Mehemed Fehmy Agha

Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha (Mykolayiv, March 11, 1896 - Pennsylvania, May 1978) was a Russian-born Turkish designer, art director, and pioneer of modern American publishing.

[5] In fashion publications, Agha adjusted the graphics, simplified layout and imposed a close relationship between text and images.

Agha stripped down Vogue's old-fashioned appearance, favoring Art Deco curves and the clean lines of Constructivism.

He traded italic lettering for forward-leaning sans serif fonts like Futura, and removed all extraneous design elements from the pages—the borders around photos, column rules, sidebars—while synchronizing the magazine's look with the latest out of avant-garde Europe.

During his career, Agha widened Vogue's margins to such an extent that the white space on either side of the page left enough “room for your laundry list,"[6] as one wit put it.

Vanity Fair's urbane editor, Frank Crowninshield, noted that Agha expanded so rapidly that “an additional floor had to be engaged in the Graybar Building in order to prevent him from bulging out of the windows, growing through the roof, or occupying the elevator shafts.”[7] His responsibilities soon came to include Vanity Fair, as well as, the home-style journal House & Garden.

Some day, a less jaded scholar of the Graphic Arts will unearth them and discover again the amazing amount of original and exciting work that was stimulated by the man who knew too much to like anything.