In Memory of Woody Pirtle, 1944-2025
The celebrated designer and former Pentagram partner has passed away at age 81.
It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Woody Pirtle, the celebrated designer and former partner in Pentagram’s New York office.
Woody was a partner at Pentagram for almost two decades (1988 to 2005), working on some of our most prestigious projects while helping to build the New York office into the powerhouse it is today.
Woody’s identity and publication designs delivered corporate messages with visual elegance, and inventiveness. His symbols, logotypes and posters are witty and economical, inviting viewers to discover the meaning—and joy—in simple graphic images that are smart, funny and playful.
Hot Seat poster for Knoll, 1982.
Logo for Mr. and Mrs. Aubrey Hair, 1976.
Cigar poster for the Creative Club of Tampa Bay, 1992.
Milton Glaser poster for the Dallas Society of Visual Communications, 1985.
Logo for the Dallas Opera, 1978.
Poster for Hilton Typographers, 1987.
Woody was born in 1944 in Corsicana, Texas and grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. He studied architecture and fine art at the University of Arkansas and began his graphic design career in 1969 at The Richards Group in Dallas. He left in 1974 for a brief period to set up practice with Jerry Herring in Houston, then returned to the Richards Group until 1978 when he founded Pirtle Design in Dallas.
In 1988 he joined Pentagram as partner at the invitation of Colin Forbes and Peter Harrison, two Brits who wanted to bring a stronger American presence to the New York studio. Woody later helped bring partners Paula Scher and Michael Bierut into the fold, putting the office on equal footing with the London location.
Woody’s logos, posters, environmental graphics and corporate communications were often lauded as the best of their kind. At Pentagram his wide-ranging clients included Allen & Company, Barnes & Noble, Neiman Marcus, Nine West, United Technologies Corporation, Upper & Lower Case magazine, Simpson Paper, Rizzoli Publishing, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Pfaltzgraff, the Rockefeller Foundation, Callaway Golf, Champion Sportswear and Murray’s Cheese. In 1998 he created the official NYC 100 logo for the Greater New York Centennial Celebration, the 100th anniversary of the five boroughs coming together.
Poster for UCLA Extension Summer Sessions, 1989.
Logo for Gary Gray, 1982.
Identity for Fine Line Features, 1991.
Boston Tea Party poster for AIGA First National Design Conference, 1985.
The Cutting Edge poster for 38th Annual International Design Conference in Aspen, 1988.
Identity for Advanced Surgical, 1992.
Chrysler/Corn poster for the Art Directors Association of Iowa, 1990.
Identity for Delta Faucet, 2001.
Poster for the Ringling School of Art, 1992.
His projects in environmental graphics include signage for Fuji Television’s headquarters building on Tokyo Bay (1996), designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kenzo Tange, and the redeveloped American Folk Art Museum building (2001), designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and sadly demolished only 13 years later as part of the MoMA expansion on West 53rd Street.
As his influential work continued to set standards for excellence, Woody was appointed to the design advisory boards of several corporations and served as a consultant for Pantone, IBM and Champion International. He taught at the School of Visual Arts, and served on the National Board of AIGA.
After almost 18 years as a partner, Woody retired from Pentagram in 2005. He reestablished Pirtle Design in an historic 18th-century mill on his property in the Hudson Valley. There he continued his client work while also spending more time on his second career as an accomplished fine artist, making collages and sculptures from found objects and images.
“I’ve always tried to blur the lines between the commercial and art world. Why is (design) any different than doing a painting? And the more I did, the more I realized that it really wasn’t that different. It’s only a different way of delivering an idea,” Woody said.
Throughout his career Woody was committed to creating pro bono work for social causes he cared deeply about. He designed many posters and campaigns for Amnesty International, including the poster celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1998.
Signage for Fuji Television Network Headquarters on Tokyo Bay, 1997.
Identity for Murray's Cheese, 2004.
Identity for Brown Forman Wine & Spirits, 2001.
Caution: Children at War poster for Amnesty International, 1999.
Stop Gun Trafficking poster for Amnesty International, 2001.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 50th Anniversary poster for Amnesty International, 1998.
In 2002 he collaborated with Scenic Hudson to create the “Stop the Plant” campaign that successfully halted the construction of a massive cement plant on the Hudson River. He served on the boards for Sustainable Hudson Valley and Walkway Over the Hudson, for which he designed the identity for the conversion of the historic Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge into the world’s longest elevated pedestrian bridge, now enjoyed by over 600,000 people a year.
Woody won countless awards over the course of his career, and in 2003 he received the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal, for his distinguished contributions to design. In 2015 he was awarded the prestigious Rome Prize, in design, from the American Academy in Rome. In 2016, he was named a Fellow of the Academy.
His work was exhibited worldwide and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Denver Art Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Neue Sammlung Museum in Munich, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, and the Zurich Poster Museum. A book on his work was published in 1999 by China Youth Press.
Woody will be greatly missed. He was pivotal to Pentagram’s presence in New York, and years after he left as partner we still loved seeing him at our studio events, most recently at our 50th anniversary celebration in 2023. Our archive is still bursting with all of the fantastic work he created during his time at the firm.
RIP Woody, and condolences to his wife Leslie and family.
Poster for AIGA Communication Graphics, 1994.
Letter Y poster for Ambassador Arts and Champion, 1994.
Poster for the 10th Annual Hampton Day School Potato Festival, 1998.
NYC 100 logo for the Greater New York City Centennial Celebration, 1998.
Poster and identity for the American Folk Art Museum, 2001.
Woody logo.
