Portrait by Primoz Korosec

It is with great sadness that we bid farewell to Alan Fletcher.

I came to know his work only recently with the purchase of his fantastic book The Art of Looking Sideways. The book is a mix of a design explosion, a glimpse into a vast and varied intellect, a superb exposition on what it means to be visually aware and most touchingly, a heartfelt ode to the importance of design both publically and personally.



Stitched together loosely, the book follows the thoughts of the author as the design meanders wildly between expressive, childlike drawings and paintings and hyper-sophisticated typographical treatments. “This book has no thesis, is neither a whodunit nor a how-to-do-it, has no beginning, middle or end,” Mr. Fletcher wrote in his introduction. “It’s a journey without a destination.”


While at Phaidon, he designed numerous books.


A long association with Fortune magazine - and a great amount of mutual trust - allowed him to attempt approaches no other magazine (or designer) could carry off.


The iconic logo for the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Mr. Fletcher is best known for having started Pentagram back in the day and more recently working with Phaidon as a consultant art director. Mr. Fletcher, after reading a book on witchcraft, coined the name Pentagram, meaning a five-pointed star, one for each partner in his firm. The partners adopted it despite some misgivings about the association with witchcraft. He thought it was funny.



He is most often thought of as a conceptual designer. Avoiding ornament and shunning popular visual movements, he was known to strike piercingly at an witty or obscure point… it often wasn’t always the point you thought it was going to be. His designs are almost always striking, or gutsy, as some may call it. He used the word panache to describe it:

“Style is a curious word because it can mean all sorts of things, from mannerism to charisma,” he told English design critic Rick Poynor. “However, as far as I’m concerned, either what you’ve done has panache or it hasn’t. You can’t design panache.”


In the first example of a visual conceit which has since been used and reused, this popular bus advertisment won the heart of London when it appeared.



He is renown in the design world for his eclectic wit, sheer perseverance and a list of accomplished associations with some of the world’s most design-conscious brands: among them the Victoria and Albert Museum, BP, Shell, Cunard, Fortune magazine, Reuters, Time and Life, IBM, furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, Pirelli, Lloyds of London, Olivetti, Domus magazine, Polaroid and Penguin Books.Mr. Fletcher designed everything from corporate identities - logos, literature, advertising, signage, calendars - to toys, books, newspapers and office interiors.


The Reuters logo, retired in 1996, has long been touted as one of the most identifiable, evocative and enduring corporate logos ever. Shame on Reuters for getting rid of it.

Mr. Flether's curioisity was boundless and his allegiance unwavering to the necessity of high art infused into commonplace design. His house is surrounded by an almost illegibly extended tall array of letters, the descenders of which form a fence.

Early Influences on Mr. Fletcher included Alvin Eisenman, Norman Ives, Herbert Matter, Bradbury Thompson, the ex-Bauhaus Joseph Albers ("a bit of a prima donna," according to Fletcher), Saul Bass and of course Paul Rand.



The Kuwaiti Royal Commercial Bank's logo is relatively unknown to the western world, but it was a work of love for Alan Fletcher, who found the necessary Arabic script to be entrancing.



Two fortunate incidents formed Mr. Fletcher's professional life:

In 1957, while still a student at Yale, he was visiting Fortune magazine in New York just as news of the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik came through: a cover was commissioned for first thing Monday morning and he was there, so he got the assignment. It was an incredible coup; no student would ever get a Fortune cover commission. He subsequently worked freelance, encouraged by Saul Bass, Rand and Leo Lionni, eventually working full time for Fortune.



Later, He had planned to set up a studio in Venezuela, but a local revolution helped change his mind. As fortune would have it, the last boat out went to Genoa, and he got a job in the design studio of Pirelli in Milan.

Apparently he was the functional opposite of a grumpy old man, and stayed lighthearted till the end. He died of cancer on september 21st, wearing a T-shirt with handwritten words taken from one of his posters:

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.’’

Alan Gerard Fletcher, designer, born September 27 1931; died September 21 2006

Labels: advertising, Design