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About
Considered a master of 20th Century graphic design, Games was born Abraham Gamse in the Whitechapel neighborhood of London on the very day the First World War began. He was the son of a Jewish-Latvian, fine-art photographer Joseph Gamse, and a Russian-Polish seamstress Sarah. In 1926, His father anglicized their family name to Games. At the age of 16, Games left Hackney Downs School to attend the St. Martins School of Art now known as the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, in London. The costs and teaching styles at St Martins were not agreeable to Games, and he left following his second term after being told he had “no artistic talent.” He found work at the Askew-Young design firm as a studio boy between 1932 and 1936; he found time to take life drawing classes at night school. A second-place award in 1934 in the Health Council Competition followed by a first prize in the London City Council Competition the subsequent year set him on his path as a freelance artist. Games was just establishing his own studio when WWII began. He served in the British Army as a private in the infantry, where he spent the bulk of his time drawing training maps, a job both he and his superiors found him painfully unsuited for. Upon his successful submission of a recruiting poster, he was assigned full-time to the War Office and created posters for the duration of hostilities. Working with a small staff in the confines of the War Office attic, Games became the first and only official British war poster designer. He created over 100 various recruiting, propaganda and educational posters during the War. Games’s work earned him high praise and quick advancement through the ranks. He attained the rank of Captain and later received the Order of the British Empire in 1958. Games was a firebrand for both the war effort and against many of his superiors, particularly in Parliament and even, at one point, the Prime Minister Winston Churchill. His 1941 press dubbed “Blonde Bombshell” or “Join the ATS” poster, was considered too glamorous by a Member of Parliament and was eventually withdrawn. His “What Are We Fighting For?” poster series upset Churchill by revealing the notion of an optimistic socialist future contrasted with the dreary world and slums of wartime London. In 1946, Games returned to his freelance practice where he created images for Shell, Financial Times, Guinness, British Airways, London Transport, El Al, and the United Nations. Games created various stamp designs for Britain, Jersey, and the fledgling state of Israel as well as book jackets for Penguin Books and logos for the 1951 Festival of Britain. Games served as a visiting lecturer in graphic design at the London Royal College of Art between 1946 and 1953. In 1959, he was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI). A proponent of Zionism, Games spent time in the 1950s in Israel where he worked to aid the emerging nation, designed stamps for the Israeli Post Office and taught classes in postage-stamp design. Games was responsible also for the design of the 1947 Cona vacuum coffee maker, which was produced from 1949, and following a rework in 1959, is still in production today. He also revealed his capacity for technical design by creating a circular vacuum and in the early 1960s, a short-lived, primitive, portable handheld copier for Gestetner. His development process for a poster design involved rendering as many as 30 small preliminary sketches, which he then combined two or three more into a final product. Games claimed that by working small, if poster designs “don't work an inch high, they will never work.” Games also utilized many photographic images as source material. On the rare occasion that a client rejected a proposed design, is was said that Games would resign and recommend that the client seek another designer. Games was considered a master of the visual pun. He was a student of the Surrealists- in particular Dali and his use of trompe l'oeil was something of a signature. His most famous propaganda image depicted a soldier’s open mouth emitting a spiral, which ominously morphs into a bloody bayonet skewering three fellow soldiers. Another, showing a British soldier killed in combat lying face-down in a coil of barbed-wire branded itself in the collective psyche of the wartime British public. His body of work, exceeding 60 years, represents some of the most iconic images of the era in Britain. Contact
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