Tom Eckersley: master graphic designer and king of collage

Born in Lowton, Lancashire in 1914, Tom Eckersley forged a 60-year career as an influential poster designer with a distinctive style.

Eckersley studied at Salford School of Art in the early 1930s, where he met fellow designer Eric Lombers. They formed a design partnership and moved to London, gaining their first London Transport (LT) poster commission in 1935.

After the Second World War, Eckersley established himself as a solo designer for a range of clients. He combined this with a teaching career, leading the graphic design department at the London College of Printing from 1958 to 1977.
 

Eckersley was well-known for his use of a bold graphic style, often achieved through the use of paper collage. He completed his last poster for LT in 1995, 60 years after his first and two years before his death in 1997.  

Here we look at some of the many highlights in his career of designing impactful posters for LT.
 

These three panel posters – small format posters displayed within glass panels in Tube trains – were all completed by the Eckersley-Lombers partnership in 1935. ‘The Zoo by floodlight’ was their very first poster commission for LT.

Eckersley and Lombers were both influenced by the work of progressive poster designers of the period, including Edward McKnight Kauffer. This awareness of contemporary trends is evident in these confident designs. 

‘By bus to the pictures tonight’ uses a photographic image of a screen actor within a silhouette of a cinema-goer, at a time when photomontage was a growing trend. The pair’s use of textured patches of colour was achieved using an airbrush – a tool using compressed air to create colour effects.
 

During the Second World War, Eckersley joined the Royal Air Force as a cartographer before being transferred to the Publicity Section of the Air Ministry. He was able to take on freelance commissions alongside, including for these LT posters.

The first is aimed at passengers altering their hours of travel, a particularly common message in wartime with the network under particular strain. The second is one of a series aimed at LT staff, this one encouraging bus drivers to conserve their tyres during wartime shortages. Eckersley manages to convey these fairly routine messages with simple and effective designs.
 

In the decades after the Second World War, Eckersley continued his successful career as a poster designer, his style evolving over time. 

These two posters, created 20 years apart, were both to mark the expansion of the Tube network. ‘Central line extensions’ is very typical of Eckersley’s style in the late 1940s, with his Victoria line poster equally symbolic of his approach in the late 1960s. The latter is simultaneously simple and clever, as well as bold and graphic, using a pair of scissors to emphasise the new line’s function in cutting travel times to central London. The flat light blue background colour echoes the Victoria line’s signature colour on the Tube map.
 

By the 1970s, Eckersley was particularly known for his use of paper and card collage, often combined with minimalist typography and flat space to give the design a powerful simplicity. These three designs demonstrate this approach. 

The first promoted the London Transport Museum’s previous home using the heavily simplified form of one of the key vehicles in the collection, an 1866 Metropolitan Railway steam locomotive. Eckersley personally considered it one of his best designs.

In ‘Ceremonial London’ and ‘Museum of London’, both of these being the original artworks for the printed posters, Eckersley encapsulates the theme into one focused figure in simple graphic form. A gunner of the Royal Horse Artillery symbolises ceremonies such as the Changing of the Guard and Trooping of the Colour. Nell Gwynn, an actress and lover to King Charles II who had formerly sold oranges to audiences at the King’s Theatre in London, is cleverly merged with the vibrant red background colour to promote visits to the Museum of London.
 

By the time of these LT designs, Eckersley was widely considered a master of his art.

This poster marked the extension of the Piccadilly line to Heathrow airport. It uses a bold graphic style incorporating the extended line diagram within a stylised LT roundel, simultaneously suggestive of a target and a Tube tunnel. 

Eckersley was also commissioned to design a mural for Heathrow Central station, using overlapping silhouettes of the rear portion of the fuselage of a Concorde aircraft. He had also designed some tile motifs for several Victoria line stations in 1969, with his bold graphic design approach translating seamlessly to this format.

Eckersley designed posters for LT over a 60-year period. While his style evolved over that time, he consistently produced graphic design of the highest quality. You can listen to him describing his career and design approach in his own words in this oral history interview.