Ian Swift is a graphic artist, typographer and designer who has become recognised for his pioneering and maverick approach within contemporary British graphic design. Swift was one of the first designers in the UK to embrace the Apple Macintosh’s potential as a design tool whilst studying at Manchester Polytechnic in 1985. This new digital approach attracted the attention of Neville Brody and in ‘86 Swift subsequently joined the design team at the eighties style bible The Face magazine before becoming art director of its sister magazine Arena two years later. He also was senior designer at Neville Brody Associates from 1998-1990.
For nearly two decades he was art director of Straight No Chaser (SNC) ‘the magazine of world jazz jive’, which became a vehicle for his hybrid design techniques and radical page layouts and later for his own bespoke font creations. SNC magazine became the centre of the emerging jazz dance scene and two decades on retains its global reputation as a black music journal, recently publishing its 100th issue.
In 1990 Swifty Typografix was founded in London’s Hoxton Square where his studio began creating logos, label identities and record covers for a growing client base including Talkin Loud, Island Records and MoWax Recordings.
One of the new breed of designers to embrace typeface design and the democratisation of font production, Swift launched ‘Typomatic' in 1997 as the UK's first independent Font foundry to showcase his font designs including Dolce Vita, Cut it Out and Coltrane. Typomatic will be re-launched this year with old and new fonts, remastered in ‘open type’ format.
‘The Graphic Art of Ian Swift’ (volume one) published in 2018, covers hybrid design work of the 1990’s illuminating his techniques, working roughs and mechanical artworks from the cut and paste days up to the millennium  Volume 2 has just been released, with a focus on more recent and personal projects from the last two decades including clothing and apparel, paintings, wall art, print and silk screen editions.
Swift’s current practice reflects his enduring interest and commitment to type, typography, lettering and font design and a return to earlier experimental graphic processes fusing materials and techniques and combining analogue and digital skills to create innovative artworks and print editions.