Reference

Alan Fletcher was the father figure of British graphic design. Through his companies Fletcher/Forbes/Gill, Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes and later Pentagram, he revolutionized the practice and the business of visual communication, introducing Britain to punchy ideas-based graphics and helping transform design from a decorative extra into a key element of corporate and public life.
As far as Fletcher was concerned, the starting point of a work was not how to do it, but why to do it. His professional approach was characterized by a rigor and perfectionism that went uncompromised over his fifty-year career. Richard Schlagman, the owner of Phaidon Press, remembers his initial surprise when a simple request to rethink a book jacket would be met with an inquisition as to the reasons for the book’s very existence. In answering these questions, Schlagman was able to generate the strongest line of art books in the business. In the late 1960s, Fletcher posed related queries to Gerald Long, the CEO of Reuters. Long was persuaded to spend several years working with Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes on an entirely new company identity. The centerpiece was a Fletcher-designed dot-matrix logo that survived for nearly thirty years. Complimenting the day’s technologies in both a practical and an emotional sense, the motif played key role in determining the company’s position in the nascent digital world.

In Fletcher’s view, nothing could be taken for granted. He found the commonplace inability to look beyond the mind-numbingly obvious a constant source of frustration. His visual curiosity spilled over from his corporate work into numerous other projects. His studio contained plan-chests full of collages, typographic games, drawings and watercolors and his shelves heaved with sketch books in which meticulous notes or deftly-drawn layouts were interspersed with deft, lightening-quick drawings of the world around. When taking part in a meeting with friends, he was never without pen and paper. The culmination of Fletcher’s extra-corporate activities is The Art of Looking Sideways, a 500-page, densely packed graphic tour de force. Published in 2001, the book’s visual games, arresting images, curiosities, bon mots and anecdotes emerge from every decade of Fletcher’s career. Visual continuities, such as his constant return to the image of the labyrinth or the pointing hand, are the most obvious expression of an unbroken stream of thought.