This blog post was originally published in 2016. John Burningham (1936-2019) lived in Hampstead, north London, and I was fortunate to interview him for London Transport Museum in 2010. On my several visits to his his lovely home next to the Heath, he was always a most generous and engaging...

Think of Blackpool and chances are you’ll think of the Tower. Or the piers. Or the Illuminations. Or the Pleasure Beach. Or the Golden Mile, Blackpool Rock, the Winter Gardens and a host of popular entertainments that have made the town Britain’s premier seaside resort. But it was not always...

In advertising, one agency’s homage can be another’s appropriation. Call it parody, plagiarism or pastiche, ‘repurposing’ a successful design for new ends has been with us since pictorial posters were first pasted onto the hoardings. In the process, the origin and meaning of a particular design can be lost as...

Posters have survived the decades in all sorts of strange ways. Some were acquired by collectors at the time and carefully preserved. Others have turned up in printers’ archives or long forgotten store rooms. Occasionally a ‘hoard’ is found in the most unlikely of places. And that’s exactly what happened...

2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of Britain’s most important post-war graphic designers, Hans Unger (1915-75). A prolific poster artist (he produced 117 designs for London Transport alone), Unger was also an accomplished mosaicist and illustrator. In this blog, author and designer Naomi Games (daughter of...

Until recently the huge literature on British interwar commercial art has largely ignored the significant contribution made by women designers. Thankfully, the genius of Freda Lingstrom, Sybil Andrews, Anna & Doris Zinkeisen, Dora Batty, Herry Perry and many mores is finally getting the recognition it deserves, with new publications and...

'...may all our worlds be coloured in an absorbing geography' (MacDonald Gill 1944) The Wonderground Map of London Town, 1914  MacDonald Gill (1884-1947) was a multi-talented man: an architect, letterer, mural painter and graphic designer. But in the public consciousness his name is inextricably linked with pictorial maps. The first...

“To make a good job of a poster it must be well designed, but for goodness sake do not drag it into the mud by calling it ‘Art’.” (Gregory Brown, Commercial Art, June 1928) For my money, Frederick Gregory Brown was one of the most influential poster artists of his...