Graphic Designers with Instantly Recognisable Work

The look we call Art Nouveau on a poster is largely Mucha's: a tall, narrow format, a woman framed by a halo-like circle, hair in whiplash curves, and a mosaic of flat pastel colour. It began with a rush job over Christmas 1894, a poster for Sarah Bernhardt's play Gismonda, which so pleased the actress that she signed him to a six-year contract. Printed lithographs for biscuits, champagne and cigarette papers followed, and the style was copied so widely that Parisians simply called it le style Mucha.

An American in London who brought Cubism and Vorticism to the bus stop. Frank Pick of the Underground commissioned well over 100 posters from him between the wars, and Kauffer's are the ones that still look modern: Soaring to Success! for the Daily Herald in 1919, with its flock of angular birds, or his flattened landscapes for weekend trips out of town. Pick's patient patronage, which treated posters as public art, made the work possible, and Kauffer credited him for it.

Cassandre's posters for railways and ocean liners turned speed into geometry. Normandie, 1935, shows the liner's prow from below so it towers like a cliff, with tiny gulls for scale; Étoile du Nord puts rails converging on a single star. He also designed the Peignot typeface and, for Dubonnet, a three-panel man who fills up with colour as he drinks. Late in his career he drew the interlocking YSL monogram for Yves Saint Laurent, which is still in use.

If you have ever picked up an orange-and-white Penguin paperback, you have held Tschichold's work. Hired by Allen Lane in 1947, he spent two years writing the Penguin Composition Rules and redrawing the three-band cover grid so that hundreds of titles from different printers looked consistent and readable. The twist is that he had earlier written The New Typography, the manifesto for asymmetric modernist layout, and then rejected it as too rigid after the Nazis jailed him. Penguin shows both sides: modern clarity and classical calm.

Beck was an engineering draughtsman laid off by the Underground who sketched a new Tube map in his spare time in 1931, borrowing from electrical circuit diagrams: only horizontal, vertical and 45-degree lines, evenly spaced stations, and the central area enlarged at the expense of geographical truth. The publicity office printed a trial run in 1933 and passengers loved it. He was paid a small fee and spent years fighting for credit as others revised it. Almost every transit map in the world now follows his idea.

The face of Swiss Style. Müller-Brockmann's concert posters for the Zurich Tonhalle from the 1950s onwards use nothing but sans-serif type, coloured bands and arcs laid on a strict mathematical grid, yet they feel as rhythmic as the music they advertise. His 1981 book Grid Systems in Graphic Design turned the method into something anyone could learn, and it still underpins web layout today. His road-safety poster der Fussgänger ist schutzlos, with its looming car wheel, shows he could also hit hard.

Games's motto was maximum meaning, minimum means, and his Second World War posters prove it. As the War Office's official poster artist he made Your Talk May Kill Your Comrades, in which a gossiping soldier's words spiral from his mouth and turn into a bayonet running through three of his comrades. Afterwards he won the competition for the Festival of Britain emblem of 1951, the compass-point star with Britannia's head and bunting, and designed the first animated on-screen ident for BBC Television. He worked alone, without assistants, developing each idea from small pencil sketches.

Rand persuaded American business that a logo should be simple enough to survive a fax machine and a matchbook. His striped IBM mark of 1972, the UPS shield with its parcel tied in string, the ABC lettering in a circle and the Westinghouse W all came from that conviction. He also had the nerve to present Steve Jobs with a single option for NeXT, plus a booklet explaining why, for a reported $100,000 fee. Earlier, his witty magazine covers for Direction showed the playful side behind the corporate work.

Lubalin treated letters as pictures. In his famous Mother and Child logo the ampersand nests a child inside the O of Mother; in the masthead for Avant Garde magazine the capitals lean and lock together so tightly they read as one shape, and the typeface he developed from it with Tom Carnase became a 1970s staple. His work with the editor Ralph Ginzburg on Eros, Fact and Avant Garde gave him unusual freedom, and the expressive, tightly kerned headline type of the era owes him a great deal.

Sister Corita, a Catholic nun who taught art in Los Angeles, made screenprints that look like nothing else: supermarket slogans, song lyrics and scripture cut up, enlarged and set in sizzling Day-Glo colours. Her students at Immaculate Heart College helped pull the prints and stage her joyful Mary's Day festivals. She left the order in 1968 and moved to Boston, where her rainbow swash on the giant gas storage tank by the Southeast Expressway, painted in 1971, is still the largest copyrighted artwork in the world.

Bass made the film poster and the title sequence into graphic art. The jagged paper-cut arm for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955, the spiralling Vertigo poster and the body cut into pieces for Anatomy of a Murder share one trick: a single cut-out symbol that sums up the whole film. Later title sequences for Martin Scorsese, including Goodfellas and Casino, were made with his wife and partner Elaine Bass, who co-directed much of the later film work. He also designed the AT&T globe and the Bell System bell.

The stick-figure pictograms you follow through airports and stations descend from Aicher's work for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Built on a strict grid of right angles and 45-degree diagonals, they let a swimmer, a cyclist or a fencer be read in a glance without words, and his team paired them with a cheerful pastel palette chosen to avoid any echo of the 1936 Berlin Games. Aicher also co-founded the Ulm School of Design, reworked Lufthansa's crane identity in the 1960s and later drew the Rotis typeface.

