Sunday 29 August 2010

TRIBUTE

Ray Hawkey, graphic designer, 1930-2010

Len Deighton recalls a friend and colleague who led a modern revolution in publishing graphic design

Ray Hawkey was a quiet, impeccable dressed, soft-spoken genius. He changed very little from the time I met him in the 1950s until he died last week. He had a loving wife and long-lasting stable marriage and had lived in the same carefully chosen Notting Hill apartment for many decades. Ray grew up in Cornwall, near the sea, and despite the respect and admiration he earned in London’s luxurious world of press and advertising, he thought of himself as a country boy. “You are big-city material,” Ray would tell me when our opinions differed, as they often did. His apartment depicted this other life. Beautifully framed photographs, paintings and embroidery portrayed the tall ships of times long ago. A polished brass ship’s compass, a lovely figurehead and a ship bent into a green glass bottle provided a background to superb items of furniture. It was a great privilege to be Ray’s friend. His support when I struggled to earn a living as an illustrator was unfaltering. When he spotted the stained and scribbled recipes I used in my kitchen, he tided them up, advised me about the graphics and took them to the Observer – they became “cookstrips”: a recipe a week for many years. When, with apologies and hesitation, I showed him my first attempt to write a novel [The Ipcress File], he grabbed it and took it to the Daily Express. They bought it for serialization. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, Ray became an art director at Condé Nast. He was there for several years and he made his mark. The originality of his work on luxury magazines was soon to blow apart the deadly dull typography of newspapers. His use of diagrams, drawn headlines and san-serif fonts jolted the Daily Express, and then the Observer, and unleashed modern graphics for all media. Ray’s designs transformed book jacket design. His high-key photo on the cover of The Ipcress File had the publishers throwing up their hands in horror, but he was proved right, and fewer clients argued with him. His James Bond covers, which featured real bullet holes, firmly supported the movies, and producer Harry Saltzman was one of Ray’s many fans. Kingsley Amis, Frederick Forsyth and many other authors were provided with brilliant covers, and each job was startlingly different to its predecessor. In the 1970s and 80s Ray wrote three novels, each with the same originality he brought to his graphics. When I produced Oh! What a Lovely War, I brought Ray in to do the film titles. They proved a great success and have since come to be considered classics. Finally let me add that everyone who had anything to do with Ray would remark upon his generosity and loyal friendship. If that sounds too perfect for words, well maybe he was. He will be terribly missed.

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