TWELVE UNUSUAL ALPHABETS
COMPILED BY CROSBY FLETCHER FORBES
Crosby, Fletcher, Forbes
Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes [Theo Crosby, Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes]: TWELVE UNUSUAL ALPHABETS COMPILED BY CROSBY FLETCHER FORBES. London: Mears, Caldwell, Hacker, [n. d., 1970]. Portfolio folder housing 12 sheets. Folder worn, spotted and splitting at spine, all 12 sheets with staple holes to corners. Twelve vintage full alphabets with “freedom to reproduce . . . given freely” printed recto on all sheets. A good to very good set.
[12] 12 x 12 -inch [315 X 305 mm] sheets each reproducing a full alphabet selected by Theo Crosby, Alan Fletcher, and Colin Forbes, and printed by Mears, Caldwell, Hacker, Letterpress & Lithography, London SW9. Originally distributed as a Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes Christmas promotion, this set was distributed by Mears, Caldwell, Hacker to select clientele.
England was ablaze with creative activity in the early Sixties. Before our very eyes and ears The Beatles were transmogrified from a funky Liverpool group into an international musical life force. The satiric revue "Beyond the Fringe" launched Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook as comics and social critics. Mary Quant was influencing the way women designed themselves. And you’d better believe that Graphic design was part of the cultural explosion, and Crosby, Fletcher, Forbes were at the forefront.
Theo Crosby RA (South Africa, 1925 – 1994) was an architect, editor, writer and sculptor, engaged with major developments in design across four decades. He was also an early vocal critic of modern urbanism. He is best remembered as a founding partner of the international design partnership Pentagram, and as architect for the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe in London. However, his role as éminence grise in British architecture and design from 1950 to 1990 helped effect much broader changes.
Crosby studied architecture under Rex Martienssen, an acolyte of Le Corbusier, at Witwatersrand University Johannesburg. From 1944 he participated in the Allied invasion of Italy. His post-VE day travels around that country introduced him to a world—of urbanity and cultural generosity—which he had never experienced in South Africa, and which opened his eyes to the power of the public realm. He settled in England in 1948, following the South African government's official sanctioning of apartheid. In 1949 he began work at the modernist architectural practice of Fry, Drew and Partners on Gloucester Place in London, combining this with studying sculpture in the evenings at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Here he came into contact with teachers Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Edward Wright, with whom he would later work on the exhibition This is Tomorrow, and fellow students Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes, with whom he would later form a design partnership. The Central, with its emphasis on cross-disciplinary work, would have a lasting effect on Crosby's view of the architect's role. He also formed links at this time with the modernist MARS Group, and the Architectural Association.
Between 1953 and 1962, while establishing his own architectural practice, Crosby acted as Technical Editor (under Monica Pidgeon's editorship) of Architectural Design magazine, which was seeking to bring a more youthful, vital and progressive approach to the subject than the previously dominant Architectural Review. At first his main job was laying out the pages, for which he sought guidance from the Central School, but was "rebuffed". It was left to the painter Edward Wright to provide him with some instruction a couple of years later. He also "designed beautiful abstract covers, sometimes including the odd word to describe the theme du jour – "houses", "roofs", "Sheffield" – but rarely featuring photography or even buildings.”
Attaching himself to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, Crosby attended meetings of the Independent Group there, and was particularly impressed by the group's discussions of the impact of mass communication and information theory on architecture and design. It was Crosby who suggested, and steered to completion, what would be the Independent Group's swansong—the watershed exhibition This Is Tomorrow at London's Whitechapel Gallery. Characteristically the exhibition was organised around twelve multidisciplinary teams. Crosby collaborated on his installation with graphic designers Germano Facetti and Edward Wright, and the sculptor William Turnbull. The installations which garnered most attention, however, were those of Richard Hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker (with its Pop-Art imagery including Robby the Robot), and Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson and Nigel Henderson (which featured a "primitive" pavilion studded with evocative ephemera). In AD Crosby wrote that the exhibition was "evidence of attempts towards a new sort of order, a way towards that integration of the arts that must come if our culture is not merely to survive, but come truly to life". It was, he said later, "my first experience at a loose, horizontal organisation of equals", and claimed it was the inspiration behind the distinctive organisation of Pentagram. In characteristic fashion, Crosby—alert to practicalities—sold the ads that made the memorable exhibition catalogue possible. In 1960 he showed his own sculpture at the ICA, alongside paintings by Peter Blake and interventions by John Latham.
