Phil Baines, who has died aged 65 from multiple system atrophy, was one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British graphic design. His work has included books, posters, art catalogs and lettering for three major London landmarks: the Indian Ocean Tsunami Memorial in the grounds of the Natural History Museum and the July 7 memorials in Hyde Park and Tavistock Square, commemorating the victims of the 2005 tsunami. London bombings. These projects highlight Baines’ defining characteristics: a scientific appreciation of letterforms, a deep-seated respect for materials, and a love of collaboration.
Such attributes can also be seen in Baines’ cover designs for the Penguin Great Ideas series (2004–2020), works by “great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries” that gave him a canvas on which to display his typographic philosophy. For example, the cover of Saint Augustine – Confessions of a Sinner uses old ecclesiastical letterforms yet looks exquisitely modern. For Chuang Tzu – The Tao of Nature, Baines arranged letters to suggest a butterfly in flight. David Pearson, one of the series’ two art directors, described how his “often oblique approach gave the series a crucial extra dimension”.
Born in Kendal, Cumbria, Phil was one of three children of Martin Baines, a construction contract manager, and Joan (née Quarmby), a horticulturist. He grew up in a Roman Catholic family and began studies for the priesthood at Ushaw College, County Durham. While on holiday from Ushaw he worked at the Guild of Lakeland Craftsmen, Windermere, and from there his interest and confidence in art grew.
At the start of his fourth year he left Ushaw and in 1980 began a year’s study on the foundation course at Cumbria College of Art and Design. In 1982 he moved to London and enrolled on the graphic design course at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins), where he met Jackie Warner, whom he married in 1989, and where he was one of a talented cohort , many of whom, like him, went on to study at the Royal College of Art.
Richard Doust, then leader of the first-year course at St Martins, recalled the portfolio Baines had submitted for admission: ‘I was so excited… I was sure he was going to be someone very special. He quickly established his individuality. He made typography and especially letterpress printing his own territory.”
Baines was a fierce individual: he did not subscribe to schools of thought or join fashionable camps. Instead, he built a creative practice based on his belief in the ‘humanistic’ qualities of the English typographic tradition.
His contemporaries used the computer to add a new complexity to graphic communication. Clever software allowed for the overlapping and interweaving of text in a way that echoed the ecclesiastical manuscripts that Baines so admired. He was not a Luddite and used the computer himself, but his work always retained an element of manual labor.
Paradoxically, his work was greatly admired by the new generation of digital designers. For example, Neville Brody included Baines’ work in his experimental typographic publication FUSE, produced to demonstrate the feasibility of the new digital typography. Baines’s work does not seem out of place among the other contributors, many of whom were American typographic radicals whose multi-layered layouts were driven by fashionable theories of deconstruction and poststructuralism.
In 1988 he returned to Central Saint Martins (CSM) as part of the faculty. At staff meetings, his willingness to say the unspeakable often caused consternation among colleagues. To his students he preached a doctrine of “object-based learning,” a typically contrarian concept in the age of screen-based and virtual graphic design. He was appointed professor in 2006 and retired as professor emeritus in 2020.
Despite his dedication to teaching, Baines did not give up his client work. As well as designing books for leading publishers, he worked for the Crafts Council and the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, and designed the signage for CSM’s King’s Cross campus. He designed exhibition catalogs for Matt’s Gallery, south-west London, enjoying the creative three-way collaboration between the gallery’s director, Robin Klassnik, who exhibited artists, and himself.
He wrote books that have contributed to the understanding of visual communication: Type & Typography (with Andrew Haslam, 2002), Signs: Lettering in the Environment (with Catherine Dixon, 2003) and Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 (2005 ). , the latter of which helped make Penguin cover art one of the most important graphic arts in British design history.
With Dixon he co-curated the Central Lettering Record, an archive of typographical history housed at CSM, and in November 2023 his work was celebrated in an exhibition, Extol: Phil Baines Celebrating Letters, at the Lethaby gallery, CSM. He was appointed as a lettering expert to the Royal Mint Advisory Committee in 2016 and reappointed in 2021 to advise on the integration of lettering on new coins and medals, focusing on special issues and the accession of King Charles to the throne. For this work he received the Coronation Medal in 2023.
Baines was a keen runner and cyclist, and loved music, especially Manchester post-punk band The Fall. He was a collector of signs, letters and railways and built his own studios at his home in Willesden Green, north-west London. A few years before his retirement he moved to Great Paxton, Cambridgeshire, where he started playing chimes.
He is survived by Jackie and their two daughters, Beth and Felicity, and his father.
• Philip Andrew Baines, graphic designer, born December 8, 1958; died December 19, 2023