Influential Designers: Day 2

On Friday, May 8 we had our second round of influential designer presentations. The class heard about Neville Brody, Art Chantry, and Storm Thorgerson.

Neville Brody grew up and attended school in London. He was highly influenced by the punk music scene and it shows in his work. The type is really bold and streamlined and the total layouts of many of his designs hold a lot of energy. A lot of people disapproved of his work, calling it rebellious, but he continued on and became very successful. Neville worked on record covers and t-shirts, several magazine publications, as well as his own called "Fuse", and his own studio, Research Studios.
Art Chantry grew up in Washington state with his mother and abusive father. When Art and his mother left, they had very little funds and Art had to grow up in a rough nieghborhood. When he finally made it to college there were difficulties there for him too. He had started out attending a private religous school, but he didn't feel comfortable there. However, he did find out that he wanted to be a designer and started classes at a community college. There he felt like he didn't fit in. Many of the classes were fine arts based and didn't want advertisements or messages in the works. Art finally settled in at Western Washington State University. He didn't like working on the computer with digital images and preferred recycling actual pieces and making them something new. He even printed his type by hand. I really enjoyed his work because of how he would find images and just manipulate them by hand. He used what he had and could find and made something really cool out of that.
Storm Thorgerson is also a designer that I enjoyed. He is also an English born designer who never actually had any design schooling. He's mostly known for the album covers that he's done for Pink Floyd, as well as many others, but he also did some TV and commercial work. He tried to work with music videos, but they didn't turn out as successful as he would have liked. Storm works with photography for the most part and likes to layer pieces of pictures together. His images contain a large central object or figure, with a smaller secondary figure, and he likes to make his images so that you look and ask questions. They hold a surreal feeling to them and they always seem to make you think about what's going on because they are strange in the sense that they are different than anything that is out there now. Storm also had a couple of his own studios, one of which was "Hipgnosis". It was a creative photography studio that he started with his partner Aubrey Powell. Currently he is still working for many rock artists and freelancing from another studio, StormStudios.