Cover Boy
Art director Pearce Marchbank recently launched a website that rounds up much of his excellent magazine work from the past 40 years, including many now-iconic covers for Architectural Design, Time Out and OZ.
Marchbank started at Central School of Art and Design, London in 1966, initially influenced by George Lois (whose work for Esquire is currently showing at MoMA ; some of Lois’s best-known covers have been revisited – or rehashed – a few times of late).
A precocious student, Marchbank was art-directing AD, a ‘design science’ monthly, while still studying at Central. After graduating, he worked on Friends, the short-lived Mick Jagger-funded UK version of Rolling Stone, before starting at the newly founded Time Out in 1970. Marchbank’s re-design of the Time Out logo, a slightly blurred Franklin Gothic only intended as a stop-gap, is still used today.
The covers are all the more impressive given that Marchbank would often have less than a day to come up with a design. Marchbank worked at Time Out until 1983, then moving to the Richard Branson-backed competitor Event. Interestingly, some of his layouts for Le Nez Rouge (pictured below), a house magazine for a wine club that Marchbank worked on in 1984, are close to those of well-designed new(ish)comers Fantastic Man and Bedeutung. It seems that his influence lives on.
Art director Pearce Marchbank recently launched a website that rounds up much of his excellent magazine work from the past 40 years, including many now-iconic covers for Architectural Design, Time Out and OZ.
Marchbank started at Central School of Art and Design, London in 1966, initially influenced by George Lois (whose work for Esquire is currently showing at MoMA ; some of Lois’s best-known covers have been revisited – or rehashed – a few times of late).
A precocious student, Marchbank was art-directing AD, a ‘design science’ monthly, while still studying at Central. After graduating, he worked on Friends, the short-lived Mick Jagger-funded UK version of Rolling Stone, before starting at the newly founded Time Out in 1970. Marchbank’s re-design of the Time Out logo, a slightly blurred Franklin Gothic only intended as a stop-gap, is still used today.
The covers are all the more impressive given that Marchbank would often have less than a day to come up with a design. Marchbank worked at Time Out until 1983, then moving to the Richard Branson-backed competitor Event. Interestingly, some of his layouts for Le Nez Rouge (pictured below), a house magazine for a wine club that Marchbank worked on in 1984, are close to those of well-designed new(ish)comers Fantastic Man and Bedeutung. It seems that his influence lives on.
