They Called Him MISTER Tharp

I don't know how many of the folks reading this (if any) knew of Rick Tharp, an award-winning San Francisco-based graphic designer. In the late 1990s, we were always covering his firm Tharp Did It! in the Northern California Edition of Micro Publishing News, and we used to chuckle because Rick always insisted (with tongue-in-cheek, I later learned) on being referred to as "Mister Tharp." I met him once at a party in San Francisco in 1998 or so; this was about the time that the first batch of redesigned $20 bills were coming out and we were commenting about the redesign--I joked that the new money looked like it was the result of a font substitution (for those not in the know, this is what happens when the device printing something doesn't have the fonts that the designer used--a common problem in digital prepress). This amused him greatly and for several weeks afterward he tried to enlist my help in starting a rumor in the trade press that the new money was actually the result of a major production error at the Bureau of Printing & Engraving (it didn't work). We kept in touch for a short time afterward, but although I didn't know him well, I always remember him as a funny guy (and at the time I thought he looked like Frank Zappa, which is always a plus in my book). It hit me very weirdly, then, when I read this morning in Graphic Design: USA that, last summer, he apparently jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Very sad; he was extremely talented. A full bio here.