Richard Murray 1965 – 2010

Leading graphic designer Richard Murray, co-founder of design consultancy Williams Murray Hamm (WMH), has died aged 44.

Along with his partners, Richard Williams and Garrick Hamm, Richard built into one of the UK's leading design consultancies, renowned for its ability to create witty, challenging work for major brands.

WMH is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated design consultancies of the last decade. It topped the Design Week Creativity chart three times, has twice been named Design Agency of the Year by Marketing Magazine and was ranked number one for design effectiveness by the DBA for three consecutive years. The company has won more creative awards in that period than any other design consultancy.

Richard was bright, incisive, sarcastic and mordant. That would have been the Geordie in him. He could be as low-brow as high, and was as much enamoured of the iconography of, say, Hilda Ogden as that of Damien Hirst. There can be no-one in the UK, at least, who has not experienced, albeit often unwittingly, Richard’s work: be it for Hovis, Barclays Bank or Sainsbury’s and a host of others.

Facta first encountered Richard in the mid-80s when a student with partner Johnny Dobbyn at Lancaster University. That mateship endured – with the odd hiatus – over the decades; and Richard is indelibly imprinted all over Facta. Not least because it was he who brought the weight of WMH to bear in our favour and designed our ‘strength out of chaos’ ‘scrawl’ identity as a most-welcome freebie when the business was starting up.

Bah!

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