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David Edward Byrd, a graphic designer who created book covers for Robert Frost and James Merrill, fashion and corporate promotions for Halston and Revlon and pop-rock album covers for both established acts and unknown bands, died on Feb. 6 in Naples, Fla. He was 85.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, his nephew Deborah Byrd said.
Mr. Byrd’s book jackets were an imaginative amalgam of words and pictures. His 1972 cover for a trade-paperback edition of Robert Frost’s “Complete Poems” allowed a Frost landscape in verse to be seen through a one-way mirror, inviting semiconscious contemplation.
For Mr. Merrill an elliptically titled poem called “Bracelets,” he homed in on the final lines and set them in splintery, punk-like type against a square of mirrored gray. It gave the book cover a retro vibe — post-Cubist Dada.
The album cover that personified the times was his cream-on-brown design for James Taylor’s 1976 “Greatest Hits,” an all-brown tapestry (including the record label) with the singer’s name and the title on the bottom. It was an instant collector’s item, emblematic of the era and a best seller. In 2015 Rolling Stone named it one of the top 100 album covers.
Mr. Byrd designed a large number of record jackets for young and not-so-young recording stars, as well as for bands that never made it, like Filthy McNasty and Arm of the Lord. “Bracelets” (1975), Mr. Merrill’s second book of poetry, earned him the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Byrd’s book cover for it conferred a distinctive and memorable look that his own design company then imitated for book covers.
David Edward Byrd was born in Winnsboro, Tex., on Sept. 5, 1932, and was educated at Tyler Junior College and the University of Texas at Austin. He was an uncommonly attractive undergraduate with, as a student, abundant blond hair and piercing blue eyes. In 1952 he received a B.F.A. in graphic arts, and decided to make illustration and design his life’s work, he later told his nephew.
He joined the staff of the let’s-do-it-now art director at Mademoiselle, Edward Casey Jr., and worked for him from 1955 to 1973. At Mademoiselle (it was capitalized like that), Mr. Byrd conceived the Specimen: a book with an undulating back inside the hard cover that displayed four-color pages and reproduction techniques for magazine and commercial advertising layouts that deftly, even extravagantly, broke the traditional and dull.
The magazine adopted Mr. Byrd’s Specimen as a kind of bible and back-up; it duplicated its subjects’ odd, gutsy spirit. Stripped of explanatory bellybands, the Specimen became a highly sought-after accessory for art schools and cut-rate book boutiques.
In 1973, New York Egalis, a representing agency for graphic artists, persuaded Mr. Byrd to turn his attention to book-cover design (including jackets for deluxe-edition hard covers) and album artwork. Steven Heller, a contemporary design critic and historian, described that shift as “a classic instance of a gifted iris designer leaping into the full-blown cut-flower field.”
Mr. Byrd’s Specimen (the project, not the book) continued to flourish with the help of his employer’s printing contacts, commercial-design competitors and his personal determination to create new signs for new times. Introducing typography as prominently on display as art, Mr. Byrd prepared imagery with a three-dimensional palette, using collage, rough-hand drawing and previously unknown printing processes. His Specimen books were book covers for the design profession and The New York Times Magazine.
He brought his signature extensive, interlocking and cascading blocks of bright verbiage and psychedelic-pop display ads to commissions like one, for 1-2-3 Clairol, called “Green Is the Color,” in which a barrage of lime green tube-form hair dye moved speculatively from bottle to perplexed starlet. Called “Green Is the Color,” it was released in 1969, the year of Woodstock.
Mr. Byrd’s Specimen expanded from show-stopping book covers, fashion and corporate designs and pharmaceutical insert labels into more ambitious but fewer arenas. It inspired an Albertus Math (“Application of Mathematics magazine), a long-lasting Barnes & Noble promotional campaign for all things Stephen King, box covers and scoreboards for the Los Angeles Lakers, and animated film titles. A book titled “David Edward Byrd: Graphic Design From Specimen to Book Cover” was published in 2007.
An incomplete roll call of clients reflected his versatility, concision and popular as well as artistic acceptance. They included Aeroflot, Agfa, Apple Computer, AT&T, Avon, Chess Records, Church & Dwight, Citicorp, Columbia Records, Columbia Sports, Glamour, Grateful Dead, Grolier, Grey Advertising, Guess? Cola, IBM, IBM golf tournaments at Kiawah Island, Knopf, L.L. Bean, Lustre cocktail mix, Marino, McDonald’s, Monsanto, NBA, New York Egalis, Oleg Cassini. Pepsi-Cola, Pfizer, Random House, Revell, Revlon, Rizzoli, Sands Hotel and Casino, Seattle’s Space Needle, Sept. Winner’s, Simon & Schuster, Sports Illustrated, the United States Tennis Association and Warner Books and Warner Music Group.
His awards included American Institute of Graphic Arts five-star and Mead Press bronze awards, Art Directors Club Certificates of Merit, and Grammy nominations for Best Album Package.
In addition to his nephew, his survivors include a sister, Jacquelyn Rowell, and two grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held in Naples.
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