Phil Baines, who has died of multiple system atrophy aged 65, was one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British graphic design. His work included books, posters, art catalogues, and essays for three of London’s major monuments: the Indian Ocean tsunami memorial in the grounds of the Natural History Museum, and the 7 July memorials in Hyde Park and Tavistock Square commemorating the victims of the 2005 earthquake. London bombings. These projects point to Baines’ defining qualities: academic appreciation for letterforms, deep-seated respect for materials, and love of collaboration.
Such qualities can also be seen in Baines’s Penguin Great Ideas series (2004-20) cover designs, created by “great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries” who provided him with a canvas on which to display his typographic philosophy. For example, the cover of St. Augustine – Confessions of a Sinner uses old religious letterforms but still looks very modern. For Chuang Tzu – The Tao of Nature, Baines arranged letters that evoke a butterfly in flight. David Pearson, one of the series’ two artistic directors, described how its “often indirect approach gave the series an important dimension.”
Born in Kendal, Cumbria, Phil was one of three children born to construction contracts manager Martin Baines and horticulturalist Joan (née Quarmby). He grew up in a Roman Catholic family and began his studies for the priesthood at Ushaw College in County Durham. During his holidays in Ushaw he worked at the Lakeland Guild of Craftsmen in Windermere and from there his interest and confidence in art grew.
He left Ushaw at the start of his fourth year and began a year’s study on his foundation course at the Cumbria College of Art and Design in 1980. In 1982 he moved to London and enrolled on a graphic design course at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins); here he met Jackie Warner, whom he married in 1989, and was among a group of many talented people. He continued his education at the Royal College of Art.
Richard Doust, then leader of the first-year course at St Martins, recalled the portfolio Baines submitted for admission: “I was so excited… I was sure he was going to be someone very special. He quickly established his individuality. He did typography and especially letterpress printing in his own region.”
Baines was fiercely individualistic; She did not attend schools of thought or fashion camps. Instead he built a creative practice based on his belief in the “humanist” qualities of the British typographic tradition.
His contemporaries were using the computer to bring new complexity to graphic communications. Clever software allowed the text to be overlapped and interwoven to reflect the religious manuscripts that Baines so admired. He was no Luddite and used the computer himself, but there was always a handmade element to his work.
Paradoxically, his work has been greatly appreciated by a new generation of digital designers. For example, Neville Brody included Baines’ work in his experimental typography publication FUSE, which he produced to demonstrate the malleability of new digital typography. Baines’s work does not seem out of place among the other contributors, most of whom are American typography radicals whose multilayered layouts are driven by the fashionable theories of deconstruction and poststructuralism.
In 1988 he returned to Central Saint Martins (CSM) as part of the faculty. His willingness to say the unsaid in staff meetings often caused consternation among his colleagues. He preached to his students the doctrine of “object-based learning”, a typically heretical 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 commitment to teaching, Baines did not give up on his work for his clients. As well as designing books for leading publishers, he has worked for the Crafts Council and the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, and designed signage for CSM’s King’s Cross campus. He designed exhibition catalogs for Matt’s Gallery in south-west London and enjoyed the creative three-way collaboration between himself and the gallery’s director, Robin Klassnik, the exhibiting artists.
He has written books that contribute 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). , helped establish the Penguin cover image as one of the most important works of graphic art in British design history.
With Dixon, he co-curated the Central Lettering Record, a typographic history archive housed at CSM, and in November 2023 his work was celebrated in the exhibition Extol: Phil Baines Celebrating Letters at the CSM Lethaby gallery. In 2016 he was appointed as inscription expert to the Royal Mint advisory committee and was reappointed in 2021 to advise on the integration of inscriptions on new coins and medals, taking into account specific issues and the accession of King Charles to the throne. For this work, he was awarded the Coronation Medal in 2023.
Baines was an enthusiastic runner and cyclist and loved music, especially Manchester post-punk band The Fall. He was a collector of signs, inscriptions and railways and set up 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 took up rattling.
He is survived by Jackie and his two daughters, Beth and Felicity, and his father.
• Philip Andrew Baines, graphic designer, born 8 December 1958; Died December 19, 2023