Derek Birdsall VOLUME 1 Designers of our time

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 Designers of our time VOLUME 1

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Derek Birdsall VOLUME 1 Designers of our time

DEREK BIRDSALL
Graphic Designer b.1934

As a child, DEREK BIRDSALL loved stationery shops:

infinite stacks and reams of paper, pads, notebooks and
ledgers; instruments for writing, duplicating and erasing;
virgin ink and paper in endless configurations of possibil-
ity. He speculates that this feeling was inherited from his
grandfather, a clerk in a chemical works, and by Birdsall’s
admission, a fountain-pen fetishist.
Birdsall’s first commercial work was hand-drawn and
lettered posters for the local cricket club, for which he
earned sixpence a week for six posters, including instal-
lation and drawing pins. Fifty years later, and still an
obsessive pad collector, he has developed a grid-system
of revelatory simplicity for book design based on the stan-
dard graph paper measured in millimetres that is available
from just about any stationer in Europe.
Derek Birdsall hated school but his beautiful handwriting
was noticed by his grammar school art teacher who rec-
ommended art school. He joined Wakefield College of Art
at the age of 15 to study for the Intermediate Examination,
which is the equivalent of today’s Foundation qualification
for an undergraduate degree in art. Faced with a choice
between Lithography and Lettering, Birdsall chose the
latter. Upon discovering his young age, the Wakefield
authorities insisted he stay for three years, during which
he dabbled in letterpress, bought a printing press of his
own and began to manufacture cards for local businesses
with type “borrowed” from the college’s composing room.
In 1952 he won a scholarship to the Central School of Art
and Design in London.

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At Central, Birdsall came under the influence of

Anthony Froshaug, who – alongside Herbert Spencer
and Edward Wright – taught his students the difference
between beautiful lettering and typography proper, with
its pre-eminent concerns of clarity, directness and, above
all, textual legibility. Birdsall recalls how the 1951 Festival
of Britain had been “typographically Victorian”, but also
how through Froshaug and his teaching colleagues, and
through magazines like the Swiss printing trade journal
SGM, the legacy of Jan Tshichold was beginning to take
hold in Britain in asymmetric print designs of modernist
simplicity and decorative restraint.
When Birdsall left Central, printers were still the
principal source of freelance work, but a few publish-
ers and advertising agencies were beginning to acquire
typographic designers “of modernist approach”. After two
years of National Service in the Royal Army Ordinance
Corps Printing Unit in Cyprus, Birdsall’s first design job
was for the printer Balding & Mansell in 1957: a series of
leaflets to go with opera LP records with the text set in
standard Garamond and “indulgent” titling for Salome in
Legend and Aida in Gothic Shaded.
The style owed much to Froshaug’s own typographic
sensibility which Birdsall describes as “a sense of poetry;
modernism with a delicate touch”. While Froshaug loved
Gill Sans, for example, he was aware of and deployed
the contrapuntal merits of other typefaces. By contrast,
some other hardline modernist typography departments

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Derek Birdsall VOLUME 1 Designers of our time

supplied only Helvetica to their students.

In 1957 Birdsall was offered a job at the very
forward-looking advertising agency Crawfords
under the direction of Tom Wolsely, designing
the typographic lines on print advertisements.
He declined, preferring to remain freelance. This
was the beginning of an era of British design that
Birdsall describes now as “great and classic”, the
1960s and 70s. He began to be aware of Ameri-
can art directors like George Lois and Henry
Calendar illustrating Wolf and to observe vividly how the worlds of
love poetry for Pirelli, advertising and editorial design were constantly
1968
outshining each other and upping the ante set by
the other.
In 1959 Birdsall formed BDMW with George
Daulby, James Mortimer and George Mayhew,
simultaneously with the other epoch-defining
design agency Fletcher, Forbes & Gill. During
the next eight years at BDMW Birdsall acquired
a reputation as the “emergency art director”,
multifariously commissioning and art-directing
photography and illustration as well as designing
typography and layouts for various magazines.
The Independent In 1967 he started his own studio, Omnific! He
Magazine, 1989 continued to design jackets for Penguin books,
including a complete re-style of the Education
series in 1970; art-directed Town and Nova
magazines for short periods as well as Willy

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Fleckhaus’s now legendary Twen; designed

advertisements and literature for Lotus cars and
Mobil Oil in New York; and produced the series
of Pirelli calendars – for the first time not featur-
ing tyres – which are still the work by which he
is best known to many. During the same period
he was appointed to a lectureship at the London
College of Printing and taught at Maidstone Col-
lege of Art, always playing modern jazz during
class as long as it was allowed.
Birdsall began to get fascinated by meeting
writers and still admits no greater thrill than get-
ting a telephone call from an author who wants
him to design his book or its jacket. Gradually,
from the early 1970s, he became known above
all as a book designer. The Penguin covers of
the 1960s and 70s close to art-direction – just
the type on the Penguin covers of the 1960s
and 70s, for example, is brilliantly graphic in
itself, with or without illustration. During this
period he also became a temporary member of
Monty Python as remuneration for designing a
landmark book for them. It was followed by two
decades of grand and beautiful illustrated books
for great world institutions including Yale Center
for British Art, Tate, the V&A and the British
Council – catalogues of art and architecture
and artefacts – with elegant type and illustra-
tive material exquisitely placed and calibrated

