Alan Fletcher: The Man Who Taught People How to Look
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — Anyone who was lucky enough to spot an advertisement for Pirelli slippers on the side of London’s double-decker buses in the early 1960s may well have wondered exactly what they were seeing. Positioned beneath the heads and shoulders of six passengers traveling on the top deck were images of the lower bodies of people sitting on the tops of letters that spelled “Pirelli slippers.” Each of them was wearing said slippers. Striking, witty and memorable, it was an ingenious idea, deftly executed by a young graphic designer named Alan Fletcher who went on to become one of the most dynamic forces in British design until his death in 2006. As well as creating equally adroit graphics for such bastions of the establishment as the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Institute of Directors, Fletcher published a series of best-selling books in which he encouraged other people to share his relish for the visual elements of life. The optically illusory slippers advertisement, together with hundreds of other “jobs,” as Fletcher called commercial assignments, and personal work, including his drawings, paintings and collages, can now be seen in an online archive — alanfletcherarchive.com — compiled by his daughter Raffaella. “It’s still a work in progress,” she said. “There’s lots more to be added, and I’m still discovering stuff I hadn’t seen before that he’d done and shoved in drawers.” When an accomplished designer dies leaving a large body of work, his or her heirs often face difficult decisions of what to do with it, especially if, like Fletcher’s family, they want to ensure that it will continue to be publicly accessible. One option is to preserve the designer’s studio and open it to the public, as the family of the late Italian product designer Achille Castiglioni has done in Milan. Studio Museo Achille Castiglioni is a wonderful place that looks just as it must have done when its namesake was toiling there, but the Castiglionis have faced an arduous struggle to secure the financing to keep it open. An alternative is to sell or donate the designer’s work to a museum. After the death of the American graphic designer Robert Brownjohn, a close friend of Fletcher’s, his daughter Eliza sold one significant body of his work to the V&A and another to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fletcher’s family has yet to decide on the future of his archive. Ms. Fletcher, meanwhile, has cataloged its contents and posted some of it on the Web site, which went live last month, helped by three of her father’s former colleagues — Sarah Copplestone, Lynda Brockbank and Piers Allen — and a design student, Emily Badescu. Many designers and artists of Fletcher’s generation are barely visible on the Internet, having worked mostly in the pre-digital age. Ms. Fletcher hopes that putting her father’s archive online will sustain awareness of his work among younger designers. A model of clarity, the site is reassuringly easy to navigate, not least because each of the hundreds of projects can be searched for according to its date, context, genre, subject or whoever commissioned it. There are also written descriptions of different phases of Fletcher’s career by the designer Mike Dempsey and of individual projects by the design historian Emily King. Fletcher’s work merits such thoughtful scrutiny because he made so important and inspiring a contribution to the evolution of modern graphic design, particularly in Britain. Born in 1931, Fletcher began his design education in London, where he had spent most of his childhood, then escaped the drabness and snobbery of postwar Britain in 1956 by winning a scholarship to Yale University. He was taught there by the Modernist grandees Paul Rand and Josef Albers. After returning to London in 1959, Fletcher was determined to imbue British design with their intellectual rigor and the panache he admired in Madison Avenue’s advertising. A convivial character, he teamed up with friends for a succession of design consultancies, the last of which, Pentagram, became an international force with offices in five cities. By 1992, Fletcher had tired of commercial design and left Pentagram to work independently from a studio in the mews house beside his home in the Notting Hill area of London, hoping to devote more time to personal projects. Yet Fletcher was so gifted a designer that he imbued commercial assignments with depth, wit and meaning, even if they were as inauspicious as ads for slippers. For a 1965 logo for the news agency Reuters, he spelled out its name in letters that looked as if they were made from the dots punched out of the ticker tape through which the company relayed its information. His logos for the V&A and the Institute of Directors are exquisite exercises in typography. Commissioned in 1989 and 1991 respectively, both are still in use. “Alan Fletcher did as much as anyone to shape the look of late 20th-century Britain,” Ms. King observed. “The legacy of his approach — high craft, incredible visual literacy and a light touch — is still evident today.” After leaving Pentagram, Fletcher continued to accept commercial projects, but only if he thought they would be enjoyable. A favorite assignment was the creative directorship of the art and design book publisher Phaidon Press, where he was able to work with beautiful imagery and to refresh his thinking by collaborating with young designers. Much of his time was devoted to producing his own books, including “The Art of Looking Sideways” and “Beware Wet Paint.” Describing himself as a “visual jackdaw,” Fletcher conceived them as manifestoes for his belief that, as he put it: “Design is not a thing you do. It’s a way of life.” Filled with his doodles, cartoons, pictograms and anecdotes, the books proved immensely popular and went a long way toward quelling his concern that most of us are never taught how to look — not properly. |