A Career by Design: Woody Pirtle 1944-2025

A great designer and person was lost last month, Woody Pirtle. I first met and began to follow this design influencer in 1978 when he was leaving the Richards Group to form Pirtle Design. I always admired his designs and broad design sense.

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. 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.

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 and later helped bring partners Paula Scher and Michael Bierut into the fold. 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.

Woody will be greatly missed. He was pivotal to the design community nationally and internationally and certainly lived a career by design.