Alan Fletcher

Having recently come into possession of a hardcover edition of Pentagram: The Compendium, I’m a bit late to Pentagram party. But you know what they say, better late than never.

Today, I heard Alan Fletcher passed, one of the founding members. According to Design Observer:

Colin Forbes deserves the credit for inventing Pentagram’s unique organizational structure, which has endured now for nearly 35 years and where I’ve worked as a partner for 16. But it was Alan Fletcher who showed by example, across three decades, how one could work, and live, within that structure. For him, design was not a profession or a craft, but a life. In an interview for his 1996 book Beware Wet Paint, he told Rick Poynor, “I’d sooner do the same on Monday or Wednesday as I do on a Saturday or Sunday. I don’t divide my life between labour and pleasure.” The title of another book from Pentagram could serve as a concise statement of his philosophy: Living by Design. (link)

In describing his work at Pentagram, DesignMuseum describes it as such:

Fletcher spent the next two decades at Pentagram, a period over which the firm grew from five to eleven partners and opened offices in New York and San Francisco. In the face of this expansion, he maintained the most economic of teams, usually employing between two and five people. This allowed him to combine large-scale identity projects, such as that for the Commercial Bank of Kuwait, with small-scale commissions that offered greater scope for his graphic wit and idiosyncrasy. Fletcher’s portfolio from these years – published in the monograph Beware Wet Paint – is a combination of carefully crafted logos and spontaneous graphic epiphanies. Nothing is heavy handed, and the sketches and doodles demonstrate his ingenuity and charm. (link)

Work, non-work, large-scale work, small-scale work. Sounds like he was a master of balance.