Who Designed the Recycle Logo?

Picture a graphic design pioneer of the 1960s. You're probably imagining someone in a Manhattan studio, or a modernist in Basel, or a slick ad man in a sharp suit.

You're almost certainly not picturing a Catholic nun in Los Angeles, screen printing anti-war posters in a college art department.

But that's exactly who Corita Kent was.

Born Frances Elizabeth Kent in Iowa in 1918, she joined the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at 18 and took the name Sister Mary Corita. She taught, she studied, and in the early 1950s she discovered the medium that would define her: serigraphy, or silkscreen printing.

She taught herself on a DIY silkscreen kit and worked it out from there.

That choice of medium was itself a statement. Screen printing meant she could make multiples, which meant her work could be affordable and widely shared rather than locked away in a gallery for collectors. She wanted art in people's hands.

By 1964 she was chair of the art department at Immaculate Heart College, and she turned it into one of the most exciting creative environments in America. The guests she brought in tell you everything: Saul Bass, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames, and even Alfred Hitchcock all passed through.

Kent looked at the world Andy Warhol was looking at, the supermarket, the billboard, the advertising slogan, and she saw something different in it. Where Warhol reflected consumer culture back at itself, Kent stole its language and repurposed it entirely.

She'd take a supermarket slogan or a brand's tagline and twist its meaning until it said something about God, poverty, hunger or peace instead. A cereal brand's "big G" became a G for goodness, and for God. Wonder Bread packaging became a meditation on hunger, cut through with words from Gandhi. She was pulling text from adverts, scripture, Beat poetry, song lyrics and news reports, and remixing them into work that was joyful, urgent and completely her own.

And she loved letters. Not just what words mean, but how they look and sound and sit on a page. She once said she loved the look of letters so much that they became a subject in their own right. Any typographer will recognise that feeling instantly.

Kent's other enormous legacy is as a teacher. The Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules, a list of ten she authored with her students, are still pinned to studio walls all over the world.

They tell you to find a place you trust and stay there a while. To pull everything out of your teachers, and everything out of your fellow students. To make things and use things without judging them, because the making and the judging are different processes and should happen at different times.

That's not art-school mysticism. That's a working philosophy for anyone learning a creative discipline, and it's more or less how we approach teaching design at Shillington. Do the work. Trust the process. Save the critique for afterwards.

She also taught her students to look properly. She sent them out to supermarkets and car washes with a finder, a small cut-out frame, to isolate details they'd otherwise walk straight past. Design starts with noticing.

Kent's work grew more political through the 1960s, taking on civil rights, poverty and the Vietnam War. Her posters and banners turned up at rallies and marches. She made the cover of Newsweek.

It also got her into serious trouble. The Archbishop of Los Angeles took a dim view of a nun making work like this, and the pressure on her order became intense. In 1968 she asked for dispensation from her vows and left, moving to Boston.

She never stopped working. She created the Rainbow Swash, the vast rainbow painted on a gas storage tank that's still a Boston landmark. And in 1985 she designed the United States Postal Service's LOVE stamp, which sold hundreds of millions of copies. She died the following year.

For years Corita Kent was left out of conversations. Too religious for the art world, too radical for the church, too much a woman in a room full of men. She's finally getting the recognition she deserves, and it's long overdue.

Her lesson is the one we keep coming back to. Design isn't decoration, it's a tool. In Kent's hands, colour, type and image became a way to argue for peace, to build community and to make people look harder at the world in front of them.

If you've ever felt like you see the world in colour, type and meaning, you're already thinking like a designer.

This is part of our Did You Know? series, where we explore the stories behind the world's most iconic design. Follow along on Instagram for more.