WORLD FAMOUS GRAPHIC DESIGNERS and many more....

 

Alan Gerard Fletcher

Born on September 27, 1931, Alan Fletcher spent early years of his life in Nairobi, Kenya. His father was a civil servant in Kenya but as his father’s health declined considerably, his family moved to England when he was five. Before being evacuated to Christ’s Hospital in Horsham in 1939, he resided at his grandparent’s house in West London. In 1949, Fletcher enrolled himself at the Hammersmith School of Art and then went on to study at the Central School of Art. The latter offered him great opportunities as he trained under an eminent typographer Anthony Froshaug. He also made friends with some of the notable artists of the time including Colin Forbes, David Hicks, Derek Birdsall, Terence Conran and Theo Crosby. Soon after graduation, he moved to Barcelona where he taught English at Berlitz Language School for a year. Upon his return to London, he attended the Royal College of Art (1953-1956). The same year he finished the school he married an Italian, Paola Biagi.

Even after marriage, Fletcher continued his studies as he earned a fellowship at the Yale School of Architecture. There his artistic sense and skills flourished under the supervision of some of the notable graphic designers and artists which include Paul Rand, Herbert Matter, Josef Albers, Alvin Eisenman and Bradbury Thompson. He befriended other designers as well, such as Bob Gill. In 1958, Leo Lionni commissioned Fletcher to design a cover for Fortune magazine. He briefly travelled around and did a stint for Saul Bass in Los Angeles and Pirelli in Milan, but returned to London in 1959.

Subsequently, Fletcher began working on his own design firm. In 1962, he co-founded ‘Fletcher Forbes Gill’, in partnership with Colin Forbes and Bob Gill. The following year they produced Graphic Design: A Visual Comparison. Some of their leading clients included Olivetti, Pirelli, Cunard and Penguin Books. In a few years, Gill left the firm and was replaced by Theo Crosby. The firm evolved into Pentagram in 1972, as two more partners joined it and some noted clients sought their expertise, such as Lloyd’s of London and Daimler Benz. Some of his major works are still used, for instance, a logo for Reuters developed in 1965, “IoD” logo for the Institute of Directors and “V&A” logo for Victoria and Albert Museum.

Moreover, Fletcher also founded British Design & Art Direction in partnership with his friends; David Bailey and Terence Donovan. It was later renamed as Designers and Art Directors Association (D&AD). After decades of producing innovative and inspiring work, he left Pentagram in 1992. Henceforth, he worked from his home in Notting Hill, where his daughter Raffaella Fletcher assisted him. In 1993, he joined the Phaidon Press for which he produced majority of work as art director in his later life. Fletcher believed that design and life are two inseparable things as he put it in the words, “Design is a way of life.” In 1994, Jeremy Myerson published his book of design, titled Beware Wet Paint. Besides, he penned down a number of books on the subject of graphic design and visual thinking. It took Fletcher 18 years to produce his magnum opus, The Art of Looking Sideways (2001). The Design Council awarded him Prince Philip Designers Prize in 1993. Alan Fletcher died of Cancer in 2006, at the age of 74.

 Alexey Brodovitch

Alexey Brodovitch was born in Ogolichi, Russian Empire (now Belarus) to a wealthy family in 1898. His father, Vyacheslav Brodovitch, was a respected physician, psychiatrist and huntsman. His mother was an amateur painter. During the Russo-Japanese War, his family moved to Moscow, where his father worked in a hospital for Japanese prisoners. Alexey was sent to study at the Prince Tenisheff School, a prestigious institution in Saint Petersburg, with the intentions of eventually enrolling in the Imperial Art Academy. He had no formal training in art through his childhood, but often sketched noble profiles in the audience at concerts in the city.

