Tuesday 12 April 2011

Alan Fletcher

Alan Fletcher the design firm Fletcher/Forbes/Gill with Colin Forbes and Bob Gill in 1962. An early product was their 1963 book Graphic Design: A Visual Comparison.
Clients included Pirelli, Cunard, Penguin Books and Olivetti. Gill left the partnership in 1965 and was replaced by Theo Crosby, so the firm became Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes. Two new partners joined, and the partnership evolved into Pentagram in 1972, with Forbes, Crosby, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky, with clients including Lloyd's of London and Daimler Benz. Much of his work is still in use: a logo for Reuters made up of 84 dots, which he created in 1965, was retired in 1992, but his 1989 "V&A" logo for Victoria and Albert Museum, and his "IoD" logo for the Institute of Directors remain in use. In last years he designed the logo for the Italian School of Architecture "Facolta` di Architettura di Alghero", University of Sassari.
He left Pentagram in 1992, and worked from the home in Notting Hill that he had occupied since the early 1960s, where he was assisted by his daughter Raffaella Fletcher, Leah Klein and Sarah Copplestone, and worked for new clients, such as Novartis. Much of his later work was as art director for the publisher Phaidon Press, which he joined in 1993. For him, life and work were inseparable: "Design is not a thing you do. It's a way of life." quoted in his obituary in The Times. He would continue working, even on holiday, drawing on a notepad with a pencil.

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