Rian Hughes

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Example of Rian Hughes' art.

Rian Hughes is a British graphic designer and comics artist, noted for his work on 2000AD, where he illustrated Robo-Hunter, Tales from Beyond Science, Really and Truly and Dan Dare, among others. His work was highly distinctive, wearing its 1960s influences on its sleeve, daring to be two-dimensional and bold in its use of large expanses of flat, bold colours. This stood out particularly during the early 1990s, when British comics were leaning ever more towards fully-painted art. Unusually, Hughes preferred to be his own letterer, and designed several unusual fonts for this purpose.

Since leaving comics illustration, Hughes has become a successful advertising artist and font designer. He runs his own company, Device, with clients including Virgin Airways, Penguin Books, DC Comics, Eurostar the BBC and a range of magazines and newspapers. Hughes prefers to design his own fonts for new projects usually giving them humorous and occasionally rude names. The font Knobcheese was marketed as "A typeface in the Swiss (cheese) tradition. With knobs on."

1 Early days
2 Design for comics
3 Bibliography
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Early days

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, released as small press minicomics in editions of around 20 copies. Three issues of Zit were published between 1983 and 1984 and through these he got involved with the British small press comics scene of the time based around the Fast Fiction stall Paul Gravett was running at the Westminster Comic Mart in London.

Hughes was a regular contributor to Gravett's Escape Magazine 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.

[edit] Design for comics

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, serialized 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 innovative 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 was given the task of designing books that repackaged American comics for the UK market. Most notable was his work on Love and Rockets, a personal favourite of Hughes. 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, writer of Dare and Really and Truly, 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 where he worked on the entire magazine on a minimal budget in three days, and the retro covers for Flex Mentallo produced with artist Frank Quitely.

[edit] Bibliography

Cover to Device, a retrospective published in 2002

Comics work includes

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)