Rian Hughes

Rian Hughes
Nationality	British
Education	London College of Printing
Known for	Illustrator, comics artist, cover artist, typographer, type designer, graphic designer, writer
Notable work	Logo-a-gogo: Branding Pop Culture, Korero Press, 2018 Cult-ure: Ideas can be Dangerous, Carlton Books, 2015 XX: A Novel, Graphic, Picador, 2020 The Black Locomotive, Picador, 2021
Website	devicefonts.co.uk

Rian Hughes is a British graphic designer, illustrator and comics artist and novelist.

Overviews

Hughes' work appeared in the long-lived anthology title 2000 AD on the series Robo-Hunter, Tales from Beyond Science, "Really and Truly" and Dan Dare, among others.

Biography

Early career

Hughes graduated from London College of Printing and was employed at various advertising agencies where he worked for ID magazine, Smash Hits and Condé Nast. At the same time he was drawing his own comics, and got involved with the British small press comics scene of the time.

Hughes was a regular contributor to Paul Gravett's Escape from 1983 to 1989 with strips including Norm and The Inheritors. In 1987 his first graphic novel, The Science Service, co-written with John Freeman, was published by Belgian publishers Magic Strip in seven languages. The UK edition was co-published in 1989 by Acme Press in the UK and Eclipse Comics in the US.

Design and logo design

From the mid-1980s through to the present day, Hughes has been involved with design work for a wide range of comics publishers. He is responsible for the distinctive look of the Knockabout Books line of collected underground comics and periodicals from 1985 to 1992. By the early 1990s it seemed like every aspect of the British comics industry had Hughes' stamp on it, from the carrier bags at Forbidden Planet to the logo of Mega City Comics. In 1990 the strip Dare was drawn by Hughes, serialised in Revolver, a magazine he designed, and written about in Speakeasy, a news magazine he'd also redesigned.

At Fleetway he did influential work, designing a new display font for their weekly comic 2000 AD, under the supervision of Art Director Steve Cook. When the adult comic Crisis was launched it featured a radical Hughes design and he continued to spearhead Fleetways identity with the launch of Revolver and their graphic novels line.

For Titan Books he designed books that repackaged American comics for the UK market. His design was considered daring but the American publisher, Fantagraphics Books, was impressed and used similar concepts in their own collections.

For DC Comics Hughes has designed numerous logos and covers, initially for the Vertigo imprint where many British creators were working. Here he continued his collaboration with Grant Morrison, creating covers and identity for The Invisibles. He has also worked on covers for DC's superhero lines, notably the Tangent series of Elseworlds comics.

Other notable design work for the comics industry includes the 1986 MTV Europe Awards booklet Outbreaks of Violets, possibly the rarest Alan Moore title, late-era issues of Deadline, and the retro covers for Flex Mentallo produced with artist Frank Quitely.

Hughes' design output has broadened into work for clients in the music industry, advertising, toy industry and publishing. He has designed album artwork for Ultravox and Oxford-based rock group The Winchell Riots. In 2007 he collaborated with ex Spice Girl Geri Halliwell on a series of six children's books, Ugenia Lavender.

As part of Grant Morrison's The Multiversity, he designed the definitive Map of the Multiverse, DC Comics' overview of all their alternate realities.

Illustration

Example of Rian Hughes' illustration

Hughes' discovery of the Mac in 1993 pushed his illustration work in a more stylised graphic direction. Adopting first Freehand than Adobe Illustrator, he used expanses of flat colour and texture in asymmetric and dynamic layouts, his characters became more elegant and exaggerated, and the type, generally custom designed for each illustration, became an integral part of his imagemaking process. This very influential flat vector style has been dubbed "Sans Ligne" in reference to the European "Ligne Claire" school by artist Will Kane. Though enabled by the Macintosh, Hughes' considers his combination of design, illustration and typography to be a return to the working methods of the poster artists of the early 20th century, a period when artists like the Stenberg Brothers, Cassandre and Jean Carlu combined type, image and layout to achieve a dynamic, integrated whole.

Now widely copied, the influence of Hughes' illustration style can be seen in advertising, on covers for mass-market women's paperbacks, children's books and editorial illustrations worldwide.

Type design

Selection of fonts designed by Hughes and released through his Device foundry

Hughes has described typography as "the particle physics of design". Hughes' interest in letterforms began at an unusually young age thanks to a Letraset catalogue his architect father had lying about the studio. At 15 he visited Letraset, where he saw Rubylith being used for the first time to create type.

This is the technique he used in the early days of his career when producing custom type for his design work. Early fonts like FF CrashBangWallop and FF Revolver (originally designed for Speakeasy and Revolver magazine respectively) were digitisations of fonts originally done in this old-fashioned method of Rubylith on board.

His first fonts were released back in 1992 as part of the FontFont range, while subsequent designs have been released via his own foundry, Device Fonts.

