Drawing inspiration.

Kate Feld previews a new art exhibition at CUBE that celebrates one of Britain’s greatest graphic designers

You might not know his name, but chances are you’ve seen his work. Alan Fletcher was one of the most celebrated and prolific British designers of the Twentieth Century, and though he died in 2006, his work continues to influence designers all over the world.

CUBE is giving his work the full retrospective treatment with Alan Fletcher: Fifty years of graphic work (and play), a touring exhibition from the Design Museum. This exhibition explores the inventiveness and variety of his designs for big-name clients including Olivetti, ICI and Lloyds. It also features some of Fletcher’s unusual personal projects in lettering, collage and illustration.

It was in these, and in books like 2001’s The Art of Looking Sideways (a cult classic artists’ inspiration book of quotes, meant to be opened at any page), that you get a sense of a man whose creative well never really ran dry; he was open-minded, playful and never afraid to experiment. True to form, he died in 2006 wearing a shirt hand-lettered with a phrase from one of the many posters he produced: ‘I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.’

Fletcher founded design firm Fletcher/Forbes/Gill in the 1960s and Pentagram in the 1970s, an iconoclastic and visionary firm that completely changed the way designers worked. Designer (and Manchester Creative Director) Peter Saville worked in the office next to Fletcher at Pentagram in the 1990s, and the two men struck up a friendship based on mutual respect and friendly debate, Saville recalls, despite being ‘polar opposites’ in their approaches to design.

Saville puts Alan’s work at the forefront of a newly inclusive, democratic movement in advertising and design that came out of New York in the postwar years. As a promising young design student, Fletcher found his way to New York, via a Yale scholarship. During his two years in America he managed to work with many of the leading lights of American design. When he returned to the UK, he brought with him a new way of doing things.

‘Alan strove to appeal universally in his work,’ Saville said. ‘You weren’t excluded from it by not having read the right books or gone to the right school. It didn’t matter what you knew, there was information for everyone, a language developed for everyone. That was Alan’s métier.’

Saville mentions specific Fletcher projects like his Pirelli tire adverts or the elegant V&A logo (still in use today) as exemplifying what was special about his work. ‘I think the distinction to make about them is that they’re not just known, they’re loved. He invested the work with an insightfulness, a wit, and those are the qualities that touch us.’

Alan Fletcher: Fifty years of graphic work (and play), 22 January – 4 March 2010, CUBE (£4/£3.50). Images (top to bottom): John Cage (1993), Design: Alan Fletcher; Down with Dogma (1993), Design: Alan Fletcher, both copyright: Design Museum

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