Bradbury Thompson died Wednesday, November 1, 1995. He was 84 years old.
Sometimes called the father of modern magazine design, he was one of the most talented (and nicest) designers America has produced. Below is an excerpt from the inside flap of his book, The Art of Graphic Design (Yale 1988).
The art director of Mademoiselle and design director of Art News and Art News Annual in the decades after World War II, he also designed the formats for some three dozen other magazines, including Smithsonian. Thompson is in addition a distinguished designer of limited edition books, postage stamps, rationalized alphabets, corporate identification programs, trademarks, and sacred works (most notable, the Washburn College Bible, in which the words are set in the cadence of speech).
His hallmark has ever been the adaptation of classic typography to the modern world. Thompson is perhaps most well known as the designer of more than sixty issues of Westvaco Inspirations, a magazine published by the Westvaco Corporation.... Bradbury Thompson has served on the faculty of the Yale School of Art for over thirty years.... His profession has honored him with all of its highest awards, including those of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the National Society of Art Directors, the Art Directors Club, the Type Directors Club, [the American Center for Design], and the Society of Publication Designers.
We were distant relatives (his mother and my grandmother were sisters) and communicated frequently over the last 10 years or so. For the last couple of years I had been working with Brad to design a new version of his Alphabet 26, a typeface concept he developed in the late 1940s which uses only 26 symbols for the alphabet, using the same symbols for both upper and lower case characters. Alphabet 26 is just about finished. His family wishes that it be completed as a tribute to Brad.
Paul Baker