Philip B. Meggs

Philip Baxter Meggs (30 May 1942 – 24 November 2002) was an American graphic designer, professor, historian and author of books on graphic design. His book History of Graphic Design is a definitive, standard read for the study of graphic design.

He has been called the most important historian of design since Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983). In contrast to Pevsner, he published a history of graphic design that went beyond the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the first educators to create an overview of the history of graphic design that did not depend exclusively on the traditional structure of the history of the art, Meggs believed that graphic design would need to acquire an adequate understanding of the past and its relation with art.

Meggs was born on May 30, 1942 in Newberry, South Carolina, to Wallace Nat Meggs and Elizabeth Pruitt Meggs. He had a twin brother, William Joel Meggs.

At 16 years of age he practiced typesetting metal type in the afternoons after school and enjoyed drawing and painting.

He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and an honorary doctorate from Massachusetts College of Art

In 1964 he married his college girlfriend, Libby Phillips, an art director and illustrator. They had two children, Andrew and Elizabeth.

Post-college, Meggs worked as a senior designer at Reynolds Metals and then art director at A.H. Robins Pharmaceuticals.

In 1968, he began teaching in the Communication Arts and Design Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, chairing the department from 1974 to 1987, during which time enrollment doubled and the program rose to national prominence. In the late 1970s, Meggs used a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to travel to other institutions and teach the history of visual communication in an effort to promote the subject. In addition to his teaching at VCU, he served as visiting faculty at Syracuse University and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

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