Bob Linney obituary | Graphic design

My friend Bob Linney, who has died aged 75, was a graphic artist whose vivid work spanned a wide range of mediums, including concert posters, book and record covers, murals and overseas development teaching aids.

Bob was born in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, to Keith Linney, a sea pilot, and Isobel (nee Thomson). He went to Harwich county high school in Essex and then gained a first in biology and a PhD in genetics at the University of Birmingham between 1966 and 1972.

He abandoned the idea of a career in science in 1971 when, along with a fellow science student, Ken Meharg, he joined the Birmingham Arts Lab, an experimental arts centre and artists’ collective, living for some time in a room accessed from under its bar counter. As their poster maker and exhibition curator he screenprinted posters for student sit-ins, dances, touring theatre and dance companies, films, and for the print exhibitions that he and Ken curated.

After moving to London in 1975, Bob was based at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) as a poster maker before renting a workshop in 1976 at Butler’s Wharf, near Tower Bridge, where he set up a printing business with Meharg, X3 Posters, designing posters for punk and new wave bands such as the Clash, the Police, U2 and UB40.

He took on bigger premises in Shoreditch in 1981 and shortly afterwards moved to a farmhouse in Walpole, Suffolk, with his wife, the artist Jacky Eltes, whom he had married in 1973, to start a family and work from a home studio.

From 1983 to 1989 he was commissioned to design publicity materials for the Arts Council’s Contemporary Music Network, promoting tours for musicians including Don Cherry, Steve Reich and the Kronos Quartet. The painterly posters, made for nearly 70 events, are now collectible.

As well as working on commissions for arts organisations, publishers and promoters, Bob was committed to furthering the use of graphic art in health and development around the world, and in 1983 he founded the charity Health Images, travelling extensively in Africa and Asia to help health, environmental and community development field workers make and use graphics using low-cost materials.

Unicef subsequently used Bob’s images for its publications about water, sanitation and hygiene, while Médecins sans Frontières South Africa commissioned a flipchart about preventing mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus.

His 1995 book Pictures, People, And Power was designed to help people involved in communicating with isolated, rural communities, and provides guidelines for non-artists, showing them how to make their own visual aids.

A keen guitar player, Bob was a devotee of Bob Dylan and also loved world and folk music. An environmentalist in later life, when he was not out walking he could be found tending the hay meadows and hedges around his home.

He is survived by Jacky and their children, Jo, John and Alfie.