Richard Eckersley (designer)

Last updated
Richard Eckersley
Born(1941-02-20)20 February 1941
Lancashire, England
Died 16 April 2006(2006-04-16) (aged 65)
Lincoln, Nebraska, US
Occupation British graphic designer

Richard Hilton Eckersley (20 February 1941 – 16 April 2006) [1] was a graphic designer best known for experimental computerized typography designed to complement deconstructionist academic works.

Graphic designer person who who assembles images, typography or motion graphics to create a piece of design

A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed or electronic media, such as brochures (sometimes) and advertising. They are also sometimes responsible for typesetting, illustration, user interfaces, and web design. A core responsibility of the designer's job is to present information in a way that is both accessible and memorable.

Originated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is an approach to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. Derrida's approach consisted of conducting readings of texts with an ear to what runs counter to the intended meaning or structural unity of a particular text. The purpose of deconstruction is to show that the usage of language in a given text, and language as a whole, are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. Throughout his readings, Derrida hoped to show deconstruction at work.

Born in Lancashire, England, his father Tom Eckersley was a noted poster designer during and after the Second World War, later to become head of the School of Art and Design at the London College of Printing in the 1960s. After attending Trinity College in Dublin, Eckersley began his design career at Lund Humphries, the publisher of Typographica and The Penrose Annual , where E. McKnight Kauffer had once been art director.

Tom Eckersley English poster artist and design teacher

Tom Eckersley was an English poster artist and teacher of design.

Dublin Capital and chief port of Ireland, cultural, educational and business centre

Dublin is the capital of, and largest city in, Ireland. It is on the east coast of Ireland, in the province of Leinster, at the mouth of the River Liffey, and is bordered on the south by the Wicklow mountains. It has an urban area population of 1,173,179, while the population of the Dublin Region, as of 2016, was 1,347,359, and the population of the Greater Dublin area was 1,904,806.

He later joined the state-sponsored Kilkenny Design Workshops in Ireland. After six years there, Eckersley took a teaching position in the United States, and in 1981 he got a job at the University of Nebraska Press, where he shook up the field with computer-designed typography for Avital Ronell's Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. The unorthodox design had the intended effect of breaking up the text's readability.

Ireland Island in north-west Europe, 20th largest in world, politically divided into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland (a part of the UK)

Ireland is an island in the North Atlantic. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St George's Channel. Ireland is the second-largest island of the British Isles, the third-largest in Europe, and the twentieth-largest on Earth.

University of Nebraska Press American university press

The University of Nebraska Press, also known as UNP, was founded in 1941 and is an academic publisher of scholarly and general-interest books. The press is under the auspices of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the main campus of the University of Nebraska system. UNP publishes primarily non-fiction books and academic journals, in both print and electronic editions. The press has particularly strong publishing programs in Native American studies, Western American history, sports, world and national affairs, and military history. The press has also been active in reprinting classic books from various genres, including science fiction and fantasy.

Avital Ronell American philosopher

Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, she teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. She has written about such topics as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone; the structure of the test in legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical domains; stupidity; the disappearance of authority; childhood; and deficiency. Ronell is a founding editor of the journal Qui Parle and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Related Research Articles

Jan Tschichold German graphic designer

Jan Tschichold was a calligrapher, typographer and book designer. He played a significant role in the development of graphic design in the 20th century – first, by developing and promoting principles of typographic modernism, and subsequently idealizing conservative typographic structures. His direction of the visual identity of Penguin Books in the decade following World War II served as a model for the burgeoning design practice of planning corporate identity programs. He also designed the much-admired typeface Sabon.

Tibor Kalman was an American graphic designer of Hungarian origin, well known for his work as editor-in-chief of Colors magazine.

David Carson (graphic designer) American graphic designer

David Carson is an American graphic designer, art director and surfer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design, and use of experimental typography. He was the art director for the magazine Ray Gun, in which he employed much of the typographic and layout approach for which he is known. In particular, his widely imitated aesthetic defined the so-called "grunge typography" era.

