Design is Everywhere: Yves Saint Laurent.

We know Yves Saint Laurent as one of the most important fashion designers who ever lived. The tuxedo jacket for women, the safari suit, the Mondrian dress. A man who fundamentally changed how the world dressed.

What far fewer people know is that for nearly four decades, he was also making graphic design. Every single year, without fail, he sat down and designed a poster. And every single one of them said the same thing.

LOVE.

It started in 1970. Rather than sending a conventional greetings card, Saint Laurent designed his own, in poster form, and sent it out to his friends, collaborators, clients and muses to mark the year ahead.

He did it again the next year. And the next. He kept going until 2007, producing a new LOVE poster almost every year for close to four decades. The tradition only ended shortly before his death in 2008.

Here's what makes the series so remarkable from a design point of view. The constant was the word. Everything else was up for grabs.

Each year Saint Laurent adopted a brand new colour palette and built the image from scratch, working with collage, drawing and gouache. Cut-out shapes, hand-painted forms, bold blocks of colour, letters that twist and stretch and sometimes almost disappear into the composition. One year a snake winds its way through the letterforms. Another year the type is soft and painterly. The influences shift too, from Matisse and Braque to Cocteau and Warhol, with many of the posters made in Morocco, where he spent much of his time and where the light and colour clearly seeped in.

Same word. Completely different visual language, every single time.

For anyone learning design, that's an extraordinary thing to study. It's a masterclass in how much expressive range sits inside a single constraint. Give a hundred designers the word LOVE and most will reach for the same handful of visual clichés. Saint Laurent found 37 different answers, and never repeated himself.

So why do these posters still feel fresh, when so much graphic design from the 1970s and 80s looks firmly stuck in its decade?

Because Saint Laurent wasn't designing to a trend, he was designing to a feeling.

Trends are a moving target. Chase them and your work is dated the moment the target moves. Emotion doesn't move. Joy, warmth, optimism, affection, these read exactly the same in 1970 as they do today, and they'll read the same in 50 years. When you anchor a piece of work to something people feel rather than something people are currently into, it doesn't age. It just becomes itself.

The other thing we love about this story is what it says about the boundaries of our discipline, or rather the lack of them.

Saint Laurent had no obligation to make these. He wasn't a graphic designer by trade and nobody commissioned him. He simply had something he wanted to say, and he understood that colour, composition and typography were the tools to say it with. He reached for graphic design because it was the right language for the message.

The posters now hang in galleries and sell at auction as collectible works in their own right. Not bad for a series of New Year's cards.

Design isn't a job title or a department. It's a way of thinking that shows up wherever someone decides to communicate something with intention. In a fashion house in Paris. On a greetings card. In the hands of a couturier who just wanted to tell the people he cared about that he loved them.

Design is everywhere.

This is part of our Design Is Everywhere series, where we spotlight the designers and design work shaping the world around us. Follow along on Instagram for more.