Winter 2025

Reputations: Margaret Calvert

‘If I look back at my beginning and everything, it’s learning on the job. You teach yourself and you pick up things and you look and you research – and it happens.’ Interview by John L. Walters and Simon Esterson. Portrait by Philip Sayer [EXTRACT]

Margaret Calvert is the doyenne of British graphic design, much admired for her contribution to the sign systems for the UK’s motorways and roads on which she worked with her boss and mentor Jock Kinneir in the late 1950s and 60s

[…]

Was there a sense that you were part of a New Wave, the Modernists who were changing the way?

Well, I never thought that, but I do remember thinking that the Festival of Britain – all this Victoriana and decorative stuff – that wasn’t me at all. So naturally I rejected all that. I never thought I was new wave – young people don’t, do they? It was just a wonderful time. Fashion-wise, there was that little shop Bazaar [Mary Quant] in the King’s Road, and then there were the Beatles. So fashion changed and design and D&AD was happening. Small groups were starting. Fletcher Forbes and Gill were very different from Design Research Unit. Of course, in the 1960s, there weren’t many designers. Then that book appeared designed by Derek Birdsall, 17 Graphic Designers

The term graphic designer was new.

Absolutely. Graphic design didn’t exist before, it was called commercial art, which is quite a respectable title, instead of ‘branding’. I hate the word ‘branding’. I can only think of poor animals.

John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London

Simon Esterson, art director of Eye, London

Read the full version in Eye no. 107 vol. 27, 2025

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.