At John Morgan’s funeral in September the vicar told a story about a book very close to his heart, the book of Common Worship. It had been redesigned by Morgan and the anecdote was about a panel of commissioners who passed a mock-up of the book between them and, rather than looking at its design, competed with each other to see how much damage they could do; trying to tear, drop, hold up by a single leaf, scuff, shake and, ultimately, throw it across the room. Morgan, meanwhile, looked on mortified, his meticulous work being brutalised. At the end of the meeting the churchmen seemed satisfied that the book could withstand abuse, gave their assent and left without any further comment. Morgan later made a film about the incident, Blank Dummy.
It is easy to imagine Morgan, a thoughtful, humble but also confident designer feeling stunned, because almost no one I know loved books more than him. Not books in the way writers and academics do, but books as objects, as things. One of his final books was Usylessly, an exact replica of the first 1922 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses but stripped of its text. Instead, among the mostly blank pages were essays about the book, about the journeys, idiosyncrasies and fates of the original editions. It is an incisive, funny and revealing exercise about literary classics, which understands them less as static and stable markers of cultural value and more as snowballs gathering material and damage and the traces of use as they roll through history.
Morgan was born in Galgate, a small village south of Lancaster, in 1973. After local grammar school he studied graphic design and communication at the University of Reading (where he would later also teach and where he met his wife, Claire Burton). There he developed his intense fondness for the history of design, a love that would endure and accumulate, as well as for the exigencies and eccentricities of design over the centuries. He was profoundly literate, loving books as reading matter, which not all designers do, and as cultural artefacts that gather around them myth, nonsense, marginalia and memory.
Biennale masterstroke
Although books were his first love, Morgan was arguably better known for almost everything else. In architecture, his work for David Chipperfield’s practice refined and redefined the office in tune with its minimal, modern design sensibility grounded in an appreciation of history. When Chipperfield was appointed director of the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, the graphics were given over to Morgan’s studio and it adopted the typography of the city’s characteristic stencilled street signs throughout. It was a masterstroke of wayfinding and urban branding, the most visually coherent Biennale so far.
He also designed the exquisitely understated signage for the new Tate Britain, using a Georgian-inspired typeface for the exterior signage and others inside including brass dates inset in the floor. Extremely subtle and very useful, always deferring to the art, never crowding it out. Morgan was beloved of architects (he also designed 6a’s website, a kind of continuously vertically scrolling scrapbook) partly because he loved architecture himself. He often used spatial metaphors, understanding graphics as a kind of architectural problem, dealing with volume, surface, content and time.
Morgan was equally revered in the art world. He designed the graphic identity and all the literature for London’s Raven Row gallery and had long-standing relationships with the artists Edmund de Waal and Helen Marten alongside producing dozens of books with artists, photographers and galleries, including Juergen Teller and Christian Marclay. His redesign for ArtReview remains the magazine’s distinctive template. His range meant that he could just as easily design a Charles and Ray Eames exhibition at the Barbican as new hand-painted lettering for the HMS Victory.
Platform 1
Morgan set up his studio in 2000, at first in a north London co-operative workspace with other creatives and designers and then moving to a former clerk’s office in Paddington Station overlooking Platform 1. It was an extraordinary space, looking out onto departing trains and Brunel’s great iron roof but with corporate carpet and lighting in the stripped, bland style of post-nationalised utilities. Later the family would move to the Cotswolds, Morgan hopping on the train right outside his office.
One of his triumphs was a series of reinterpretations of classic literature with Four Corners Books in its “Familiars” series, working with artists to expand the notion of both the illustrated and the artist’s book. These included a big saddle-stitched folio of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (with Gareth Jones) and a wonderful edition of Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose (with Rick Buckley) with a hardback cover and cut-out nose on the leading edge. There was also a vivid edition of Treasure Island (with Shiraz Bayjoo) with mesmerising, bleeding colour blots, haunting colonial-era images and an enigmatic pull-out map.
You could talk to Morgan about the lowest or the highest of culture and learn something surprising
This series offers a good indication of Morgan’s appetite for design. He loved Modernism, Swiss design, the grid, stripped-back and sans serif type, but he was just as fond of early printed books and 19th-century ephemera, French paperbacks, and trashy and glossy magazines. It was this love of design in all its incarnations that made him such good company. You could talk to him about the lowest or the highest of culture and learn something surprising. Softly spoken and with a measured voice that was always a pleasure to listen to, Morgan never shed his gentle Lancashire accent. His erudition and knowledge could have been intimidating were it not for his preparedness to listen and keenness to learn. These qualities made him a well-respected teacher and, in addition to the University of Reading, he taught book design at the Royal College of Art in London and ran a unit at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
An exacting mind
On the other hand, Morgan always knew exactly what he wanted. The architect Tom Emerson, co-founder of 6a, who worked closely with Morgan over many years, told me a story about how Morgan came to him with a swatch of colours to be used for the cover of his book Dirty Old River. Each one, Emerson said, was the same shade of brown. “You can have any one of these you like,” Morgan told him. “Just choose whichever one.”
In 1995 Morgan started working with the revered British designer Derek Birdsall at his Omnific studio. Birdsall was a bridge to both Modernism and pop, and it was here that he started working on Common Worship, later taking the project with him when he established his own studio (with Birdsall’s blessing, if that is the right word in this context).
Morgan’s intent was to update the prayer book with a cleaner, more readable text. It came in a variety of formats each characterised by its full title “Common Worship” horizontally and “Services and Prayers for the Church of England” reading vertically, arranged into a crucifix in foiled letters. Inside, a Gill Sans typeface referred to the Church’s own typographic histories of Modernism but produced clarity and space. The paper stock was ivory (as in old prayer books with tissue-thin leaves) to make for a more humane experience; he referred to Dutch typographer and curator Willem Sandberg’s notion of “warm printing”. There are few new books that manage to reflect so completely on English culture, literary and graphic history with such self-restraint.
Books as muses
More recently, Morgan founded the digital foundry Abyme with his colleague Adrien Vasquez, and an imprint, Ten Thousand Angels Press. And he finished writing his last book, Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes: A Selection of Books as Muses, just before he died, in his library, from a brain tumour that had been diagnosed as terminal in 2024.
Tall, bald, clean-shaven, invariably dressed in black (often wearing a long coat), Morgan was a distinctive and very much-loved figure in London’s cultural scene, even many years after he had left for the country. His wry, friendly smile and informed conversation will be greatly missed, but his books and his deep influence on British design culture will last.
• John Morgan, born Galgate, Lancashire, 6 January 1973. Worked at Omnific (with Derek Birdsall) 1995-2000; founded John Morgan Studio 2000. Married Claire Burton 2003 (two sons, one daughter); died Chadlington 2 September 2025