At the start of World War I at the young age of 16, Brodovitch abandoned his dream of entering the Imperial Art Academy and ran away from home to join the Russian army. Not long after, his father had him brought home and hired a private tutor to help Alexey finish school. Upon graduating, Brodovitch ran away again on several occasions. He recalls:

After a week or so I ran away to the front line to kill Germans. But my father, now a military general at the head of a Red Cross hospital train, had plenty of influence, and I was soon brought back to him. On the train back I was employed as a nurses' aid. In East Prussia I ran away again and joined a nearby regiment. Once again I was caught, and this time I was sent to an officers' school, the Corps de Pages. During the Russian Civil War, Brodovitch served with the White Army. While fighting against the Bolsheviks in Odessa, he was badly wounded and was hospitalized for a time in Kislovodsk, in the Caucasus. In 1918, the town was surrounded by the Bolsheviks, forcing Brodovitch into exile. It was during this retreat to the south through Caucasus and Turkey that he met his future wife, Nina.

By good fortune, Alexey's brother Nicolas turned out to be one of the soldiers guarding the refugees in Novorossiysk. Not long after, their father, who had been imprisoned in Saint Petersburg by the Bolsheviks, managed to flee to Novorossiysk in hopes of finding his family. The three were once again together, and arranged for Brodovitch's mother and other relations to join them in Constantinople. Finally reunited, the Brodovitchs made their way to France.

Upon arriving in Paris, Brodovitch wanted to be a painter. A Russian white émigré in Paris, Brodovitch found himself poor and having to work for the first time in his life. He took a job painting houses, while his wife Nina worked as a seamstress. They lived in a cheap, small apartment in the area of Montparnasse, among other Russian artists who had settled in Paris at the end of the 19th century. This group of artists, including Archipenko, Chagall, and Nathan Altman, would meet at the inexpensive Académie Vassilieff, which offered painting and sculpting classes without an instructor. His connections with these young Russian artists led to more artistic work as a painter of backdrops for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Paris was a cosmopolitan city through which many artists and art movements passed. Brodovitch was exposed to everything from Dadaism from Zurich and Berlin, Suprematism and Constructivism from Moscow, Bauhaus design from Germany, Futurism from Italy, De Stijl from the Netherlands, and the native strains of Cubism, Fauvism, Purism and Surrealism. Among these various artistic influences, Brodovitch found his beginnings as a designer.

On nights and weekends away from the Ballets Russes, Brodovitch began sketching designs for textiles, china, and jewelry. By the time his work for the ballet had finished, he had already compiled an extensive portfolio of these side projects and was selling his designs to fashionable shops. He worked part-time doing layouts for Cahiers d'Art, an important art journal, and Arts et Métiers Graphiques, an influential design magazine. While working on layouts, Brodovitch was responsible for fitting together type, photographs, and illustrations on the pages of the magazines. He had the rare opportunity of having influence over the look of the magazine as there was no art director.

He gained public recognition for his work in the commercial arts by winning first prize in a poster competition for an artists' soiree called Le Bal Banal on March 24, 1924. The poster was exhibited on walls all over Montparnasse along with a drawing by Picasso, who took second place. Brodovitch remained proud of this poster throughout his career, always keeping a copy of it pinned to his studio wall. The graphic, light-to-dark inversion of its mask shape, type, and background suggest not only the process of photography, but also represents the process of trading one's identity for another when wearing a mask. It is the oldest surviving work by Brodovitch. He continued to gain recognition as an applied artist due to his success at the Paris International Exhibit of the Decorative Arts in 1925. He received five medals: three gold medals for kiosk design and jewelry, two silver medals for fabrics, and the top award for the Beck Fils pavilion "Amour de l'Art."

After these wins, Brodovitch's career as an applied artist took off. In 1928 he was hired by Athélia, the design studio of the Parisian department store Aux Trois Quartiers, to design and illustrate catalogues and advertisements for their luxury men's boutique, Madelios. Brodovitch was aware that many of the customers were fairly traditional in their tastes, so he balanced out his modern designs with classical Greek references.

An ad for Athélia by Brodovitch. Although employed full-time by Athélia, Brodovitch offered his service as a freelance designer on the side. He started his own studio, L'Atelier A.B., where he produced posters for various clients, including Union Radio Paris and the Cunard shipping company. He was also commissioned by the Parisian publishing house La Pléiade to illustrate three books: Nouvelles by Alexander Pushkin, Contes Fantastiques by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Monsieur de Bougrelon by Jean Lorrain. Brodovitch embraced technical developments from the spheres of industrial design, photography, and contemporary painting. His broad curiosity began to assimilate the most interesting aspects of all these fields into his work, eventually making them his own. He later instilled this same curiosity in his students, encouraging them to use new techniques like the air brush, industrial lacquers, flexible steel needles, and surgical knives.

