The years after the Second World War were a boom time in British design, and Richard Guyatt did more than most to shape postwar design talent for the emerging world of distinctive design professions. Indeed, he is credited with coining the term “graphic design” as a name for his discipline. He was one of the small group of designers and artists who drove the reform of the Royal College Art, where he became Professor of Graphic Arts in 1948.

His influence on the profession was considerable, based as it was on the balance of traditional fine art values with the ever developing contemporary visual language of graphic design. His similarly balanced teaching philosophy, summarised in his 1950 inaugural lecture as “Head, Heart and Hand”, aimed to encourage an approach that combined intellectual substance with emotion and practical skill.

“The applied arts of design gain their strength from serving something other than themselves — industry in its widest sense — and in so doing they infuse their love of art into the practical levels of our lives,” he wrote in 1967.

“Designers, sure of their position, face problems quite different from those which confront fine artists. With their main interests focused on the aesthetics of design, they have to maintain this civilising element when working under the practical and commercial presssures of industry.” This, Guyatt believed, was healthy. His emphasis on the teaching not only of practical skills but also the fine art tradition, alongside the emerging contemporary grammar of graphic design, was rare but influential.

He pushed consistently and with much success for commercial art to achieve a central place, not only within the college, but in culture as a whole. He founded the college's graphic design department — replacing what had been known as “commercial art”. “No one was quite sure what it meant,” he later said, “but it had a purposeful ring.”

The guiding hand he exercised over some of the leading names in British design is revealed in Graphics RCA, the catalogue of an exhibition marking 15 years of his students' work. David Gentleman, Brian Tattersfield, Michael Foreman, Alan Fletcher, Len Deighton and Ridley Scott all feature.

His own range of influences was wide, but he had a particular interest in the Russian thinker P.D. Ouspensky, whose work on the limits of human perception shaped his own uncluttered style.

Guyatt himself created numerous distinctive and popular designs over his 50-year career. His early posters for BP and Shell-Mex in the 1930s made use of bold, striking imagery that are still regarded as classics of the genre. He reached an even bigger audience with his commemorative mugs and plates for Wedgwood, issued on royal occasions such as the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969 and the wedding of the Prince and Lady Diana Spencer. This was the work he most enjoyed doing, and the results are now highly collectible.

Sir Hugh Casson described his work as “elegant without being flimsy, charming but never sweet, witty but not facetious, dignified yet never self-important, controlled, convinced and unpretentious”.

Richard Gerald Talbot Guyatt was born in 1914 in northwest Spain where his father was British consul. He was educated at Charterhouse, where his talent for graphics was quickly apparent. He began his career as a freelancer in 1935, establishing his early reputation with work for Shell's Visit Britain's Landmarks and Racing Motorists series. (His own face was used in one of them, reportedly without his knowledge.)

During the war he worked for the Ministry of Home Security, as regional camouflage officer for Scotland, disguising strategical sites against bombers. During this time he worked with Hugh Casson and Robin Darwin — relationships which later became crucial to the development of design in Britain through the influence of the Royal College of Art, for which they became largely responsible. Guyatt joined the royal college after two years as chief designer for Cockade Ltd.

For the 1951 Festival of Britain he was one of the designers of the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, which aimed to symbolise in these two animals both the sturdy and the imaginative sides to the British character; an old story in a strikingly modern context.

This matching of traditional themes and modern techniques was also apparent in his commissions for stamps, postal orders and coins. One of these, issued in 1965 to mark the 700th anniversary of Parliament, featured a Wenceslaus Hollar engraving of Stephen's Hall and was the longest ever issued by the Post Office. He was a member of the Stamp Advisory Committee, 1963–74.

His first mug for Wedgwood commemorated the Queen's Coronation in 1953; he produced others for the Royal Silver Wedding in 1973, the Millennium, Golden Jubilee and 50th anniversary of the Coronation. He also produced ceramics for the Ministry of Works, for display in British embassies worldwide.

In 1980 he designed a crown piece for the 80th birthday of the Queen Mother, featuring a radiating motif of bows and lions (a sly reference to her family name, Bowes-Lyon). The controlled composition of delicate, flowing lines was a feature of much of his commemorative work.

Guyatt also designed corporate logos for clients such as WH Smith and the Windsor Festival. With Nicholas Jenkins, a colleague at the RCA, he founded a small consultancy, Guyatt/Jenkins Design Group, of which he was chairman. He became rector of the RCA in 1978 and retired three years later.

He was appointed CBE in 1969. He was predeceased by Elizabeth Mary Corsellis, who he married in 1941.

Professor Richard Guyatt, designer, was born on May 8, 1914. He died on October 17, 2007, aged 93