Neville Brody burnt so brightly and was praised so lavishly in the 1980s that a backlash was bound to follow – and it did.

For me, looking back over this period, the designer who really stands out is not perhaps someone I might have expected when I began the project. One way of getting the measure of any designer is to contrast them with their contemporaries. Inevitably, any such task involves a great deal of comparison. These thoughts have been constantly in my mind of late as I work on an exhibition and book about the last 40 years of British graphic design. Could this be the reason why, despite all the calls for more penetrating forms of criticism, there is so little close critical reading of particular projects and individual bodies of work? Might it be that there are very few designers whose ideas warrant, or can sustain, this kind of attention?

But what I am getting at here is the ability to step back from the day-to-day task of designing and place visual communication and your own activity in a broader context, because you bring a purpose to the task that is uniquely your own. Certainly, the designer can apply the hard-won rudiments of craft to the task of expressing the client’s message, and they might be able to talk about that message, as supplied content, in an intelligent way.

Here, the “service” nature of design and the education that supports it really do seem to impose some fundamental limitations. I have interviewed hundreds of designers and transcribed miles of tape over the years, but the number who have had strikingly unusual (as opposed to just interesting) observations to make about either design or the world is not large. If you approach graphic design – and, in particular, the individual graphic designer – looking for complex ideas about design and culture that might require book-length elucidation, then few designers have much to report about their practice that is significantly different from what their colleagues say, and that moves beyond the sphere of necessary but still, at root, limited professional talk. Once you have stated the fundamentals, which have been repeated many times, there is often not that much left to say. Complaints about the lack of depth in writing about graphic design occur with thudding regularity, but these critics rarely acknowledge what seems to be a basic fact about design.

Graphic design neville brody