GRAPHIC DESIGN WORKS OF NEVILLE BRODY VS OTL AICHER

GRAPHIC DESIGN WORKS OF NEVILLE BRODY VS OTL AICHER

            Graphic design has become part and parcel of the modern world to the extent that imagining how the world would be without it is hard. In short, graphic design history is a story covering the fullness of existence which can be used as a source of inspiration to even the modern designers though it has been a tough journey right from the use of stone tools to the digital tools used today. Knowing how and where this industry has come from helps the current designers to understand their position alongside history. And one of the fascinating approaches towards this is by understanding convergence and divergence of some of the famous graphic designers in the history of this industry. This paper compares and contrasts the works of Neville Brody and that of Otl Aicher.

With deep scrutiny on these two famous graphic designers of the history, there are various aspects of their works where they converge. For instance, they are both known for their tactical use of typography (Brody 2001). Their opinion was that people read their works from a different perspective from the way they read books. When people are reading magazines, for example, they rarely go through the magazine from beginning to end. They tend to move back and forth while picking the interesting bits only (Brody & Blackwell 2002). From their designs, Neville Brody and Otl Aicher have used this idea as the background for their designs, by highlighting the fascinating parts of their designs to capture the attention of their audience. As an addition, they have also used contrasting shapes, sizes, and colors in their designs.

In most of their designs, different letter sizes and styles appear on the same page, an approach which was very unusual during their time. This is evident in Brody’s design for the “The Face” magazine and Aicher’s “1972 summer Olympics” poster (Aicher 2015).

In their designs, they have arranged their type in diagonals and with some letters being extra-large while others are undersized. The kind of topography by these two designers seems to play an integral part in their designs and therefore having equal importance. The lettering style in both designs was used to illustrate the covers as well as the images and with the same impacts, an approach which was also very unusual during the time (Brody 2001).

Regarding techniques, Neville Brody and Otl Aicher are good examples of designers who utilized post-punk style very well in most of their designs and have shown highly individual approaches in their designs (Rathgeb & Aicher 2006). Many of their designs contained handcrafted features such as rubbings or college, drawings or paintings. In their days, and that is before computer-aided designs everything had to be cut and pasted in unison from the film overlays, paper cut-outs or transfer prints. They both created 3D models, wooden carvings or plaster casts and then photographed them for their designs.

However, despite many similarities with their design works there are some distinguishing elements between Neville Brody and Otl Aicher designs. And the main difference comes in from their common graphic design styles. Keenly looking at Brody’s designs, he has utilized the Art Nouveau graphic design style (Brody & Blackwell 2002).

            Art Nouveau graphic design style is graphic design style which is characterized by its flat, hand-drawn typefaces and outlined illustrations. And which is often confused with the Art Deco style although they have a clear distinction in that Art Nouveau appears more as hand drawn and lacks highly geometric features that identify the Art Deco style (Brody 2001).

On the other hand, in most of the Otl Aicher designs, he has used the Late Modern Style of graphic design (Aicher 2015)

            Late Modern Style is a graphic design style which is known for its use of distorted geometric shapes as well as the informal layouts. Its only aspect that is not informal is its type, which is devoid of decorations (Rathgeb & Aicher 2006)

Conclusion

Generally, looking at the two works of Neville Brody and Otl Aicher, there is a common approach evident in their designs. Among them being their tactical use of typography which was done with an aim of taking care of how people read magazines unlike books. They have also utilized the idea of eye capturing which is necessary in advertisements and the sector where their talents were required most. Such a convergence in their works is clear evidence that they were working towards the common goal. On the other hand, there are differences in the way they have used graphic design styles in their work. For instance, Neville Brody designs have been majored on Art Nouveau graphic design style while Otl Aicher was more on the late modern style, styles which were fascinating in their works. These differences shows diversity in the industry and which is important for innovation.