Graphic designer, typographer and art director Derek Birdsall, who died at the age of 89, belonged to the “old guard” of the profession, a survivor from the pre-digital era. Highly regarded by his peers, his work reached a diverse audience for more than five decades. The ‘new woman’ of the 1960s was presented with fashion through awareness-raising articles in the monthly magazine Nova, of which Birdsall was artistic director for a time; Teachers of the Macmillan era had never had it so good and bought the Penguin Education series, attracted by the humor of its ingenious covers.
In the half century that followed, gallery visitors and art historians were grateful for the careful arrangement, elegant layout and typographical detail of almost 100 catalogs and art books he designed, most memorable for the exhibition of George Stubbs’s famous horse paintings at the Tate Gallery. in 1984, the successful Treasure Houses of Britain for the National Gallery of Art in Washington the following year, and Rembrandt and His Workshop for Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in 1991.
But his best-known and most widely distributed draft in Britain was Common Worship, the service book of the Church of England, published in 2000.
Born in Knottingley, West Yorkshire, Derek was the son of Hilda (née Smith) and Frederick Birdsall, a labourer. After leaving King’s school, Wakefield, he went to Wakefield College of Art, where he already owned a small Adana press.
A scholarship took him to the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. There, modern principles of typography were spread, largely through the printer-designer Anthony Froshaug, whose disciplined aesthetic enchanted a generation, and Birdsall earned a National Diploma in Design (1955).
Two years’ service in the Ordnance Corps, where he drew maps for the printing works in Cyprus, provided a way to extend his professional training, and in 1959 he co-founded one of the first design groups, in Bloomsbury Place, just a stone’s throw away from Central School.
BDMW was a collaboration with George Daulby, George Mayhew and Peter Wildbur. All four supported their income by teaching part-time: for Birdsall this was in the design department of the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts in Clerkenwell, now the London College of Communication, where I first met him.
Dedicated to his work, in the 1950s Derek made a habit of placing a more or less finished design at the foot of the bed so that it was the first thing he saw in the morning and could be assessed with fresh eyes .
European modernism – he had a large collection of Swiss posters – and an interest in geometry and the history of type design gave Derek much of his typographic style and expertise; his inventiveness was fueled by American examples of young New York designers, before Bob Gill and Robert Brownjohn, among others, came to work in London. His greatest admiration went out to his friend, the experienced American designer Paul Rand.
Chess and poker sharpened his reasoning and concentration. Long pub lunches – part of his daily routine – developed his skills in persuasion and anecdote. In 1964 he moved to offices in King Street, Covent Garden, where the large snooker table took up more space than the worktops. The studio was the site of lively parties, bringing together fellow designers, some clients and his many friends.
He brought in Derek Forsyth, the advertising manager at Pirelli, and introduced editorial and production consultants. The decade presented Birdsall with opportunities that suited his main interest: finding a precise graphic or typographical form for the content. He was one of many art directors in Nova’s 10-year life, starting in 1965, and named his studio Omnific.
His commercial design included publicity for Lotus cars and point-of-sale displays and a logo for Dorothy Gray cosmetics. American customers sought him out. Birdsall was a long-time consultant for IBM Europe, ran oil company Mobil’s art magazine Pegasus and designed catalogs for exhibitions sponsored by the international conglomerate United Technologies, whose interests ranged from aircraft to industrial products. He designed a prospectus for the summer school of the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture in Italy, and taught there.
He also co-authored two books on chess, Fischer v Spassky Reykjavik 1972, published that year, and A Book of Chess, from the following, and designed and edited The Technology of Man: A Visual History (1979). In addition to covers for the Penguin’s Education series, he designed many on the fiction list. In the late 1980s he returned to art direction for Independent magazine (1989-93), followed by designs for a new Sunday Telegraph magazine (1995).
A specialty of Derek was designing catalogs raisonnés – extensive presentations of works by a specific artist. Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas was a book that weighed five kilos. This was followed by Georgia O’Keeffe (1,200 pages in two volumes, 1999); George Stubbs, building on the Tate catalogue, with text by Judy Egerton (2007); and Frank Auerbach, with text by William Feaver (2009). In this he took particular care to respect the relative size of original paintings and liked to include judiciously selected full-size details.
Birdsall was generous in the encouragement he gave students. When a former student came to repay a loan, Derek refused the money, suggesting that it could one day in turn be transferred to a student with the same problems.
Derek, always eager to share his experiences, would often gently pat your forearm with conspiratorial intimacy and begin, “You know, and I know, that….”
But as well as seeking consensus on a piece of pre-digital typographer knowledge, he was just as likely to confide in the address of the only typewriter repair shop within reach of his Islington studio.
He enjoyed repeating client comments, such as the Bishop of Salisbury’s description of the color of the headings in the Prayer Book as Sarum Red, a specification that Derek adopted. In describing the “delightful ampersand” of one typeface, he was passionate rather than precious.
At a reception at Buckingham Palace, he reprimanded a Design Council official who had briefed Queen Elizabeth II on the fiscal value of the design industry. “Your Majesty, design is not an industry,” he said. Derek believed it was a craft.
Serious and brilliant, he could be flamboyant. With a large black fedora, his appearance was something of film director John Huston – but with a roll instead of a cigar.
His public lectures – down-to-earth revelations and stories from professional life – were welcomed by students. And although it ended in a row with the combative headmaster Jocelyn Stevens, he enjoyed his time as a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art (1987-88).
Birdsall became a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, appointed Royal Designer for Industry (1982) and won the New York Art Directors Club Gold Medal (1987) and the Prince Philip Designers Prize (2005).
Notes on Book Design (2004), which chronicles his half-century of experience, details almost everything he had to teach and illustrates his vast range as a book designer.
In 1954 he married Shirley Thompson. She and his daughter Elsa, both colleagues in his studio, survive him, as do his sons Christopher, Simon and Jesse, seven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
• Derek Walter Birdsall, graphic designer, born August 1, 1934; died May 4, 2024