Early Life
Fletcher was born in Kenya, where his father was a civil servant. He returned to England aged 5 with the rest of his family, when his father was terminally ill. He lived with his grandparents in Shepherd's Bush in West London, before being evacuated in 1939 to Christ's Hospital in Horsham.
He studied at the Hammersmith School of Art from 1949, then at the Central School of Art, where he studied under Anthony Froshaug and befriended Colin Forbes, Theo Crosby, Derek Birdsall and Ken Garland. After a year teaching English in Barcelona, he returned to London to study at the Royal College of Art from 1953 to 1956, where he met Peter Blake, Joe Tilson, Len Deighton, Denis Bailey, David Gentleman and Dick Smith.
He married Paola Biagi, an Italian national, in 1956 (they met with a heated discussion about if orange and pink were a good or bad colour pair). He then took up a scholarship to study at the School of Architecture and Design at Yale University, under Alvin Eisenman, Norman Ives, Herbert Matter, Bradbury Thompson, Josef Albers and Paul Rand. He visited Robert Brownjohn, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar in New York, became friends with Bob Gill, and was commissioned by Leo Lionni to design a cover for Fortune magazine in 1958. After a visit to Venezuela, he returned to London in 1959, having worked briefly for Saul Bass in Los Angeles and Pirelli in Milan.
Read more about this topic: Alan Fletcher (graphic Designer)
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