Crouwel was nicknamed Mr Gridnik for good reason. His posters and catalogues for Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum through the 1960s and 70s were built on visible grids, and his 1967 New Alphabet, made only of straight lines and right angles for the cathode-ray screens of the day, was so radical it was barely readable, which was partly the point. Peter Saville later borrowed it for Joy Division's Substance sleeve. Crouwel co-founded the studio Total Design, which also handled Schiphol Airport's signage.

I ♥ NY was sketched in 1976 in the back of a taxi, reportedly on an envelope, for a state tourism campaign; Glaser did it for free, and the rebus of letter, heart and initials became the most imitated logo on earth. It is only one face of a varied career. His 1966 Bob Dylan poster, a black silhouette with psychedelic hair, came folded inside a greatest-hits album, and as co-founder of Push Pin Studios and New York magazine he helped steer American illustration away from Swiss austerity.

Tanaka could build a face from a few flat shapes. His posters for the Sankei Kanze Noh performances set a Noh mask's hairline, eyes and mouth over a grid of coloured squares, and his 1981 Nihon Buyō dance poster, a geisha made of circles, squares and an eye-slit, became one of the most reproduced images in Japanese design. He brought modernist geometry and traditional Rimpa colour together like no one else. With the retailer Seiji Tsutsumi and the copywriter Kazuko Koike he helped found Muji in 1980, and as its first art director he set the plain kraft-paper packaging that made restraint the selling point.

Vignelli's 1972 New York subway diagram, all coloured lines at 45 and 90 degrees with Central Park drawn as a grey square, was so abstract that riders complained and it was replaced in 1979; it is now revered and was revived in digital form. His signage system with Bob Noorda, in Helvetica-style lettering on black bands, did last. The American Airlines double-A logo, the Bloomingdale's shopping bags and much of the furniture and tableware he designed with his wife Lella Vignelli show the same belief in a few typefaces used well.

Fletcher's V&A logo of 1989, in which the ampersand also forms the crossbar of the A, is a perfect example of his wit: one idea, executed so economically that it looks inevitable. He co-founded Pentagram in London in 1972 with four partners, a studio model of independent designers sharing a business that many agencies still copy, and his Reuters dot logo and Institute of Directors identity show the same playful precision. His book The Art of Looking Sideways is a treasure chest for anyone curious about visual thinking.

You probably know Chermayeff's logos better than his name, because the studio he ran with Tom Geismar, and later Sagi Haviv, put them on banks and broadcasters everywhere. The Chase Manhattan octagon of 1960, an abstract symbol with no letters at all, was a gamble the bank's executives needed persuading on; the Pan Am globe, the NBC peacock of 1986 and the Smithsonian sun came from the same partnership. Chermayeff himself was also a collage artist and children's book illustrator, and that cut-paper playfulness shows in his posters.

Every time you drive in Britain you read Calvert's work. With her former tutor Jock Kinneir she designed the road sign system introduced from the late 1950s, drawing the Transport and Motorway typefaces and the warning pictograms, including the children crossing, with the girl based on a photograph of Calvert herself, and the roadworks figure often joked about as a man opening an umbrella. Tested for legibility at speed, the signs set a template for many countries. Her Rail Alphabet with Kinneir ran on British Rail for decades, and she taught at the Royal College of Art.

As Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967, Douglas gave the movement its look: thick black outlines, flat bold colour and Oakland residents drawn with dignity and fury, printed every week on the back page of The Black Panther newspaper. Constraints shaped the style; it had to survive cheap offset printing and be pasted on walls. Children, grandmothers and street vendors appear as often as armed militants. He has continued making community art and murals worldwide, and his work is now collected by major museums.

The prism on Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon came from Hipgnosis, the London studio Thorgerson ran with Aubrey Powell; the final artwork was drawn by their colleague George Hardie. That collaborative credit matters, because the studio's best sleeves were big photographic stunts staged for real: a man on fire shaking hands for Wish You Were Here, an inflatable pig floating over Battersea Power Station for Animals, hundreds of hospital beds on a beach. Thorgerson kept making surreal, wordless covers until his death in 2013.

Reid's sleeve for the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen in 1977, the Queen's Jubilee portrait with her eyes and mouth blanked out by ransom-note letters cut from newspapers, is the image of British punk. The look came from the scissors-and-glue methods he had used at Suburban Press, his radical community printing project in Croydon, and from his art-school friend Malcolm McLaren, who managed the band. Never Mind the Bollocks, in clashing pink and yellow, completed the set. He kept making activist and spiritual art until his death in 2023.

Scher's identity for New York's Public Theater, begun in 1994, threw out polite theatre posters in favour of loud wood-type lettering in mixed weights, tumbling across the page like a street bill; it changed how arts organisations advertised across the city. As a Pentagram partner since 1991 she has also drawn the Citi logo, reportedly sketched on a napkin in the first meeting, and the Windows logo of 2012. Her hand-painted typographic maps of the world show the same love of words crammed into every space.

A former professional surfer and sociology teacher, Carson art-directed Ray Gun magazine from 1992 and tore up the rules of legibility: overlapping columns, type running off the page, headlines cut to fragments. The most famous provocation was setting a dull Bryan Ferry interview entirely in the Zapf Dingbats symbol font. Readers wrote in furious and delighted. It looks like chaos, but each spread responds to the music and the writer, and his grunge typography shaped 1990s advertising, from Nike and Pepsi to MTV.