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw Crosby add to his reputation as an architect through a number of temporary exhibitions. With Edward Wright he produced the Architectural Design magazine's stands at the 1955 and 1958 Building Exhibitions, and the congress and exhibition buildings for the 6th International Union of Architects Congress, held in London in 1961, both of which combined architecture and graphics in a striking fashion. Such projects also reinforced his belief in the desirability of cross-disciplinary work in the arts. Later he remembered how, after completing the UIA project "we all felt very pleased with each other and have I suppose often wondered why such occasions, generous and spontaneous are so rare". Three years later he designed a pavilion at the Milan Triennale, for which he was awarded Gran Premio. Fletcher Forbes Gill, the design company that Crosby would subsequently join, produced the graphics for the pavilion.
In 1965, on the departure of Bob Gill from the design partnership Fletcher Forbes Gill, Crosby joined to form Crosby Fletcher Forbes, reportedly after Fletcher and Forbes had considered extending their proposals for the corporate identity of Shell Petroleum to encompass the architecture of Shell gas stations. The decision to have an architect on the team was soon vindicated when Reuters, having asked Crosby to redesign its boardroom, was then persuaded to work with Fletcher on a new corporate identity and logo. The team "had an ability to combine the formal restraint of Swiss modernism with the wit of the Madison Avenue advertising industry", which "set them apart from other British design firms"
In 1972 the three were joined by Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky, to form Pentagram, which was organised as a horizontal cooperative of equals, in which profits were shared, and staff and overheads pooled. Pentagram went on to build up a formidable worldwide reputation. Throughout the Pentagram years Crosby's passion for publication was expressed through a provocative series of "Pentagram Papers" (the title most likely a punning reference to the Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971).
Alan Gerard Fletcher (Kenya, 1931 – 2006) was described by The Daily Telegraph as "the most highly regarded graphic designer of his generation, and probably one of the most prolific.”
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Fletcher moved to England at age five, and studied at four art schools: Hammersmith School of Art, Central School of Art, Royal College of Art (1953–1956) and lastly Yale School of Art and Architecture at Yale University in 1956. He studied at the Hammersmith School of Art from 1949, then at the Central School of Art, where he studied under noted typographer Anthony Froshaug and befriended Colin Forbes, Terence Conran, David Hicks, Peter Firmin, Theo Crosby, Derek Birdsall and Ken Garland. After a year teaching English at Berlitz Language School in Barcelona, he returned to London to study at the Royal College of Art from 1953 to 1956, where he met Peter Blake, Joe Tilson, Len Deighton, Denis Bailey, David Gentleman and Dick Smith.
He married Paola Biagi, an Italian national, in 1956 (they met with a heated discussion about if orange and pink were a good or bad colour pair). He then took up a scholarship to study at the Yale School of Art and Architecture at Yale University, under Alvin Eisenman, Norman Ives, Herbert Matter, Bradbury Thompson, Josef Albers and Paul Rand. He visited Robert Brownjohn, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar in New York, became friends with Bob Gill, and was commissioned by Leo Lionni to design a cover for Fortune magazine in 1958. After a visit to Venezuela, he returned to London in 1959, having worked briefly for Saul Bass in Los Angeles and Pirelli in Milan.
He founded a design firm called 'Fletcher/Forbes/Gill' with Colin Forbes and Bob Gill in 1962. An early product was their 1963 book Graphic Design: A Visual Comparison in John Lewis's Studio Paperbacks series. Clients included Pirelli, Cunard, Penguin Books and Olivetti. Gill left the partnership in 1965 and was replaced by Theo Crosby, so the firm became Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes. Two new partners joined, and the partnership evolved into Pentagram in 1972, with Forbes, Crosby, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky, with clients including Lloyd's of London and Daimler Benz. Much of his work is still in use: a logo for Reuters made up of 84 dots, which he created in 1965, was retired in 1992, but his 1989 "V&A" logo for Victoria and Albert Museum, and his "IoD" logo for the Institute of Directors remain in use.
Colin Forbes (Great Britain, 1928 – ) is notable as a former head of the graphic design program at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, and as one of the founders of the Pentagram design studio.
Forbes was born in London in 1928. He studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and worked briefly under graphic designer and journalist Herbert Spencer. After graduating, Forbes returned to become Head of Graphic Design at the Central School at the age of 28. By 1960 Forbes had left teaching for private practice and in 1962 formed Fletcher/Forbes/Gill with Alan Fletcher and Bob Gill. In 1972 Forbes and Fletcher were two of the five founders of Pentagram design studio, a leading studio in the world of design. Forbes was a 1991 recipient of the AIGA medal.