Richard Eckersley, 65, Graphic Designer, Dies (Published 2006)

Richard Eckersley, an award-winning graphic designer who introduced unconventional typography to staid-looking university-press books, died on Sunday at his home in Lincoln, Neb. He was 65.

The cause is not yet known, although he had been in failing health for more than a year, said his son, Sam, a theater poster designer in New York and a member of the third generation of Eckersleys to practice graphic design.

The elder Mr. Eckersley had been the senior designer at the University of Nebraska Press since 1981, producing hundreds of covers, jackets, interior layouts and promotional posters for scholarly -- often abstract -- books on modernist and postmodernist theory and criticism, including Louis Aragon's "Treatise on Style."

Most of Mr. Eckersley's book designs, the design historian Roy R. Behrens said in a 2002 Print Magazine article, "are characterized by typographic subtlety and restraint."

A stickler for the finer points of spacing and arranging type, Mr. Eckersley turned out work that was resolutely functional. Yet through consistently meticulous compositions and a preference for bright, flat color, matte paper and minimal ornament, he created a visual identity for the University of Nebraska Press, which often received honors in book shows and design competitions.

In 1989, however, Mr. Eckersley made a radical departure from his signature restraint, shaking up the field with his design for Avital Ronell's "Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech," an unorthodox study of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger and the philosophy of deconstruction. This was the first book Mr. Eckersley designed on the computer, using new page-making software programs to interpret the author's complex postmodern ideas typographically.