A British advertising designer who worked for no less than 45 years at one place: the ad agency W.S. Crawford’s. Known by all simply as Ashley, he dominated modernist commercial work in Britain. He believed that ‘designers are problem-solvers’. Influenced by Cubism, Futurism and the Bauhaus, he dared to introduce bold sans serif typefaces into advertising, back in the 1920s. He advocated great freedom in style and typographic choices and an unusual range of illustrative possibilities. His agency served them all: the Milk Marketing Board, Simpson, the GPO, DAKS, Liberty, and Wolsey. For Chrysler, his 1925 campaign showed his dynamic illustrations and heavy block letters, which were later cut as an alphabet for Monotype; as was a brush script he had made. Ashley was elected a Royal Designer for Industry in 1947 and in 1951 received an OBE for his services to graphic design. He was the author of Line Drawing for Reproduction (1933, 1941) and Advertising and the Artist (1956).