Many of Hughes' fonts were created for specific design commissions, and their names reflect their application or the circumstances of their conception. The chunky no-nonsense Judgement family was commissioned for 2000 AD, home of Judge Dredd. Metropol Noir, created specifically for the BDA Gold Award-winning 1996 MTV Europe Music Awards programme, is named after the Paris hotel Hughes was put up in for the event. Others are more descriptive; FF Knobcheese suggests a knobbly Swiss Cheese; Foonky and Laydeez Night derive from a kitsch 70s aesthetic. One of his most widely-used fonts is Korolev, based on signs in a photograph of a 1937 Red Square Parade and named after Sergey Pavlovich Korolev, the lead Soviet rocket engineer throughout the Cold War.

Novels

In 2020 Hughes turned his hand to writing and published XX, a graphic novel about a signal from space featuring fictitious articles, alphabets, a lost sci-fi novella, and other elements that draw on Hughes' experience as a designer and typographer. Writing for The Times, Simon Ings named XX “one of the ten best sci-fi novels of 2021”. Hughes’ second novel, The Black Locomotive, contains similar graphic contrivances.

Bibliography

Comics

• Zit (three issues, self-published, 1983–4)
• The Inheritors (Modern Era Editions, 1988)
• The Science Service (script by John Freeman) (ACME/Eclipse, 1989, ISBN 0-913035-86-6)
• Dare (written by Grant Morrison, a revisionist sequel to Dan Dare)
  • "Dare" (Revolver #1–7, 1990)
  • "Dare" (in Crisis #55–56, 1991)
• Tales from Beyond Science (tpb, 88 pages, Image Comics, January 2012, ISBN 1-60706-471-5):
  • "The Men in Red" (with Mark Millar, in 2000 AD No. 774, 1992)
  • "The Music Man" (with Alan McKenzie, in 2000 AD No. 775, 1992)
  • "Long Distance Calls" (with Mark Millar, in 2000 AD No. 776, 1992)
  • "Agents of Mu-Mu" (with Alan McKenzie, in 2000 AD No. 777, 1992)
  • "The Eyes of Edwin Spendlove" (with John Smith, in 2000 AD No. 778, 1992)
  • "Secrets of the Organism" (with John Smith, in 2000 AD No. 779, 1992)
  • "The Secret Month Under the Stairs" (with Mark Millar, in 2000 AD Winter Special No. 4, 1992)
  • "The Man Who Created Space" (with Mark Millar, in 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special, 1994)
• "Really & Truly" (written by Grant Morrison, in 2000 AD #842–849, 1993)
• Robo-Hunter (with Peter Hogan):
  • "Slade Runner" (in 2000 AD 1994 Yearbook, 1993)
  • "Winnegan's Fake" (in 2000 AD #852–854, 1993)
  • "Metrobolis" (in 2000 AD #904–911, 1994)
  • "War of the Noses" (in 2000 AD #1023, 1996)

Collections

• Dare (a collection of the series scripted by Grant Morrison, published 1991)
• Yesterday's Tomorrows (a collection of work scripted by Grant Morrison, John Freeman, Tom De Haven and Chris Reynolds and consisting mainly of previously published work) (paperback, 280 pages, Image Comics, 2010)

Illustrations by

• Ugenia Lavender (written by Geri Halliwell), six volumes hardback/paperback, 68 pages, Macmillan, 2009)

Novels

• XX (Macmillan, 2020)
• The Black Locomotive (Pan Macmillan, 2021)

Nonfiction works written and/or designed by

• Really Good Logos, Explained (with Margo Chase, Ron Miriello, Alex White) (limpback, 250 pages, Rotovision, 2009)
• Cult-ure: Ideas can be Dangerous (hardback, 320 pages, Fiell, 2010)
• Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss (hardback, 280 pages, Titan Books, 2011)
• Custom Lettering of the 20s and 30s (flexi, 576 pages, Korero Press, 2016)
• Custom Lettering of the 40s and 50s (flexi, 580 pages, Fiell, 2010)
• Custom Lettering of the 60s and 70s (flexi, 580 pages, Fiell, 2010)
• On The Line (with Rick Wright) (hardback, 48 pages, Image Comics, 2010)
• Lifestyle Illustration of the 60s (limpback, 520 pages, Fiell, 2010)
• Logo-a-gogo: Branding Pop Culture, Korero Press, 2018
• Ten Year Itch (an overview of his typeface design) Device, 2004
• "Art, Commercial" (a monograph documenting his illustration, logo design and design work) Die Gestalten Verlag, 2002

References

• Interview at Korero Press
• Interview at the Forbidden Planet International site
• Hughes, Rian (2002) "Device: Art, Commercial". Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin ISBN 3-931126-86-2
• Rian Hughes at Barney
• Rian Hughes at the Grand Comics Database
• Rian Hughes at the Comic Book DB (archived from the original)

External links

• Official website
• Rian Hughes – Design, Tea, and Biscuits VIDEO Talk at Art Directors Club, NYC November 2007
• Assessment of Hughes’ work
• Overview of Hughes’ FontFonts

Interviews

• Logo Geek Interview with Rian Hughes, March 2018
• Creative Characters Interview with Rian Hughes, MyFonts, April 2009
• Kenny (18 May 2007). "Rian Hughes – Yesterday's Tomorrows". Forbidden Planet.