Ian Swift 1/1

Ian Swift aka Swifty is a dedicated graphic artist. Since embarking on his career at The Face magazine in 1986 he has pursued an individual course which has led him to specialise in the music industry and youth culture aesthetics. Equally at home with a club flyer or a complex movie title sequence, he has successfully run his own practice ‘Swifty – Grafix’ for over two decades. His work has featured in dozens of books and magazines and in 1997 he launched ‘Typomatic’, UK’s first independent font foundry. While his reputation and working life is rooted in the typo-grafix world recent exhibitions reveal a shift in Swift’s focus towards a body of artworks with a more exploratory and personal dimension. Ian Swift talks about his upbringing and how he wanted to be in the army when he was younger. He explains what triggered him to go to art school and become a graphic designer. And how he got in contact with Neville Brody, while in his third year at Manchester Polytechnic. Later on he worked for Straight No Chaser magazine. We wonder if he thinks this is where he developed his own visual language. Ian explains how the magazine became a vehicle for his font design as well. Furthermore we talk about his attitude towards licensing fonts, ‘The only thing I can actually call my own are my fonts.’ Recorded via Skype in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. (We apologize for the audio quality)