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Jim Parkinson, Logo Artist in Print’s Glory Days, Dies at 83

July 6, 2025
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Jim Parkinson, Logo Artist in Print’s Glory Days, Dies at 83
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Jim Parkinson, a renowned lettering artist whose hand-drawn logos branded the covers of Rolling Stone, Esquire, Newsweek and dozens of other publications during the heyday of print journalism in the 1960s and ’70s, died on June 26 at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 83.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his wife, Dorothy A. Yule, said.

Using a mechanical pencil and a dip pen before computers took over his profession — and the media — Mr. Parkinson drew letters that blended classic design with a loose ’60s-style energy, giving publications an identity that radiated with gravitas and personality.

“He was working during the analog heyday of commercial lettering,” Roger Black, a prominent design consultant, said in an interview. “His work was never slick or sleek. It had a hand-drawn quality that was warm, never mechanical. The question for Jim was always, ‘What are your roots?’”

Mr. Black was the art director at Rolling Stone in the late 1970s when Jann Wenner, the publication’s co-founder, wanted to overhaul the cover logo and typeface for the magazine’s 10th anniversary. Mr. Black hired Mr. Parkinson, who was working as a freelance designer after a stint drawing letters at Hallmark.

It was a tricky assignment.

“We came out of a particular cultural moment — the baby boom, hippie culture, drugs and music,” Mr. Wenner said in an interview. “We had a kind of energy that we wanted to communicate. And yet, at the same time, the magazine wanted to be very formal in our journalistic standards and traditions.”

The original logo, in all capital letters, was drawn by the underground comic artist Rick Griffin and looked like the type on psychedelic posters he had designed. Mr. Parkinson replaced the trippy lettering with a serif style that was more authoritative, yet footloose and oblique.

“A magazine that has been around for a while has a lot of time and money invested in establishing its identity,” Mr. Parkinson told Masthead magazine in 2005. “There is no reason to chuck all that out the window. There are often little clues, details, attitudes in the old logos that are very appealing. I like to try to move the logo forward without severing all links to the past.”

Mr. Wenner loved the overhaul, which Mr. Parkinson would subsequently tweak in 1981 and 2018.

“He evolved what had been a kind of hippie logo, and he gave it a polished, more machined look — a funky but classical style that really jumped off the page,” he said. “The modern Rolling Stone logo really is his doing.”

Mr. Parkinson’s success at Rolling Stone made him one of the most prominent lettering and font designers in media.

In addition to Esquire and Newsweek, he created or revamped logos for Men’s Journal, Atlanta magazine, The Washington Post, Variety, The Wall Street Journal, Texas Monthly, The Detroit Free Press, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times Magazine.

He also designed logos for the Doobie Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

James Thornley Parkinson was born on Oct. 23, 1941, in Oakland. His father, Roger, worked for the Pacific Bell Telephone Company. His mother, Gladys (Gum) Parkinson, managed the home.

As a boy, Jim lived across the alley from a lettering artist named Abraham Lincoln Paulsen, who created designs for awards and degrees and performed lettering tricks at parties, like writing the Gettysburg Address upside down.

“He lettered upstairs in the back room of his house, pretty much like I do today,” Mr. Parkinson said in a 2010 interview with FontCast, a series of web interviews with typeface designers. “He would invite me into his studio, and I would just sit up there in the afternoons and just watch him work, lettering away.”

After graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in 1963, he moved to Kansas City, Mo., for a job at Hallmark. There, he worked in the lettering department with Hermann Zapf, the renowned typeface designer who created Palatino and many other fonts.

“I was blown away by his craftsmanship,” Mr. Parkinson said. “It made me realize that you don’t just sit down and letter. It’s like if you’re going to be a good athlete, you don’t just go out on the field and do something heroic. You get in shape. You have to learn how to play the game.”

For Mr. Parkinson, that meant obsessively studying the history of typography, whether in wood type, old Bibles, vintage signs or bookmaking.

“He was an incredible collector of this stuff,” Mr. Black said. “He’d find old posters, old books, old signs. He loved old ads. And he would save everything, then go back and get inspiration from it.”

Mr. Parkinson left Hallmark and returned to the Bay Area in 1969. At first, he struggled to get by. “I lettered for food and furniture and even for an old car,” he wrote on his website. (He also occasionally traded designs for mind-altering substances.)

Eventually, he got his big break when a friend recommended him to Mr. Black at Rolling Stone. Mr. Parkinson could have made more money working in advertising, but it wouldn’t have been as much fun.

“I found that working for a publication, designing a custom typeface or a logo, was much more fulfilling than all the other lettering work I’d been doing,” he wrote on his website, “and, after that, I tried to make it a point to work for publications as much as possible.”

Mr. Parkinson’s first four marriages ended in divorce. He married Ms. Yule, a book artist, in 2010. She is his only immediate survivor.

While working in the Bay Area in the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Parkinson was a spirited partyer.

“I love lettering,” he often said, “because it keeps me out of trouble.”

There was another reason.

“The thing that was fun about inking is that it was a craft,” he told FontCast. “It’s like being a cabinet maker or a designer, or making shoes or something like that. You were producing through your craftsmanship — something physical that you could touch.”

The post Jim Parkinson, Logo Artist in Print’s Glory Days, Dies at 83 appeared first on New York Times.

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