Eckersley, Thomas, 1914-1997

Tom Eckersley was born on 30th September 1914 in Lancashire. His artistic training began in 1930 when he enrolled at Salford Art School, his abilities were soon recognised and he was awarded the Heywood Medal for Best Student. In 1934 Eckersley moved to London with the express purpose of becoming a freelance poster designer, he was accompanied by Eric Lombers (1914-1978), a fellow student and future collaborator on commissioned poster designs.

Eckersley-Lombers posters were both aesthetic and functional, therefore perfectly fulfilling advertisers' criteria. Eckersley-Lombers always supplied full size artwork with hand drawn lettering for their poster designs. Eckersley was involved not only in graphic design but in the teaching of it, he and Lombers worked as visiting lectures in poster design at Westminster School of Art. The partnership benefited from the cultural recognition of the poster as a design piece in the 1930s and from the fact that mass media was yet to explode, meaning that the poster was the only means of shouting a message to a mass audience. However, this was in turn restricted by tariffs that one had to pay in order to put up posters in authorised spaces, thus posters had to be memorable even to someone strolling past and therefore maybe only glimpsing it once.

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