During his lifetime, Morris produced items in a range of crafts, mainly those to do with furnishing, including over 600 designs for wallpaper, textiles, and embroideries, over 150 for stained glass windows, three typefaces, and around 650 borders and ornamentations for the Kelmscott Press. He emphasised the idea that the design and production of an item should not be divorced from one another, and that where possible those creating items should be designer-craftsmen, thereby both designing and manufacturing their goods. In the field of textile design, Morris revived a number of dead techniques, and insisted on the use of good quality raw materials, almost all natural dyes, and hand processing.

Read more about William Morris in our post: William Morris: The First Celebrity Designer?

E. A. Séguy was one of the foremost French designers of decorative art during the first third of the twentieth century. He produced numerous color portfolios of visual ideas for artists, illustrators and designers over a long and distinguished career. His books reproduce in full color all 40 of the extraordinary plates from Papillons (Butterflies) and Insectes, two portfolios Seguy published in the 1920s. Included are 81 specimens of butterflies plus 16 artistic designs based on butterfly motifs, and 80 insects other than butterflies with 16 decorative compositions utilizing insects.

Learn more about this artist from our post: Eugène Séguy & the pochoir method.

Romain de Tirtoff (23 November 1892 – 21 April 1990), known by the pseudonym Erté (from the French pronunciation of his initials: [ɛʁte]), was a Russian-born French artist and designer. He was a 20th-century artist and designer in an array of fields, including fashion, jewellery, graphic arts, costume, and set design for film, theatre, and opera, and interior decor.

In 1925, Louis B. Mayer brought him to Hollywood to design sets and costumes for the silent film Paris. There were many script problems, so Erté was given other assignments to keep him busy. Hence, he designed for such films as Ben-Hur, The Mystic, Time, The Comedian, and Dance Madness. In 1920 he designed the set and costumes for the film The Restless Sex starring Marion Davies and financed by William Randolph Hearst.

By far, his best-known image is Symphony in Black, depicting a somewhat stylized, tall, slender woman draped in black holding a thin black dog on a leash. The influential image has been reproduced and copied countless times

Erté continued working throughout his life, designing revues, ballets, and operas. He had a major rejuvenation and much lauded interest in his career during the 1960s with the Art Deco revival. He branched out into the realm of limited edition prints, bronzes, and wearable art.

Two years before his death, Erté created seven limited edition bottle designs for Courvoisier to show the different stages of the cognac-making process, from distillation to maturation. In 2008, the eighth and final set of the remaining Erte-designed Courvoisier bottles, containing Grande Champagne cognac dating back to 1892, was released and sold for $10,000 apiece.

Edward Penfield was an American illustrator in the era known as the “Golden Age of American Illustration” and he is considered the father of the American poster. His work has been included in almost every major book on American Illustration or the history of the poster. He is also a major figure in the evolution of graphic design.

He first worked for Harper’s Weekly and later became art director. He developed his own unique style of simplified figures with bold outlines in settings free of extraneous detail. He believed, “A design that needs study is not a poster, no matter how well executed.” He wrote and published a book titled Holland Sketches, which was published by Scribner’s in 1907.

Penfield lived in New Rochelle, New York, a popular art colony among actors, writers and artists of the period. The community was most well known for its unprecedented number of prominent American illustrators. He was one of the founding members of the New Rochelle Art Association which was organized in 1912.

His posters were bold and stood out from a distance with great clarity. As artists like Alphonse Mucha, Théophile Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec popularized the poster in Europe, Penfield accomplished the same feat in the United States. For his posters, Penfield utilized simple shapes and a limited palette of colors that lent themselves to the primitive methods of reproduction of the era.