Design history · Periodicals
The Face
The British style magazine that gave Neville Brody five years and changed editorial design.
The Face launched on 1 May 1980 — Nick Logan's attempt to cover music, fashion and youth culture in a single magazine with no direct precedent. Logan invested £3,500 of his own money. The first issue put Jerry Dammers on the cover and sold 56,000 copies. Neville Brody joined as art director in 1981. For the next five years he used the magazine as a working laboratory: drawing on Russian Constructivism and De Stijl, treating type as image, designing a new masthead treatment for almost every issue, and building symbol systems in place of conventional drop-caps. In 1984 he designed Industria — a tall, geometric sans-serif — exclusively for the magazine. The approach was not decoration: Brody was making an argument about what a page could do. By the time he left in 1986, The Face was being studied by designers and art directors across Europe and the United States. The 1988 Thames & Hudson monograph coincided with a V&A retrospective and became the world's best-selling graphic design book at the time. Phil Bicker took over art direction, bringing in photographers including Corinne Day and Juergen Teller. Lee Swillingham and Stuart Spalding directed the magazine in its final years. Wagadon sold to Emap in 1999; the last original-run issue appeared in May 2004. Wasted Talent Media relaunched it as a quarterly in 2019.
Design history · Periodicals
The Face
The British style magazine that gave Neville Brody five years and changed editorial design.
The Face launched on 1 May 1980 — Nick Logan's attempt to cover music, fashion and youth culture in a single magazine with no direct precedent. Logan invested £3,500 of his own money. The first issue put Jerry Dammers on the cover and sold 56,000 copies. Neville Brody joined as art director in 1981. For the next five years he used the magazine as a working laboratory: drawing on Russian Constructivism and De Stijl, treating type as image, designing a new masthead treatment for almost every issue, and building symbol systems in place of conventional drop-caps. In 1984 he designed Industria — a tall, geometric sans-serif — exclusively for the magazine. The approach was not decoration: Brody was making an argument about what a page could do. By the time he left in 1986, The Face was being studied by designers and art directors across Europe and the United States. The 1988 Thames & Hudson monograph coincided with a V&A retrospective and became the world's best-selling graphic design book at the time. Phil Bicker took over art direction, bringing in photographers including Corinne Day and Juergen Teller. Lee Swillingham and Stuart Spalding directed the magazine in its final years. Wagadon sold to Emap in 1999; the last original-run issue appeared in May 2004. Wasted Talent Media relaunched it as a quarterly in 2019.
Key facts
- Founded
- 1 May 1980, London — Nick Logan / Wagadon
- Art director (Brody era)
- Neville Brody, 1981–1986
- Format
- Monthly music, fashion and style magazine
- Run
- 1980–2004 (original); relaunched 2019 as quarterly
- Publisher
- Wagadon (1980–1999), Emap (1999–2004)
- Collections
- Design Museum London (permanent collection, 2011); V&A postmodernism exhibitions
Key works & examples
The Face — Electro cover (Issue 49, May 1984)
1984
The most-cited single cover from Brody's tenure: the word ELECTRO filling almost the full page, set in condensed display type on a yellow ground, the masthead reduced to a supporting element in the top corner. The issue charted the arrival of electro and beatbox culture in British cities. The cover demonstrated Brody's working method — a single word treated as a poster, the editorial information subordinate to the typographic image. Issue 49, May 1984.
The Face — 'Distort Yourself' cover (Issue 36, April 1983)
1983
Issue 36, April 1983. The masthead here carries Brody's notched-A variant — the letterform cut with a triangular notch, one of the typographic mutations he introduced across successive covers. Cover lines include "ART! SEX! STYLE! DECADENCE! REVOLT!" set in heavy condensed uppercase with mixed colour. The issue contains interviews with David Hockney and Paul Weller. The design demonstrates Brody's approach to the cover as a monthly typographic event, not a settled identity mark.
The Face — 'Searching for the Perfect Beat' spread (Issue 42, October 1983)
1983
An interior spread from Issue 42, October 1983. The headline "THE PERFECT BEAT" is set across the full width in mixed-weight display type, with one letter inverted. Diamond symbol bullets — part of the custom mark system Brody built for the magazine — replace conventional drop-caps throughout. Columns of text run at varied widths against a dark ground. This spread documents the symbol system Brody developed alongside the Industria typeface: small geometric marks that carried the page's designed language down into body-copy level.
The Face — 'Beuys+ Adventures' spread (Issue 40, August 1983)
1983
Issue 40, August 1983. A double-page spread on Joseph Beuys. The title "BEUYS+ ADVENTURES" is set in a large bold sans-serif running off the top of the page. On the left column, a circle-and-cross symbol — one of Brody's custom marks — replaces the dropped initial. The body copy runs in tight columns with varied leading; photographs are cropped at unexpected angles. The spread is representative of how Brody treated the interior pages: not as a neutral container for text and images but as a designed argument with its own visual logic.