Take a look at the V&A’s logo. Amazing, isn’t it? So seemingly conservative, with its classic Bodoni typeface, yet underneath how subversive.
Observe the way the portly curves and curls of the ampersand are sandwiched between the strict lines of the A and the V, like a fat man hiding his bulk under a Savile Row suit. How the ampersand’s serif stands in for the bridge of the A. How the bulges of the ampersand somehow hint at the ghost of the A’s left leg hidden behind, maybe, I imagine, giving the “and” a little tickle with its toe. Fletcher’s logo turns the organisation’s colloquial name into a formal, physical, yet almost cute, thing with such simplicity, such economy, such brevity. Like visual haiku. Who can think of the V&A without the logo popping into the mind?
Nobody could pack simple, inert letters with such character like Alan Fletcher, whom the Design Museum is celebrating in a new retrospective. In his hands As and Bs and Zs become people. They have lives, hinterland. They are funny, nasty, jolly, wistful, sad. They become like him. When Fletcher died in September, aged 74, graphics fan sites and blogs (for yes, there are such things) overflowed with tributes.
People who’d met him maybe twice wrote of his death as being like losing a limb. “Devastated!”; “Design god!”; “My hero”. The praise was testament to his character and also his work — a father of postwar British graphic design, part of its design aristocracy for four decades, the man who almost singlehandedly created the country’s reputation for witty, irreverent yet elegant branding and advertising.
Like his work, his abrupt character might be mistaken for terseness were it not couched in such wit, charm, modesty and generosity. “He was a gentleman,” says Emily King, curator of the Design Museum’s retrospective, opening on Saturday, “immensely generous to other designers, a father figure, warm. But also intensely rigorous.” This collision between abrupt, abstract rigour and warm, almost anarchic allusion created the energy that propelled him.
Graphic designers are a breed apart. They don’t see the world like anyone else. An F with a micromillimetre out of place can cause them sleepless nights. They look for patterns and joy where you and I just see dirt and chaos. They take the everyday madness of life and edit it until it becomes beautiful.
You’d often catch Fletcher wandering round his neighbourhood, Notting Hill, with a knife, to slice off an L that caught his eye on a cardboard box in the street. He’d rarely go out without returning with something in his pockets, a bit of scrap, perhaps, to metamorphose into a toy for his grandson or a kitchen cabinet.
He called himself a “visual jackdaw”, forever on the lookout for something others might overlook, to take back to his studio and transform. “Most people,” he told an interviewer in 2004, “walk around with paper bags over their heads. And they live in a visual world which is the listening equivalent of Muzak in a lift.”
In a world of increasing visual bombardment it took the discriminating eye of Fletcher to edit it down to a world of wit and brevity. In three simple swishes of a pen he could conjure up a person’s face at the table opposite, a beach, a cat, defensive, with back arched. “He reduced, reduced, reduced to their absolute minimum,” says Jeremy Myerson, professor of design studies at the Royal College of Art and a collaborator with Fletcher on the 1994 book Beware Wet Paint. “He was an absolute perfectionist. He’d never let anything go until the absolute last minute, until he was absolutely happy. Of course, this could make working with him immensely frustrating.”
The result usually made up for it — not just the elegance, but the wit. Fletcher was, Myserson wrote, always “more interested in wit than humour. Humour is entertaining, but wit makes you look at something in a different way,” an attitude he fleshed out in his mammoth book The Art of Looking Sideways (2001), a compendium, he said, of “non-linear” thinking 20 years in the making. “I see wit as cerebral acrobatics. You stand thoughts on their head. You have little pictures in your mind and juggle them around.”
So the V&A logo becomes a little character; the letters of the Pirelli logo he designed in the 1960s imply the job of the company by the swerve of the typography; ditto the dots of his Reuters logo, nodding towards the perforated tickertapes that drove early computers. My favourite? A poster he made for the National Portrait Gallery’s pictures of famous British personalities exhibition, in which he composed an identikit image of the Prince of Wales from fragments of other celebrity portraits. Fletcher was, says Myerson, “as much of a writer as a designer”, rare in a profession stereotyped for loving the shape of words more than their meaning. But then, adds King, “he always thought of writing as if it were drawing”.
This merging of image and text — so that the shape of the word reinforced or added allusions to the linguistic meaning of the text — Fletcher pioneered after an apprenticeship that merged his innate rigour and anarchy, the classic typography of Swiss and German graphics and the energetic commercial Pop of America in the Fifties.
At the Central School and Royal College of Art in London he trained under and alongside emergent Pop artists such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake. Escaping to Yale he trained under Josef Albers and Paul Rand, mastermind of the “logo-with-personality” for IBM, UPS and ABC. To this connection between cerebral, European economy and American “wisecrack” was then added the excitement of London in the Sixties. “He lived the whole Swinging London thing,” says Myerson, “but what was incredible is that he did this as a graphic designer. Before this, graphic designers were the lowest of the low, one up from a signwriter. Fletcher made them exciting, but also respected, a profession.”
His firm, Fletcher/Forbes/Gill, almost singlehandedly invented in Britain the idea of what we now call branding, corporate identity and the figure of a graphic designer as something both sexy — worthy, as he was, of a Vogue photoshoot — and respectable. Before them, says Myerson, “there were advertising agencies peopled by Oxford and Cambridge graduates who did the words, with the secondary-modern kids in the basement doing the making. There was a real class divide,” which Fletcher blew away in true Sixties style.
In 1972 he set up the design consultancy Pentagram with the designers Colin Forbes and Mervyn Kurlansky, the architect Theo Crosby and product designer Kenneth Grange. It was the epitome of the tight, rigorous professional outfit, expanding corporate identity from mere letterheads and logos to complete environments, right up to architecture. It ballooned across the world, but Fletcher was always, says King, “able to find life in even the most tedious corporate jobs”.
He did this, and hammered home his belief in the overarching importance of graphic identity, by “always talking to the man at the top”, adds King. By giving a corporate beast a human face he could better imbue its words with personality. When in 1992 Fletcher left Pentagram to work on his own quirky projects, “it seemed perverse to most people”, says Myerson, “like leaving something right at the top. But of course it was entirely within character. When it all got too respectable, he naturally took a step sideways. What else would a man like him do, but what you least expected?”
Alan Fletcher: Fifty years of Graphic Work (and Play) is at the Design Museum, London SE1 (0870 9099009), from Saturday to February 18. Fletcher’s posthumous book Picturing and Poeting is published by Phaidon
