Common Worship, the book used by more than a million Church of England congregants a week, brings together “the best of both ancient and modern, classic and contemporary” orders of service. With its call in 2000 for proposals to give the book a refresh, the General Synod found a like mind in the designer and typographer John Morgan who, with Derek Birdsall, dispensed with the traditional prayer book aesthetic of a dense full page to give plenty of space around the orders of service, the design minimal but on an ivory paper stock, imbuing warmth.
Morgan, who has died aged 52 from a brain tumour, would continue working with the church for more than a decade, developing the original design into different formats and for varying ecclesiastical occasions.
Photograph: Michael Harvey © John Morgan studio
He and Birdsall used a Gill Sans font, which proved flexible enough for the many subheadings inherent in variations of services for holidays and holy occasions (bold for the confessional, regular text for absolution). The bishops proved exacting clients, presenting myriad practical issues that Morgan only saw as a source of inspiration, be it paper requirements (which needed to be hardwearing but thin enough that the book was not heavy), type size (balancing elegance with the book’s use in often low lighting), to the project’s spiritual nature (prayers had to appear on a single page to avoid their rustling mid-recitation). The cover design was elegant but arresting: the words Common Worship form the arms of a cross, with the subtitle Services and Prayers for the Church of England acting as the post.
“Atmosphere is a problematic and woolly word, but it’s the best description of what I aim for in my work,” Morgan said. “It’s the sensation you find when you walk into a building or space and it changes the way you feel.”
In 2004 Morgan collaborated with the then poet laureate Andrew Motion on a public artwork for the BBC’s Media City in west London. Morgan designed a template for a series of short compositions by Motion, the words set in dark cobbles along the main walkway. A decade later he oversaw a total overhaul of Tate Britain’s signage. For the museum he created a new typeface, based on an 18th-century design and wrought in brass at the gallery entrance, but sought to reduce the presence of all other signs and give more space around the artworks.
Common Worship, designed by Morgan. Photograph: Michael Harvey © John Morgan studio
His clients were otherwise typically artists and small publishers, as well as the architects David Chipperfield and 6a, Morgan preferring “small gestures” to showier briefs. Chipperfield said of his longstanding relationship with the designer: “If everyone shouts it’s a good idea to whisper. And John is a very good whisperer.”
Born in Galgate, Lancashire, he was the son of Maureen (nee Pugh) and Michael Morgan, a biochemist. After studying at Lancaster Royal grammar school, in 1992 John enrolled on the typography and graphic communication course at the University of Reading, which was heavy in its workload and stringent on the history and theory of design.
Lettering designed by Morgan for the repainting of HMS Victory, 2015. Photograph: John Morgan studio
Morgan credited his tutor the typographer Paul Stiff as being critical to ensuring stripped-down designs did not mean bland, recalling to Eye magazine, “You’d get really severe, useful criticism from Paul. He described one of my student projects as looking ‘like an in-flight meal’.” At Reading he met Claire Burton, an art student whom he married in 2003. “The [art] students would be sitting, smoking, painting, while we’d be working like crazy to a deadline.”
On graduation in 1995, Morgan joined Birdsall’s Omnific studio. “It felt like an atelier, which for me at the time was an important thing.” His work with the Church of England originated at Omnific, but with Birdsall’s blessing, Morgan took the Common Worship project with him when he established John Morgan Studio in 2000. Initially operating within a creative co-operative in north London, in 2004 the agency moved to the former clerks offices above Platform 1 of Paddington Station. It was, Morgan said, a “design solution”, as his train from his home in Oxfordshire arrived at the terminus.
Books continued to be the designer’s passion, working with the art publisher Fontanka and the gallery Raven Row; two long-standing collaborations with the ceramicist Edmund de Waal and Turner prize-winner Helen Marten; as well as publications with the artists Christian Marclay, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Juergen Teller, among others.
“Books aren’t products, it’s a different territory,” Morgan said. In 2021 he produced Usylessly, a self-initiated project recreating the first 1922 edition of the James Joyce novel, within which the designer charted the history of the book as a physical object.
The new typeface for Tate Britain. Photograph: David Grandorge © John Morgan studio
Morgan received the first of three consecutive nominations in 2011 for the Design Museum’s designs of the year, for the Familiars series, published by Four Corners Books, a collaboration with artists on reissues of classic titles. The following year he got a nod for his redesign of AA Files, the Architectural Association’s journal, and in 2013 he won the graphic design category award for his work with the Venice architecture biennale.
That year, the studio redesigned ArtReview, stripping away the glossier elements that had seen the art magazine through the 1980s and 90s, and reconnecting it with its postwar socialist roots.
Morgan’s interest in historical precedents continued when he was commissioned to produce new lettering for the repainting of HMS Victory in Portsmouth harbour in 2015, jettisoning the anachronistic font that had been used on the 18th-century ship’s stern in a 2005 refurbishment for a more historically accurate serif design inspired by those seen on contemporary naval paintings, created with Adrien Vasquez. In 2017 the pair established the Abyme type foundry, and earlier this year Morgan set up his own publishing imprint, Ten Thousand Angels Press, finishing work on a second edition of Usylessly just before his death.
He is survived by Claire and their children, Rudy, Francis and Iris, and by his parents and his sister, Jane.
John Andrew Morgan, graphic designer, born 6 January 1973; died 2 September 2025
