Raymond Hawkey

Raymond (Ray) Hawkey born 1930 in Portsmouth is an English graphic designer and author based in London.

Professional Education

Hawkey achieved a National Diploma in Design at the (then) Plymouth School of Art and was awarded a scholarship in 1950 to study at the Royal College of Art where he became a notable art director of the RCA's ARK magazine [cite web
last1=Johnstone
first1=Amelia
last2=Lucas
first2=Tom
title=The History of ARK/ARC
work=ARC
published-date=Spring 2004
url=http://www.arcroyal.co.uk/backissues/arc1/downloads/ARC1.pdf
accessdate=2007-12-06 ] (now known as ARC), where he allegedly "outraged the rector Robin Darwin by introducing illustration and photography to ARK's covers" [cite web
last=Dempsey
first=Mike
title=Immaculate conception
work=Design Week
publication-date=2001-12-14
url=http://www.mad.co.uk/Main/News/Disciplines/Design/Articles/e9b9bcb0f6fc43b58a0252154c35e868/Immaculate-conception.html
accessdate=2007-12-06 ] . He was one of the founders of the Association of Graphic Designers in 1959 [Citation
last =Poyner
first =Rick
last2 =Crowley
first2 =David
publication-date =October 2004
title =Communicate!: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties
publisher =Laurence King Publishing
isbn =1856694224] .

Newspaper design

While an RCA student Hawkey helped the picture editor of the Sunday Graphic and won a design talent competition organised by Vogue magazine. He was recruited by Vogue's publishers Condé Nast where he worked for "three happy years."

In 1959 he became design director of the Daily Express where he and Michael Rand revitalised the use of illustration as a key adjunct to stories. Design Journal said "theircountdown description of a passenger plane ditching in mid-Atlantic is still [1970] fresh and moving; since there were, understandably, no cameramen at the scene of the crash, none of the other newspapers illustrated what it was like for the passengers" [cite web
title=Comment - Graphic accidents
work=Design Journal 1970
url=http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/diad/article.php?year=1970&title=255&article=d.255.18
accessdate=2007-12-08 ] and that " [they] ... set a style which is still [1974] recognisable as the root of the best current work" [cite web
author=Robert Waterhouse
title=News that's fit to draw
work=Design Journal 1974
url=http://www.vads.ahds.ac.uk/diad/article.php?title=307&year=1974&article=d.307.32
accessdate=2007-12-10 ] .

Hawkey was appointed presentation director of The Observer in 1964 and lead the design of its colour magazine. In July 1986 he was co-designer (with Tony Mullins) of the first dummy of The Independent, but it is not clear how much of his contribution survived the painful cycles of redesign before the launch [Citation
last =Garland
first =Nicholas
author-link =Nicholas_Garland
publication-date =1990
title =Not Many Dead
publisher =Hutchinson
isbn =0-09-174449-0] [cite web
last=Naughton
first=John
title=Dear Diary: a review of Nick Garland's account of the Independent's early days
url=http://molly.open.ac.uk/Personal-pages/Pubs/Essays/dear-diary.htm
accessdate=2007-12-09 ] .

Other graphic design

During his time at the Royal College of Art Hawkey first encountered Len Deighton when Deighton (another RCA scholarship student at that time) gatecrashed a literary party that Hawkey was helping to organise. Instead of ejecting the intruder, Hawkey found much in common with him and they became "lifelong friends" (Dempsey, "ibid"). In 1962, Hawkey was Deighton's choice to design the cover of his first novel "The IPCRESS File", which some regard as the template for the covers of all subsequent airport novels [cite web
last1=Dyckhoff
first1=Tom
title=They've got it covered
work=Guardian web edition
published-date=2001-09-15
url=http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/history/story/0,6000,552107,00.html
accessdate=2007-12-06 ] . He went on to design further covers for Deighton's books, including "Horse Under Water", "Funeral in Berlin" and "The Action Cookbook" (where the IPCRESS revolver reappears, this time with a sprig of parsley in the barrel) [Cover images of the Action Cookbook can be found at http://acejet170.typepad.com/foundthings/2006/10/action_cookbook.html (accessed 2007-12-08)] .

He also designed covers for works by many other authors, including the Pan paperback editions of James Bond published in the mid-to-late 1960s, which the Financial Times described [cite web
title=Book Covers: Thunderball
author=James Lovegrove
date= 2008-03-08
work=Financial Times
url=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8a5d576e-e8c7-11dc-913a-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
accessdate=2008-03-10 ] as having "a stark elegance... consistently menacing and memorable. Each has a single photographic image on a plain or textured background. Blurb is dispensed with. It’s the visual equivalent of a cruel, sardonic smile."

Hawkey's photo-realistic cover style is seen in his title sequence for the 1969 film of Oh! What A Lovely War [cite web
title=Oh! What a lovely war (1969)
work=Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television
url=http://www.eofftv.com/o/ohw/oh_what_a_lovely_war_main.htm
accessdate=2007-12-08 ] for which Len Deighton was screenwriter and an (uncredited) producer [cite web
title=Oh! What a lovely war (1969) - Full cast and crew
work=IMDB
url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064754/fullcredits#cast
accessdate=2007-12-08 ] .

Books by Raymond Hawkey

Hawkey has written four thrillers:
*"Wild Card" (with Roger Bingham) (1974)
*"Side-Effect" (1979)
*"it" (1983)
*"End Stage" (1988)

Len Deighton described "Side-Effect" as "compulsively readable, brilliantly researched and chilling as tomorrow's headlines" [front cover of the New English Library paperback edition (1980) ISBN 450-04572-2] .

Raymond Hawkey also wrote and co-designed a 3D animated pop-up book "Evolution: The Story of the Origins of Humankind", published by Putnam in 1987.

References

Further reading

*Mike Dempsey's 2001 article [http://www.mad.co.uk/Main/News/Disciplines/Design/Articles/e9b9bcb0f6fc43b58a0252154c35e868/Immaculate-conception.html] (full citation in References, web link may require registration) is the source for some biographical material not otherwise credited in this article.
*Thumbnail images from the title sequence of Oh! What a lovely war are reproduced on page 101 of Poyner & Crowley's book (cited in references) and can be viewed using the Read Inside feature for this book on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (accessed 2007-12-08).