Thomas Eckersley was born on 30 September 1914 in Lancashire. His artistic training commenced in 1930, when he enrolled at Salford Art School, where his abilities were he was awarded the Heywood Medal for Best Student. In 1934 Eckersley moved to London, intending to become a freelance poster designer. He was accompanied by Eric Lombers (1914-78), a fellow student and future collaborator. The posters produced by the Eckersley-Lombers partnership were both aesthetic and functional, thereby perfectly fulfilling advertisers’ criteria. They always supplied full-size artwork with hand-drawn lettering for their poster designs. Eckersley was involved not only in graphic design, but also its teaching. He and Lombers taught as visiting lecturers in poster design at Westminster School of Art. The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 marked the end of the Eckersley-Lombers partnership and they went their different ways. Eckersley designed posters for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), aimed at workers in factories and industrial settings that often supported the military in some way. The posters are striking in their bluntness; with little text, it is the illustration that catches the eye. Most used block colours and cut-out shapes. Having originally joined the Royal Air Force to undertake cartographic work, Eckersley was transferred to the Publicity Section of the Air Ministry, which permitted him to work from home and to take commercial commissions again. In 1948 his contribution was recognised with the granting of an OBE for services to poster design. Due to shortages of materials, the commercial advertising market was depressed in the years following the war. However, Eckersley was able to gain commissions from new sources such as Gillette and renewed his connections with old clients, such as the GPO. He also took on work as a book illustrator, illustrating his wife’s book Cat O’Nine Lives in 1946. Harold F Hutchison was appointed Publicity Officer for London Transport in 1947. The circumstances of post-war London demanded a new chapter for their publicity. As well as repairing London Transport’s systems, Hutchison recognised the importance of restoring faith in the public they served. In 1950 Hutchison wrote a publicity policy, stating the function of their posters to be: ‘London Transport’s information window, through which we tell the public what we do and what we hope to do; what we expect of our staff and what we appreciate from our public…’ In the following years, more direct advertising media began to overshadow poster publicity. The annual number of London Transport poster commissions dropped to seven or eight, but Hutchison commissioned leading artists and designers of the day, in order to retain the highest possible quality. These would include: Edward Bawden, William Roberts, Abraham Games and Eckersley. In 1954 Eckersley joined the London College of Printing and established the first undergraduate courses in graphic design in the UK. He was Head of Design at the College from 1957 until 1977. He also continued his commissioned work, adding The United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Wide Fund for Nature, the National Business Calendar Design Awards and Thomas Cook to his list of clients. In addition to poster making and book illustration, Eckersley also designed magazine covers and logos. His designs often employ an abstract-like quality and collage to convey their message, but whatever the technique, his designs have one common factor: they bring together text and pictures to relate complex messages in a direct way. Eckersley retained copies of many of his posters and examples of his original artwork; these form the equivalent of sketches for the working poster maker. Eckersley used these when teaching, as well as for personal reference. The posters were kept at his home and formed a working archive. In addition to retaining examples of his published posters Eckersley also produced and retained posters that he had designed purely for personal enjoyment, such as a series of film posters that depicted the faces of Hollywood movie greats that were only published on a small scale for events like exhibitions of his work. Eckersley died in 1997, two years after a retrospective of his work was exhibited at the London College of Printing. A collection at the University of the Arts, London includes posters from throughout Eckersley’s career and includes magazine covers and original artwork.