Alan Pipes

Alan Pipes (born 19 March 1947 in Bury, Lancashire, England) is a British writer on art, product design and graphic design. He studied physics at the University of Surrey, in Battersea and worked in print publishing, notably as Managing Editor of Computer-Aided Design journal (1977–82), published by IPC Science and Technology Press (then Butterworth-Heinemann), and editor of CadCam International (1982–85), published by EMAP, before becoming a freelance writer in 1985. From 1998 to 2002, Pipes published a number of works on the Art Product Design project in Helsinki.

Pipes's college textbooks have become standards in their field, with Production For Graphic Designers currently in its 5th printing. Also known as Fred Pipes or Alan (Fred) Pipes (so named after his resemblance to Freddie Garrity singer with the Manchester band Freddie and the Dreamers), he is also a cartoon illustrator, an artist and printmaker, exhibiting regularly in the Brighton, Adur and Worthing Artists Open House festivals since 1996. He has been a committee member of the Brighton Illustrators Group since 1990 and has been webmaster of Channel 4's archaeology television programme Time Team since 1998. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Pipes also catalogues short, unusual and misplaced cycle lanes on a website, Weird Cycle Lanes. According to an article about it in the Daily Telegraph, 'Some people collect stamps, some people collect beermats, but Alan Pipes collects unusual cycle lanes. He's already acquired a cult following on the South Coast with his web-gallery of improbable, impractical and sometimes impassable bits of municipal road-marking. Now he's expanding his search nationwide to try to find Britain's most ludicrous bus and cycle lanes.'