Alan Fletcher

Alan Fletcher is one of the most influential figures in post-war British graphic design. The fusion of the cerebral European tradition with North America’s emerging pop culture in the formulation of his distinct approach made him a pioneer of independent graphic design in Britain during the late 1950s and 1960s. As a founding partner of Pentagram in the 1970s, Fletcher helped to establish a model of combining commercial partnership with creative independence. He also developed some of the most memorable graphic schemes of the era, notably the identities of Reuters and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and made his mark on book design as creative director of Phaidon.

Born to a British family in Kenya 1931, Fletcher came to Britain as a five year-old after his father became terminally ill to be bought up by his mother and grandparents in West London. During World War II he attended Christ’s Hospital, a boarding school in Horsham, where he wore a uniform that he later described as “a second-hand medieval costume”. Along with his classmates, Fletcher was destined for a career in the army, the church or banking. Being totally unsuited to any of these, Fletcher opted out of the rigid grooves of 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 forward looking and cosmopolitan than the last. Leaving Hammersmith for the livelier environment of the Central School, he found himself in class with his future partners Colin Forbes and Theo Crosby as well as such other future luminaries as Derek Birdsall and Ken Garland. 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, where his contemporaries included the artists Peter Blake and Joe Tilson.
Towards the end of Fletcher’s three-year stint at the RCA, the head of design Richard Guyatt exchanged places with Alvin Eisenman, his opposite number at Yale University. Fletcher suggested to Guyatt that, if professors were able to swap places, students should have the same privilege. The result was a travel scholarship awarded to Fletcher on graduation on the condition that he attends classes at Yale.

Before arriving in the United States, Fletcher’s vision of life there was informed by the movies: all Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and bright lights. Intending never to return to the 40-watt gloom of London, he married his Italian girlfriend Paola, acquired emigration papers as part of the white Kenyan quota and entered the US across the Canadian border in 1956. Over the next two years Fletcher absorbed as much of US graphic design as he could.

Fletcher loved the US and would happily have stayed there, but his wife, Paola, was pining for Europe so the Fletchers returned to London via Milan. During their short stay in Italy, he had worked at the Pirelli design studio thereby enabling Fletcher to return with Pirelli as a client. In Fletcher’s eyes, London appeared as gloomy in 1959 as it had been on his departure. Fighting the urge the Fletcher get on the first boat back to New York, he settled in a corner of his friend Colin Forbes’s studio for a weekly rent. Forbes had become head of graphic design at Central and Fletcher combined working for clients such as Time and Life magazine and Pirelli with teaching there for one day a week. Two years later Fletcher and Forbes decided to formalize their working relationship and, with the US graphic designer Bob Gill, who had settled in London, they established Fletcher/Forbes/Gill.