In an interview published after his retirement, he said he felt he had received insufficient credit for the establishment of Pentagram in London, which prompted him to write his essay Transition, a lucid exposition of his design of the group’s business structure that was first published in the November 1992 edition of the journal Communication Arts. Satellite offices in San Francisco and Austin, Texas, helped transform the group into one of the powerhouse firms of the international design scene.įorbes’s time at Pentagram came to an end in 1993 and he retired to his horse farm in North Carolina. But, thanks to Forbes’s charm and energy, and the shrewd appointment as partners of leading figures from the US design scene, including Woody Pirtle, Michael Bierut, Paula Scher, Michael Gericke and the architect Jim Biber, Pentagram became recognised as more than a colonial outpost of the London company. No foreign design company had done this successfully, and at first the New York design community regarded the new firm merely as an outpost of a British design studio.
The establishment of the firm, with its distinctive multidisciplinary ethos – graphic designers, architects and industrial designers all under the same roof – marked a great achievement on Forbes’s part, as did the founding of a Pentagram office in New York a few years later. His students included Mervyn Kurlansky, another of the eventual five founders of Pentagram.Ĭolin Forbes’s George Nelson on Design book cover, with its overlapping ‘on’, has been much imitated. On graduating he was given a lecturing post at the school and, following a brief stint working for an advertising agency, he was invited, at the age of 28, to return to Central as head of graphic design. After demob, he returned to Central to study typography.
National service (1945-48), when for part of the time he was stationed in Palestine, interrupted his studies. Fellow students included Terence Conran and the graphic designers Derek Birdsall, Ken Garland and Alan Fletcher, one of his future Pentagram partners. For ambitious design students at that time, Central was the place to be. While Colin’s first ambition had been to design aeroplanes, after leaving Brentwood school, Essex, at the age of 17 he began a course in book illustration at the Central School of Arts and Craft in London. In the case of his own firm, the equal sharing between partners of income, decision-making and ownership assured a structure that could survive the departure of its founders.īorn in London, Colin was the son of Kathleen (nee Ames) and John Forbes, a public relations manager for ICI. At the time he did so, graphic design lacked the status within the business world it has today: he took pride in having helped establish it as a profession. He possessed an ability, rare among graphic designers then and now, to inspire the trust and respect of the leaders of large businesses. Corporate identity was still in its infancy in postwar Britain, and he created enduring and sophisticated visual identities for leading corporations, including Lucas Industries, British Petroleum and Pirelli. Designed in the 60s, some of the covers look as if they were designed yesterday by a young, hip design studio. Photograph: Pentagramįorbes was especially proud of the sharp and technically accomplished covers he produced for the ICI magazine Plastics Today.