Bob Gill Biography

For his graphic design work, Gill has won a number of awards, sold illustrations to Esquire, Architectural Forum, Fortune, Seventeen, and The Nation magazines and has illustrated children’s books and designed film titles.

He played the piano at summer resorts in the Catskill Mountains, New York, to pay his school tuition. He attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (1948–1951), Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1951), City College of New York (1952, 1955). 1954, he became a professional graphic designer in New York City. However, 1960 after an interview in a New York hotel room for a job in London, he moved there to work for Charles Hobson, a hack advertising agency, according to Gill, which was later sold to Grey Advertising (now Grey Global Group). He was very good at dealing with clients.

1962, Gill, Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes established Fletcher/Forbes/Gill design studio, the forerunner of Pentagram (design studio). More than 100,000 copies of the partnership’s book, Graphic Design: Visual Comparisons (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1963), were sold.

1967, Gill left the partnership and assumed independent freelancing again, including teaching, filmmaking and writing children’s books. 1974–1975, he returned to New York, proposed a so-called peace monument for Times Square, directed hardcore pornographic movie Double Exposure of Holly and worked with Robert Rabinowitz on multimedia Beatlemania (musical), which ran 1977–1979 (1,006 performances) on Broadway.

Independent, unorthodox and outspoken, he has also designed for Apple Corps records, Rainbow Theater, Pirelli, Nestlé, CBS, Universal Pictures, Joseph Losey, Queen (now Harpers & Queen) and High Times magazines and the United Nations.

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