Alan Fletcher

Today I visited the Cube Gallery in Manchester to see an exhibition on 50 years of graphic work by Alan Fletcher. I can truthfully say that this visit has changed the way I think about graphic design. I thought the point was to design work that suits its purpose and is visually appealing. Fletchers work has shown me that it is more about the ideas. You have to make your audience think. A poster which is aesthetically pleasing and contains all the information, with an appropriate hierarchy, following all the rules of graphic design, will never engage its audience as much as a poster with well thought out underpinning ideas. This point is shown well in Fletchers calendars. For each month he has created a new image to represent it. For December he has a Santa Clause figure made from basic geometric shape, and November fireworks made from similar shapes. At first it is hard to make out what these images are of, but this was an intentional decision intended to make the audience think and work out what the month is. In my opinion this gets the message across a lot better than just having the word ‘December’ in a nice looking typeface.