The typographer and designer John Miles, who has died aged 92, had a partnership with Colin Banks that was accountable for a number of the most high-profile public sector id schemes of the Nineteen Seventies and 80s. Chief amongst them was that for the Publish Workplace, notably the alphabet of double line lettering, created in 1972 and nonetheless in use by Royal Mail; and the British Telecom id (1980), with its unabashed modernist model and distinctive blue and yellow livery that was changed solely within the 90s.
Banks and Miles had constructed an enviable and enduring roster of shoppers, together with the Customers’ Affiliation, the British Council and London Zoo, who not solely valued their imaginative design abilities but in addition their long-term method to enterprise relationships, a lot of which lasted many years. This method generally had its drawbacks – the brand new look that they’d painstakingly developed for the Larger London council (GLC) within the Nineteen Seventies was cancelled on the final minute following a change in management.
Different family names included London Transport, Metropolis and Guilds, the British Airports Authority and Monotype, in addition to worldwide shoppers reminiscent of Philips in Eindhoven, the European parliament in Brussels, the United Nations College in Tokyo and motels in Cape City, Amsterdam and the Canary Islands.
Born in Streatham, south London, to Thomas, who labored for an insurance coverage firm, and Winifred (nee Seeley), John attended Beckenham and Penge grammar college, then undertook two years’ nationwide service stationed largely in north Africa. Within the garrison library at Benghazi, Libya, he got here throughout Herbert Learn’s 1934 guide on the ideas of design, Artwork and Trade, which brought about him to desert his place at teacher-training faculty and focus on a artistic profession.
Following his demob in 1952 he was accepted at Beckenham Faculty of Artwork (now Ravensbourne College London), the place he was drawn in the direction of typography. Three days per week have been spent in school and the remainder of the time at a printing college in Maidstone, the place he first met Banks.
On commencement John obtained a scholarship to review typography and punch reducing underneath Jan van Krimpen and SL Hartz on the banknote and stamp printing agency Joh. Enschedé en Zonen within the Netherlands. Following his return to Britain in 1955 he was supplied a job as assistant to Hans Schmoller at Penguin Books. Sitting at a desk with “Half-point” Schmoller (so named due to his consideration to element), “one of many most interesting typographic designers in Europe”, in line with John, the younger designer couldn’t imagine his luck. He described his time there, principally spent designing textual content pages for Penguin, Pelican and Puffin books, as “a real apprenticeship”.
Though there was the occasional attention-grabbing facet challenge, such because the Puffin Noah’s Ark press-out and assemble guide he designed and illustrated (1958), after three years working throughout the confines of the Penguin format John started to really feel stressed. When Banks, who had pursued a contract profession, requested if he wish to go into partnership, he accepted.
They initially labored out of a moist basement in Ebury Avenue, in central London. The Zoological Society of London was one in all their first shoppers, they usually got some jobs by Schmoller at Penguin. They relocated to Grafton Avenue within the 60s earlier than shifting once more, to the previous Literary Establishment constructing in Blackheath, which is the place I labored for them within the 90s.
In 1986, Banks and Miles received the gold medal on the Brno Biennale of Graphic Design for the British Telecom id. BT’s ensuing determination to alter companies and branding was lambasted each by the Solar, “BT blows hundreds of thousands on Trumpet”, and the Guardian: “The brand new id for Britain’s least favorite personal monopoly has been blamed for a collapse in shopper and public confidence on account of its expense, artistic ineptitude and the media drubbing it took.”
John’s profession straddled the revolution within the mechanics of design and typography and he was an early adopter of the private pc, overseeing the introduction of this new know-how to Banks and Miles within the 80s. In 1987, in the course of the time he was typographic adviser to Her Majesty’s Stationery Workplace, he wrote the bestselling Design for Desktop Publishing, whereas imposing the rule within the Banks and Miles studio that “designers get their ideas organised on paper earlier than they attempt to work on display screen”.
Enthusiastic, pleasant and beneficiant together with his information, John acted as a governor on the Central Faculty of Artwork and Design (1978-85), and an exterior examiner for the London Faculty of Printing (1984-88), and served on many design and printing societies and committees.
Banks and Miles closed store in 1996, and John and his spouse, Louise (nee Wilson), a sculptor whom he had met at artwork college and married in 1955, retired to Suffolk.
Louise died in 2021. John is survived by their youngsters, Catherine, Sophie and Jo, and 6 grandchildren, Alison, Lucy, Stan, Louis, Starsky and Maddie.
