When John Morris took over the lease on the Finsbury Park Astoria and re-named it The Rainbow Theatre, he had the task of coming up with a suitable logo in keeping with the fantastic architecture of the theatre. He turned to the American illustrator and graphic designer Bob Gill. Who along with Alan Fletcher  and Colin Forbes  they had established Fletcher/Forbes/Gill design studio in the USA, the forerunner of Pentagram.  

Gill had once played piano with the drummer Charlie Watts  (and urged him to join an unknown band called the Rolling Stones), he co-created “Beatlemania,” the late-1970s Broadway pop extravaganza, wrote and illustrated a dozen or so children's books; and redesigned High Times magazine as well as designed the cover of George Harrisons “Wonderwall” album.

Salty and opinionated, Gill was a master of the visual pun. A 1964 ad for El Al airline, promoting the balmy climate of Israel, showed a photograph of a man reclining on a beach chair and clad only in a bathing suit and a slick coating of suntan oil. “This is a winter coat,” read the tag line. In 1970, for a car rental company pamphlet listing its terms, Mr. Gill, to get across the idea that the terms were easy to understand, created a title page that declared in enormous type, “We hate small print.” A 1976 poster for Broadway was a collage of the sort of superlatives used in theatre reviews — “Spectacular” … “Masterful” … “Unbelievable” — and looked to be torn from actual headlines.

His poster for Bob Fosse's 1978 musical, “Dancin',” was a crazy collage of limbs — an indelible image for generations of New Yorkers.

As well as designing the Rainbow logo he also was responsible for about twenty of the early “in house” posters of the “John Morris era”.