The graphic designer, typographer and art director Derek Birdsall, who has died aged 89, was one of the profession’s “old guard”, a survivor from the pre-digital age. His work, highly regarded by his peers, reached a varied public over more than five decades. The “new woman” of the 1960s was offered fashion with consciousness-raising articles in the monthly Nova, which Birdsall art-directed for a time; Macmillan-era never-had-it-so-good teachers bought the Penguin Education series, attracted by the wit of his ingenious covers.
In the half century that followed, gallery goers and art historians were grateful for the careful ordering, elegant layout and typographic detailing of almost 100 catalogues and art books that he designed, memorably for the exhibition of George Stubbs’s celebrated paintings of horses at the Tate Gallery in 1984, the blockbusting Treasure Houses of Britain for the National Gallery of Art in Washington the following year, and Rembrandt and His Workshop for the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum in 1991.
