Lance Wyman at Offf Barcelona 2017 from Design Week on Vimeo. He received a letter from Russell saying his “work showed definite promise”, his first real seal of approval – and given to him by one of the defining female actors of the 20th century. To his surprise, Wyman got back a bit more than that. As a teenager, he came up with a clever ploy to get an autograph from his favourite American football player Bob Waterfield, which involved sending his wife – 1940s Hollywood actor Jane Russell – a hand-drawn portrait of herself, and asking for both their signatures in return. He decided to use this newfound skill to his advantage. “But I was the kid in the class who could draw.” Wyman’s nostalgic pipe dream of the Wild West began to dwindle as his ability with a pencil started to become more apparent.

His work sits alongside that of Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir – the designers behind the UK’s road sign system – in terms of accessibility and recognition.

Wyman has worked on some of the 20th century’s most memorable graphics projects, from branding and wayfinding for the Mexico 1968 Olympic and Paralympic Games, to the Washington D.C. Mexico ’68 Olympic and Paralympic branding, 1968 Speaking at Offf festival in Barcelona, Wyman ran through his life and work, which has transformed cities and public spaces across the world through the power of iconography. The 79-year-old New York-based graphics revolutionary has long since learnt what design is. “I didn’t know what designers were at that point,” he says. Lance Wyman’s first career dream was to be a cowboy, he tells a packed out crowd in Barcelona, before showing a black-and-white photo of himself as a young boy dressed in the appropriate attire. Speaking at Offf in Barcelona, the logo extraordinaire talked through his lifetime of work and demonstrated how a childhood love for drawing and time spent grafting in a factory got him to where he is today.

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