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Episode
19

Interview with Logo, Type & Comic Book Legend Rian Hughes

An interview with
Rian Hughes

Introduction

In this episode Ian chats with Rian Hughes, a British graphic designer, illustrator, writer and comic book artist. Rian is best known for his work in the British and American comic book industry, having created many logo designs for Marvel and DC including Batman and Robin, Bat Girl, Spider-Man, The X-Men, Captain America, Wolverine, The Script, The Invisibles… the list goes on!

In this episode we talk about Rians approach to logo and type design, as well as his new book Logo-A-Gogo, an inspirational visual history of the iconic brand identities created Rian.

Rian Hughes Interview Transcription

Rian Hughes: The involvement in comics has always been there in parallel to the design work. And I think one of the threads of my work is that I’ve always worked as a typographer, illustrator, and comic strip artist, and writer on those subjects, and other related things, always in parallel. So they inform each other. So I started off many years ago. I had a graphic novel published by a Belgian publisher called Magic Strip who were publishing people like Yves Chaland and Serge Clerc in a very nice little hardback format called Atomium 58. And that led on to working at 2000 AD with Grant Morrison on Dare. Actually it wasn’t 2000 AD, it was a companion comic called Revolver.

And because I was probably one of the only people who comic publishers knew who was a graphic designer, I ended up by being the graphic designer of choice for a lot of these magazines and comics, and that’s just how it’s continued through the friends that I have in the industry who will ask me to get involved in various things. And when a lot of the English writers and artists began working for DC primarily, but also for Marvel, and I got asked to get involved with their projects then, and so that’s how it’s grown from there, really. It seems very organic.