BOB GILL LOGOS
Bob Gill
Bob Gill [Designer]: BOB GILL LOGOS [New York: n. d.]. Original edition. Slim quarto. Plain glossy stapled wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 20 pp. Collection of 20 logos designed by Bob Gill. Mild stress to spine, otherwise a fine, fresh copy.
5.5 x 8.5 stapled booklet with 20 pages presenting 20 logos designed by Bob Gill.
Bob Gill (born 1931, Brooklyn, NY) attended Philadelphia Museum School of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art before starting a freelance career in New York. His early work included illustrations for Esquire, Architectural Forum, Fortune, Seventeen, The Nation, children’s books and film titles. He won a New York Art Directors Gold Medal for a CBS television title in 1955. In 1960 he moved to London to work for Charles Hobson, a London advertising agency and formed Fletcher / Forbes / Gill (a forerunner of Pentagram).
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 Fletcher, Forbes and Gill were at the forefront.
In the early Sixties, Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes formalized their working relationship with American graphic designer Bob Gill, and Fletcher/Forbes/Gill was born. They pooled their clients, rented a studio in a mews house off Baker Street and became the most fashionable designers in town -- their avant-garde fusion of type and image was unprecedented in the rather stuffy confines of British graphic design. Praised within London’s fledgling design community, Fletcher, Forbes and Gill were among the first graphic designers to make their mark outside it – notably being featured in Vogue magazine – and admiring clients clamoured for their services.
In 1965 Fletcher/Forbes/Gill became Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes, when Bob Gill left and the architect Theo Crosby arrived. In 1975 Gill returned to New York, where he designed a proposed 'peace monument' for Times Square, directed The Double Exposure of Holly, a hardcore porn film, and collaborated with Robert Rabinowitz to devise the multimedia musical Beatlemania, which ran for three years on Broadway.
He continues to advocate a no-nonsense approach to problem-solving, writing (in 1981) that 'Drawing (illustration) is just like design. It’s a process. A means not an end. Both are a way of making statements. So unless you have a specific point of view about something, don’t even begin the process.' He received the British D&AD President’s Award in May 1999.