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Derek Birdsall VOLUME 1 Designers of our time

in scale. He returned briefly to editorial design

and art direction in the late 1980s with dramatic
and elegant redesigns for the Independent and
Sunday Telegraph magazines.
Birdsall’s evolution as a virtuoso book de-
signer is the clearest indication of the principle
of transparency that he attaches to design. He
is troubled by what he calls the notion of “the
designer as It” – as an egocentric expressionist
(or Author as current discourse has it) – which
is unsatisfying in practice, ephemeral in effect
and ultimately even “tragic”. The preface to his
2004 book notes on book design – part reflective
treatise, part technical manual – introduces “sim-
Book cover design, Harry ply the decent setting of type and the intelligent
Peccinotti photographs. layout of pictures based on a rigorous study of
2009. content”. This is the organising sensibility of all
great graphic designers, who manage to contrive
tension and sublimity within the exercise of
reason. His innocuous recommendation is also,
curiously enough, shared by avant-garde men-
tors of today including Rem Koolhaas and John
Thackara: the sense that design needs to be
re-conceived as the organisation of what already
exists, rather than as the deliberate creation
of novelty. Birdsall’s designs are not born of
mysterious inspiration but “based on simple,
discoverable facts about the books themselves”.
In 2000 Birdsall’s redesign of the Book of

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Common Worship was published by the Church

of England. It is an awesomely demanding feat
of typographic organisation befitting a character
who – notwithstanding our popular image of the
fiery, irrational creative type – has recently filed
all his thoughts and notes since the 1950s on A6
index cards. He has prevailed in a studio at the
bottom of his garden, with few assistants and
minimal technology, through an era of graphically
reductive power-branding and baroque adven-
tures in screen-based design, as a typographer
with – above all else – respect for the image that
words alone can create.

Common Worship,
Services and Prayers for the
Church of England, 2000

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Derek Birdsall VOLUME 1 Designers of our time

BIOGRAPHY
• 1934 Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire

• 1947 First freelance commission at the age of 13: hand-painted posters

for Knottingley Cricket Club

• 1949 Enters Wakefield College of Art

• 1952 Wins scholarship to Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

Fails diploma on account of external assessor’s appraisal: “not enough
work and type too small”

• 1955 Enlists for National Service on ROAC printing unit in Cyprus;

demobbed in 1957 while in same week receiving first commercial com-
mission from Balding & Mansell printers in London. Balding & Mansell
continue to print his work as a supplier

• 1960 Birdsall designs his first Penguin covers

• 1961 Designs literature for Lotus Cars and for Pirelli, including three of
the now famous Calendars; also designs packaging for Morphy Richards
(domestic appliances) and Dorothy Gray (cosmetics)

• 1960-70 Art-directs magazines including Town, Nova and Twen

• 1963 Elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale

• 1970 Re-styles Penguin Education series; also commissioned by Mobil

Oil to design Pegasus, their magazine for world-wide distribution which
eventually ran for 20 years in six languages. The commission was fol-
lowed by several print advertising briefs and books for Mobil companies
all over the world

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• 1977 Designs Monty Python book for a fee comprising temporary mem-
bership of the comedy group and 1/7 of the royalties

• 1980-91 Designs several major art catalogues for Yale University Press,
including Treasure Houses of Britain at the National Gallery in Washing-
ton, DC in 1985 and Rembrandt and His Workshop at the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam in 1991. Also designs catalogues for George Stubbs at the
Tate Gallery (1984), Margaret Bourke-White at the RCA (1990), Henry
Moore for the British Council in New Delhi (1987) and the Duff Cooper
Library for the British Embassy in Paris in 1997.

• 1983 Made Royal Designer for Industry (RDI)

• 1988-92 Returns temporarily to magazine design and art-direction,

designing The Independent Magazine and the first issue of the Sunday
Telegraph Magazine; both are very successful in terms of circulation
increase. Also devises an in-flight magazine for IBM Europe, 1992 Now

• 2000 Designs The Albert Memorial, a book on the restoration of the

eponymous monument, published the Paul Mellon Centre in London.
Against stiff competition wins the commission for a new edition of Com-
mon Worship, the book of liturgical forms and services belonging to the
Church of England.

• 2004 Designs a set of commemorative stamps for the Royal Society of

Arts 250th anniversary and Yale publishes his own Notes on Book Design

• 2005 Awarded Prince Philip Designers Prize.

Wrote ‘Notes On Design’, (Yale University Press, 2005), awarded honorary
MA by the University for Creative Arts in 2008.

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