Alan Fletcher
Alan Fletcher is known as one of the most influential figures in post-war British graphic design. His style merges European tradition with North America’s emerging pop culture, making him a central figure in Brittish independent graphic design during the late fifties and sixties. As a founding partner of design company named Pentagram which was founded in the1970s, Fletcher helped combine commercial partnership with creative independence. He also developed some of the now most memorable graphic schemes in his time, notably the identities of Reuters and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and put his stamp on book design as creative director of Phaidon.
Fletcher was born to a British family in Kenya 1931, making his way through the early stages of education at a time when young males were expected to pursue a career in the army, the church or banking. Knowing he was totally uninterested and unsuited to any of these, Fletcher opted out of the strict post-war British middle class life and took up a place at Hammersmith School of Art. During the 1950s he attended four different art schools, each one more modern and cosmopolitan than the last. Leaving Hammersmith for the Central School, this is where he met his future partners Colin Forbes and Theo Crosby. After graduating from the Central School, he spent a year teaching English in Barcelona and then won a place at the Royal College of Art, soon he was awarded a travel scholarship on graduation, on the condition that he attend classes at Yale. Over the next two years Fletcher took in as much of US graphic design as he could.
At Yale Fletcher was taught by the renowned US graphic designer, Paul Rand, and the artist Josef Albers. After graduating from Yale, Fletcher set off for Latin America but stopped off in Los Angeles, hoping to earn money to finance the trip. Here he Worked for Saul Bass as his assistant for a few weeks.
Fletcher and Forbes grew closer as both friends and designers, eventually deciding to formalise their working relationship, merging their partnership with US graphic designer Bob Gill, who had settled in London. This marked the birth of their establishment named Fletcher/Forbes/Gill. Bringing together their own individual clients and renting a studio located nearby Baker Street which quickly became the most fashionable designers establishment in town. The Fletcher/Forbes/Gill style is perfectly summarised by an advertisement for Pirelli- illustrating the grip of a tyre with a delicate curving typeface. The concept is direct, the graphic elements are restrained and the composition is skilful. The fusion of type and image was considered extremely innovative amongst British graphic design. Praised within London’s growing design community, Fletcher, Forbes and Gill were among the first graphic designers to make their mark outside it — notably being featured in Vogue magazine.
Fletcher decided to leave the Pentagram company in 1991 due to the recession, building his own range of freelance clients. Among them, Novartis Campus, a large compound of pharmaceutical research and development buildings near Basel in Switzerland. Assuming responsibility for the visual identity of the project, he designed both two-dimensional material and environmental graphic features. Eventually becoming the consultant art director at Phaidon, he not only set high design standards for its art, architecture and design books, but worked with a generation of younger designers as well as to tell his design story by publishing his own books.
