Bob Gill, irreverent graphic designer, dies
Bob Gill, the irreverent graphic designer who helped transform his profession from its decorative roots into a business of ideas, died, on Nov. 9, in Brooklyn, New York. He was 90.
The death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by his wife, Sara Fishko.
Gill once played piano with drummer Charlie Watts (and urged him to join an unknown band called the Rolling Stones); co-created “Beatlemania,” the late-1970s Broadway pop extravaganza; wrote and illustrated a dozen or so children’s books; and redesigned High Times magazine, the oncetrendy chronicle of dope culture. But these achievements were side gigs.
His métier, and religion, was graphic design, and along with peers like George Lois — the legendary art director of Esquire who once dropped an image of Andy Warhol in a can of soup for his magazine’s cover — Gill was part of a revolution in his profession. He felt passionately that good design was about communicating a message, not foisting a fashionable aesthetic on a client.
For a long time, much of the history of art in the service of commerce was about decoration, “about making things look fancy,” said Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram, the global design firm that grew out of a boutique London ad agency founded in part by Gill.
“Bob was not alone in his generation in thinking that you should be able to sell the idea over the phone,” he added, “that it didn’t depend on your color sense or your ability to do a nice layout. But Bob was absolutely obsessive about that.”
Salty and opinionated, Gill was a master of the visual pun. A 1964 ad for El Al airline, promoting the balmy climate of Israel, showed a photograph of a man reclining on a beach chair and clad only in a bathing suit and a slick coating of suntan oil. “This is a winter coat,” read the tag line.
In 1970, for a car rental company pamphlet listing its terms, Gill, to get across the idea that the terms were easy to understand, created a title page that declared in enormous type, “We hate small print.” A 1976 poster for Broadway was a collage of the sort of superlatives used in theater reviews — “Spectacular” … “Masterful” … “Unbelievable” — and looked to be torn from actual headlines.
His poster for Bob Fosse’s 1978 musical, “Dancin’,” was a crazy collage of limbs — an indelible image for generations of New Yorkers.
“He was modern without being a strict modernist,” said Steven Heller, an art director and the author of, among other books on design, “The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design.” “His work was not high falutin’. His work was down to earth.”
Bierut said: “He was a bit of a bomb-throwing revolutionary working in the system. His real legacy is the ideological position he took on behalf of the profession. He really was a polemicist.”
Gill was perhaps as well known for his oft-quoted dictums — delivered in lectures and collected in books like “Forget All the Rules You Ever Learned About Graphic Design. Including the Ones in This Book.” (1981), a bible for generations of designers — as he was for his individual projects.