Ladislav Sutnar Czech designer, graphic, typographer and artist

Ladislav Sutnar was a graphic designer from Plzeň, Czechoslovakia who was a pioneer of information design and information architecture. Although he is uncredited, his contributions to business organization benefited society, which included creating a user-friendly telephone directory by implementing parenthetical area codes. He received design commissions from a variety of employers, including McGraw-Hill, IBM, and the United Nations. He also worked as art director for Sweet's Catalog Service for almost twenty years. Sutnar held many one-man exhibitions, and his work is on permanent display in MoMA. He is best known for his books, including Controlled Visual Flow: Shape, Line and Color, Package Design: The Force of Visual Selling, and Visual Design in Action: Principles, Purposes. Sutnar was a master of exhibition design, typography, advertising, posters, magazine and book design.

Germano Facetti was an Italian graphic designer who headed design at Penguin Books from 1962 to 1971.

Lucian Bernhard German artist

Lucian Bernhard was a German graphic designer, type designer, professor, interior designer, and artist during the first half of the twentieth century.

Noel Martin American artist

Noel Martin was an American graphic designer.

Herb Lubalin American artist

Herbert F. "Herb" Lubalin was an American graphic designer. He collaborated with Ralph Ginzburg on three of Ginzburg's magazines: Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde, and was responsible for the creative visual beauty of these publications. He designed a typeface, ITC Avant Garde, for the last of these; this font could be described as a reproduction of art-deco, and is seen in logos created in the 1990s and 2000s.

Steven Heller (design writer) American journalist

Steven Heller is an American art director, journalist, critic, author, and editor who specializes on topics related to graphic design.

Philip Baxter Meggs was an American graphic designer, professor, historian and author of books on graphic design. His book History of Graphic Design is a definitive, standard read for the study of graphic design.

Rick Poynor is a British writer on design, graphic design, typography, and visual culture.

Edward Fella is an American graphic designer, artist and educator. He created the OutWest type in 1993. His work is held in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the Brauer Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the recipient of the 2007 AIGA Medal. He is also the recipient of the Chrysler Award in 1997. Curt Cloninger called Fella as "the contemporary master of hand-drawn typography."

Henry Wolf was an Austrian-born, American graphic designer, photographer and art director. He influenced and energized magazine design during the 1950s and 1960s with his bold layouts, elegant typography, and whimsical cover photographs while serving as art director at Esquire, Bazaar, and Show magazines. Wolf opened his own photography studio, Henry Wolf Productions, in 1971, while also teaching magazine design and photography classes. In 1976, he was awarded the American Institute of Graphic Arts Medal for Lifetime Achievement and, in 1980, was inducted into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame.

Reginald Clifton Firth (1904–1980) was a New Zealand graphic designer and photographer. Influenced by writings of the Bauhaus and contemporaries, especially the Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold, Firth’s design work of the late 1920s and early 30s was some of the earliest modernist graphic design in New Zealand. Firth later went on to be a successful portrait photographer in Auckland during and after the Second World War.

Jayme Odgers American artist

Jayme Odgers is an artist, photographer and graphic designer. He is best known for his new wave design and experimental collage photography of the 1980s.

Alvin Lustig was an American book designer, graphic designer and typeface designer. Lustig has been honored by the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame for his significant contributions to American design.

Alexander Isley is an American graphic designer and educator.

Louise Fili American artist

Louise Fili is an Italian-American graphic designer recognized for her elegant use of typography and timeless quality in her design. Her work often draws on inspiration from her love of Italy, Modernism, and European Art Deco styles. Considered a leader in the postmodern return to historical styles in book jacket design, Fili explores historic typography combined with modern colors and compositions.

Deborah Sussman American environmental graphic designer

Deborah Evelyn Sussman was an American designer and a pioneer in the field of environmental graphic design. Her work incorporated graphic design into architectural and public spaces.

References

<i>The New York Times</i> Daily broadsheet newspaper based in New York City

The New York Times is an American newspaper based in New York City with worldwide influence and readership. Founded in 1851, the paper has won 125 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper. The Times is ranked 17th in the world by circulation and 2nd in the U.S.