by Phil Baines, who has died aged 65 of multiple system atrophy, was one of the most prominent voices in contemporary British graphic design. His work included books, posters, art catalogs and letters for three important monuments in London – 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. London bombing. These projects reflect Baines’ distinctive qualities: a scholarly appreciation of letterforms, a deep-rooted respect for materials and a love of collaboration.
Such characteristics are also evident in Baines’ cover designs for the Penguin Great Ideas series (2004-20), works by “great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries” that gave him a canvas to display his typographic philosophy. The Saint Augustine – Confessions of a Sinner cover, for example, uses ancient ecclesiastical letter forms and yet looks very 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 quirky approach brought a vital extra dimension to the series”.
Born in Kendal, Cumbria, Phil was one of three children of Martin Baines, a construction contract manager, and Joan (née Quarmby), a horticulturist. Growing up in a Roman Catholic family, he began studying for the priesthood at Ushaw College, County Durham. During the holidays 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 Saint Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins), where he met Jackie Warner, whom he married in 1989, and where he was among a cohort talented, many of them. he went on to study, as he did, at the Royal College of Art.
Richard Doust, then head of the first year course at St Martins, recalled the portfolio Baines submitted for entry: “I was so excited … I was sure he was going to be the – special. He quickly established his individuality. He did typography and especially a letter for his own purposes.”
Baines was extremely individualistic – he did not join schools of thought or align himself with fashionable camps. Instead, he built a creative practice based on his belief in the “humanist” qualities of the English typographic tradition.
His contemporaries were using the computer to bring new complexity to graphic communication. Clever software allowed the text to be overlapped and interlaced in ways that echoed the ecclesiastical manuscripts that Baines admired so much. He was no Luddite, and he used the computer himself, but his work always retained an element of the handmade.
Paradoxically, his work was admired by the new generation of digital designers. Neville Brody, for example, included Baines’ work in his experimental typography publication FUSE, which was produced to demonstrate the malleability of the new digital typography. Baines’ work does not look out of place among the other contributors, many of whom have roots in American typography whose multi-layered layouts were guided by the methodological theories of deconstruction and post-structuralism.
In 1988 he returned to Central Saint Martins (CSM), as part of the faculty. In team meetings he was often a cause of concern among his colleagues for his willingness to say the unbreakable. He preached to his students the doctrine of “object-based learning”, a generally contradictory concept in the age of screen-based and virtual graphic design. He was appointed professor in 2006 and retired in 2020 as professor emeritus.
Despite his dedication to teaching, Baines never gave up on his work for clients. As well as designing books for leading publishers, he has worked for the Craft Council and the Ditchling Art + Craft Museum, 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 gallery director Robin Klassnik, exhibiting artists and himself.
He wrote books that contributed to the understanding of visual communication: Type & Typography (by Andrew Haslam, 2002), Signs: Lettering in the Environment (by Catherine Dixon, 2003) and Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 (2005), and the latter of which helped establish Penguin’s cover art as one of the most important graphic art bodies in British design history.
With Dixon, he co-curated the Central Lettering Record, an archive of typographic 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 lettering expert to the Royal Mint’s advisory committee in 2016, and was re-appointed in 2021 to advise on the integration of lettering on coins and new coins, with a focus on special issues and King Charles’ accession to the throne. For this work, in 2023 he was awarded the Coronation medal.
Baines was a keen racer and cyclist, and loved music, particularly Manchester post-punk band the Fall. He was a collector of signs, lettering and railways, and built his own studios at his home in Willesden Green, north-west London. A few years before he resigned he moved to Great Paxton, Cambridgeshire, where he began to play.
Jackie is survived by their two daughters, Beth and Felicity, and his father.
• Philip Andrew Baines, graphic designer, born 8 December 1958; he died 19 December 2023
