Graphic designer and art director Les Mason was as much a successful designer in his own right as he was a provocateur, catalyst and protagonist in Melbourne’s burgeoning design scene. For more than thirty years, Mason demanded that the graphic design community and broader industry acknowledge the discipline as a fully formed profession, and that practitioners strive to offer rigorous conceptual and formal processes on par with other disciplines, such as architecture.

Born in California in 1924, Mason chose to study painting and interior design at the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, at the relatively late age of twenty-seven. Afterwards he began working in the world of commercial art and advertising as part of the small energetic design group West Coast Designers. In 1961 Mason successfully applied for a one-year contract as an art director at advertising agency USP Benson and relocated to Melbourne.

As an outsider and talented typographer with a unique ability to conceptualise, create, visualise, iterate and communicate a full concept, Mason became indispensable at UPS Benson. His first award-winning campaign was a series of institutional advertisements for Shell Australia in 1962 in which he used unusual photography – a tabby cat with its head caught in an engine manifold – alongside catchy copywriting. The result was humorous, effective and memorable, and the campaign won the Shell Institutional Award for advertising.

The Les Mason Graphic Design studio opened in 1962 in South Melbourne and Mason set about building a practice that became synonymous with good design, discourse, debate, drinking and music.

In 1966 Alan Holdsworth of Lawrence Publishing commissioned Mason to design a prestigious, bimonthly food and wine magazine named Epicurean for the Wine and Food Society of Australia. From 1966 until 1979 Mason designed seventy-seven issues of Epicurean, using his knowledge and love of geometric abstraction, colour field painting, Op Art, Surrrealism to portray food and wine visually.

At the height of his practice, Mason’s commercial clients represented some of Australia’s top consumer goods manufacturers and Government bodies. The list included Tarax, Bowater-Scott, Preservene, Comalco Aluminium, Wynvale Wines, Philip Morris and pharmaceutical producers, Sigma Laboratories and Woods Laboratories. His groundbreaking advertising campaigns for the State Bank of Australia and Australia Post periodically raised questions in Parliament in Canberra.

Mason was appointed a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and the Type Directors Club of New York in 1975. In 1981, he and his partner, the copywriter Gail Devine with whom many of his award-winning campaigns were created, relocated to Perth. There they were married and worked in their own consultancy for a number of years before travelling extensively and living in South America, where they both focused on their fine art practices.

Les Mason died in Istanbul in 2009 while attending the AGI conference.

Mason's work has been published in many international publications, the most recent in 2024 'Graphic Classics' by Phaidon, the only Australian Designer to be included amongst the 500 artists and designers from 1455 to the present.