THE graphic designer Richard Eckersley had an international reputation despite working for one of America’s lesser-known university presses. In truth it was perhaps because he worked for the University of Nebraska Press, rather than, say, Oxford or Harvard, that he was able to give such a distinctive — and disruptive — stamp to his work.

After 25 years of creating books notable for their classical restraint, Eckersley responded in the late 1980s to the academic fashion known as deconstruction by reflecting its ideas in de(con)structive book designs. It was all the rage among literary theorists to claim that writing is not stable, intentional and referential, but rather has no fixed meaning, is not deliberately patterned and cannot be about anything other that writing itself. With the coming of onscreen page make-up giving him direct control, Eckersley rose to the challenge by defying the reader’s typographical preconceptions, too.

In Avital Ronell’s Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989), paragraphs are suddenly broken off, pages are left blank, lines clash and words are intentionally ill-spaced or blurred. The medium matches the message, although this could be said to disprove the deconstructionist case since the dislocations are the result of deliberate design, with a clear mimetic purpose, and are entirely stable — being the same in every copy of the book. That argument continues, but certainly the author was delighted.

Typological tricks had, of course, been played more than two centuries earlier by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, with its entirely black page for a funeral, its squiggle representing the flourish of a stick, and many peculiar hiatuses. The trick of using mirror-writing, as Eckersley did, had recently been used by Barry Moser in his Pennyroyal edition of Through the Looking-Glass (and Tenniel himself had shown Alice disappearing and magically re-emerging through the mirror of a page). Flexing a book’s physique was not new, but seen in a university press book, Eckersley’s jambs, jars and japes raised timely questions about how seriously this new scholarship should be taken.

Born in Lancashire in 1941, Richard Hilton Eckersley was the son of Tom Eckersley. His wartime posters, such as those promoting safety in the workplace, led to his being appointed OBE in 1948 and his three sons were all to become graphic designers.

Eckersley learnt to respect books early on. His grandfather was a Methodist minister, and on Sundays practically the only permitted activity was reading — and only when the boy had washed his hands would a book be placed ceremoniously before him. Later on he became a connoisseur of printed books from the 16th century onwards, and a voracious reader of classic fiction. From University College School, Hampstead, Eckersley went up to Trinity College, Dublin, where he read English and Italian, and fostered his literary ambitions. His work for the student magazine Icarus, however, soon turned towards design, and posters for college events naturally followed.

His father was by now head of graphic design at the London College of Printing, at Elephant and Castle, London, where Eckersley studied from 1962. He became more and more expert at setting and spacing type, all in metal in those days. This fine art was never really appreciated by his father, who strove to exclude words as far as possible from his posters. On the course Eckersley met a Swedish contemporary, Dika, who was also to become a book designer. They married shortly before graduation in 1966.

He was then taken on by one of the most design-conscious of British publishers. Lund Humphries not only published the Penrose Annual and Typographica magazine, but had once employed the typographer Jan Tschichold, and its art director was E. McKnight Kauffer. Eckersley also found time to work freelance, designing museum catalogues and teaching at the London College of Printing.

After a period living in Bath, Eckersley and his wife moved to southeast Ireland, where in 1974 he became senior graphic designer at the Kilkenny Design Workshops, the official showcase for many of Ireland’s traditional crafts. While he was there he also helped to initiate a series of Irish Book Design Awards.

Another enthusiasm was soon apparent in the programmes for the Kilkenny Arts Week. Eckersley played the jazz saxophone, and before long Ronnie Scott and Zoot Sims were appearing on the festival programme alongside classical musicians.

In 1971 a four-month exchange visit to the University of Massachusetts Press had given Eckersley a taste of American life, and a decade later he was tempted back, teaching for a year at the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania before becoming senior designer at the University of Nebraska Press.

Because the press was producing only a few dozen books a year, Eckersley could create a coherent identity for the whole list, using flat colours and restrained, simple typography — not so different from the uncluttered work of his father in the 1930s. Soon the designs were winning awards, featuring in exhibitions and being used by teachers. Over the next 25 years he was to design hundreds of jackets and layouts.

Literary theory was rather a surprising departure for a press that had previously been big in frontier history — Eckersley worked for 15 years on the 13 volumes of The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition — but when Bill Regier became director in 1987, he deliberately built up a challenging list strong in translations of writers such as Louis Aragon and critics such as Jacques Derrida.

Eckersley began his disconcerting experiments with Derrida’s Glas (1986), and extended his range in books such as Blaise Cendrars’s Modernities and Other Writings (1992) and L. C. Breunig’s Cubist Poets in Paris (1995).

Over the years he wrote for several design journals such as Graphics, Design and Print, and in 1994 he was one of the four authors of The Glossary of Typesetting Terms. In 1999 he was appointed, like his father, a Royal Designer for Industry.

He is survived by his wife, two daughters, and a son who is also a graphic designer.

Richard Eckersley, graphic designer, was born on February 20, 1941. He died on April 16, 2006, aged 65.