In a career that spanned half a century, the graphic designer Kate Hepburn, who has died aged 77 of multiple system atrophy, displayed great versatility. While an artist aims to develop a distinctive and recognisable style, a designer must be able to alter their approach and technique according to the situation. Hepburn was adept at this, working in fields including leftwing causes, music, comedy and publishing.
In 1970, during Kate’s first year of study at Royal College of Art, London, her sister Alison married Terry Jones of the Monty Python team. This led to Kate working with Terry Gilliam on the animations that punctuated the television comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus; in particular he recalled her skill in drawing medieval figures. For The Brand New Monty Python Bok (1973), with its misspelled title, she designed a dust jacket smeared with fingerprints. Those who believed the jacket to be genuinely dirty could discard it – revealing the explicit mock-cover of Tits ’n Bums, “a Weekly Look at Church Architecture”.
The Python books co-designed by Hepburn show her brilliance at recreating anything, from the photo-love stories of girls’ comics, complete with deliberately abysmal picture quality, to classifieds to children’s books to Victorian play manuscripts. She would switch typesetting methods – Linotype for one pastiche, rub-down lettering for another – to achieve the authentic flavour.
In 1972, Hepburn joined the staff of the new feminist magazine Spare Rib. Its format and grid were worked out by Sally Doust, a co-designer. Hepburn’s first contribution was its logo, which the magazine’s co-founder Marsha Rowe said was made “with a mix of typeface and free hand. She designed ‘Spare’ in smaller type, jutting up against the ‘Rib’, the ‘ib’ sloping forward, with a jagged force, resonant of bone.” This reassured Rowe that her choice of title, initially a joke, was the right one. Rowe wanted to attract “women readers who were still nervous of Women’s Liberation”, and Hepburn understood that some camouflage was needed, believing that “the magazine’s design and choice of photos should look like other women’s magazines, only with different content”.
Hepburn left the magazine in January 1973, later telling Rowe that she had “begun to feel the strain of the contradiction in working for Monty Python, which still had an element of sexism, and for Spare Rib”.
In 1974, Hepburn began her occasional work for Pink Floyd. Before a tour of Japan, the drummer Nick Mason asked Hepburn to adapt Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa for his drumkit. “I had the idea, but she picked it up and took it into a 3D world.” Of her oeuvre in general, Hepburn told me that there was a lot of pastiche. But pastiche is a craft in itself, and artworks such as Mason’s drumkit, which Hepburn painted by hand, went beyond pastiche – here, by reinventing a two-dimensional graphic as a sequence of three-dimensional cylinders sitting adjacent in space.
From 1975, Hepburn contributed cover and book designs to the leftwing publisher Pluto Press, often working through the night to meet deadlines. Her designs for editions of Pluto’s themed Big Red Diary show her skill in collaging images from disparate sources to create a dynamic, coherent whole.
In the 1980s, Hepburn’s work branched out into stage design, in collaboration with her then partner Mark Fisher. Her work for Jean-Michel Jarre’s 1981 tour of China featured banners printed using rudimentary Chinese printing, airbrushed posters on canvas and the cover of the consequent live album. This work earned her two D&AD awards.
Born in Blackheath, London, Kate was the daughter of Margaret (nee Hope) and James Telfer. After her parents separated, she lived with her mother in Hampstead. Margaret later married James Hepburn, whose RAF job required the family to move frequently. In 1960 they finally settled in Parliament Hill, London, where Kate attended Camden school for girls. There she adopted Hepburn’s name, thinking it a better one for an artist.
After a year at Bath Academy of Art, she enrolled in 1966 as a graphic design student at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now part of the University of Arts London), where she received rigorous training in drawing layouts and type by hand: “You had to hand-rule the text with your Rapidograph pen, and trace 7-point type. It was a very lengthy process, devoted at times.” Making thumbnails and sketches had remained important throughout her career, as “a way of letting the client know that you hadn’t taken expensive decisions using actual materials. You were still drawing, still discussing with them.”
At Central, Hepburn began a relationship with fellow student Pearce Marchbank, whose pioneering work for underground magazines applied radical graphic techniques to politically radical content. Early in their careers both Hepburn and Marchbank had to find ways to achieve maximum visual impact with rudimentary means, for clients who had little money. After the couple separated, Marchbank’s technical knowhow remained a valuable resource. In 1987 they collaborated with Roger Waters on his album Radio K.A.O.S., a cover that converts Waters’ name and track titles to morse code. This needed only two inks and no images, contrasting with the extravagantly staged imagery used by other stadium acts at the time.
In later years Hepburn continued with her watercolour paintings, and screenprints of abstract designs conceived during her student days. Despite periods in which she worked in-house – notably at Wolff Olins brand consultancy – her calling was that of a freelance designer and artist whose vocabulary allows them to switch style to fit the circumstances.
She is survived by her daughter, Usha, her grandchildren, Maya and Manu, and her sisters, Alison and Harriet.
• Kate Hepburn, graphic designer and artist, born 11 June 1947; died 26 July 2024