By the age of 32, Brodovitch had dabbled in producing posters, china, jewelry, textiles, advertisements, and paintings. Eventually specializing in advertising and graphic design, he had become one of the most respected designers of commercial art in Paris. By 1930, however, Paris had lost its luster for Brodovitch. The once-flourishing spirit of adventure and experimentation was fading away. Although he was offered many design positions, Brodovitch turned them down, presumably looking for new locales to advance his designs.  Brodovitch who was born on 1898, Ogolitchi, Russia died on April 15, 1971

Alvin Lustig

Alvin Lustig's contributions to the design of books and book jackets, magazines, interiors, and textiles as well as his teachings would have made him a credible candidate for the AIGA Lifetime Achievement award when he was alive. Before his death, he had already introduced principles of Modern art to graphic design that have had a long-term influence on contemporary practice. He was in the vanguard of a relatively small group who fervently, indeed religiously, believed in the curative power of good design when applied to all aspects of American life. He was a generalist, and yet in the specific media in which he excelled he established standards that are viable today. If one were to reconstruct, based on photographs, Lustig's 1949 exhibition at The Composing Room Gallery in New York, the exhibits on view and the installation would be remarkably fresh, particularly in terms of the current trends in art-based imagery.

Lustig created monuments of ingenuity and objects of aesthetic pleasure. Whereas graphic design history is replete with artifacts that define certain disciplines and are also works of art, for a design to be so considered it must overcome the vicissitudes of fashion and be accepted as an integral part of the visual language. Though Lustig would consider it a small part of his overall output, no single project is more significant in this sense than his 1949 paperback cover for Lorca: 3 Tragedies. It is a masterpiece of symbolic acuity, compositional strength and typographic craft that appears to be, consciously or not, the basis for a great many contemporary book jackets and paperback covers.

The current preference among American book jacket designers for fragmented images, photo-illustration, minimal typography and rebus-like compositions can be traced directly to Lustig's stark black-and-white cover for Lorca, a grid of five symbolic photographs linked in poetic disharmony. This and other distinctive, though today lesser known, covers for the New Directions imprint transformed an otherwise realistic medium-the photograph-into a tool for abstraction through the use of reticulated negatives, photograms and still-lifes. When Lustig's approach (which developed from an interest in montage originally practiced by the European Moderns, particularly the American expatriate E. McKnight Kauffer) was introduced to American book publishing in the late 1940s, covers and jackets were mostly illustrative and also rather decorative. Hard-sell conventions were rigorously followed. Lustig's jacket designs entered taboo marketing territory through his use of abstraction and small, discreetly typeset titles, influenced by the work of Jan Tschichold. Lustig did not believe it was necessary to "design down," as he called it, to achieve better sales.

Lustig was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1986.

In 1993, the American Institute of Graphic Arts awarded Lustig a posthumous AIGA Medal. AIGA awards designers whose work has had "significant impact on the practice of graphic design in the United States."

In 2013, New Directions announced that they will be reissuing a selection of their classic titles with the original Lustig cover designs. In May 2013, New Directions will begin selling a series of postcards and other stationery featuring the artwork of Alvin Lustig. The collective works of Alvin Lustig and Elaine Lustig Cohen were showcased in a special exhibit at the AIGA National Design Center in New York City from December 2010 to February 2013. The exhibit, titled The Lustigs: A Cover Story, was the first to show the work of Alvin and Elaine Lustig together in the same collection.

Lustig developed diabetes as a teenager. As a result of diabetes by 1954 he was virtually blind. He developed Kimmelstiel-Wilson syndrome, an incurable kidney disease connected to diabetes. Lustig died at the age of 40 of diabetes-related complications on December 4, 1955.

Elaine Lustig Cohen, Lustig's wife and fellow graphic designer, took over his New York City design firm after his death in 1955. She was awarded an AIGA Medal in 2011 for her contributions to American graphic design.