Neal Ashby

Neal Ashby (b. April 1966) is an American designer based in Alexandria, Virginia. He is a principal of Ashby Design studio with many clients in the entertainment industry, like Warner Bros. Records, Virgin Entertainment Group, Capitol Records, EMI Music, Thievery Corporation's label ESL Music, and National Geographic. Ashby served as an associate professor at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design in Washington, D.C. His work has been displayed at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and the Experience Music Project, Seattle, WA. For ten years, Ashby was Vice President and Creative Director of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). In this role, he re-designed the standard layout for "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" warnings in 1996, which RIAA adopted a few years prior under pressure from Tipper Gore's infamous Parents Music Resource Center committee. Original stickers, designed in 1990 by Deborah Norcross, read "…Explicit Lyrics;" after further Senate hearings, RIAA decided to update the template to "…Content." Neal Ashby also created a more balanced and neutral composition, switching to one typeface in different outlines — Garage Gothic (1992), designed by Tobias Frere-Jones. Ashby's sticker was extensively used by the US record industry between 1996 and 2001; after that, Universal Music Group, and then most other labels, gradually transitioned to a slightly different variant with Placard (1937) font.