwardgoreyhouse.org
www.wikipedia.org