Whether she was doing a graphics project for a major client or a wrapping a Christmas present for a friend, Mary Fowler would make it look exquisite.
A design colleague and longtime friend, Jeff Burkholder of Atlanta, called Ms. Fowler a world-class designer. "Typically," he said, "Mary's designs were minimalist, with clean lines and no extraneous ornamentation. She had a finely tuned sense of proportion."
He said the two of them worked together at Rich's for four years during the early 1980s creating ad layouts for newspapers. "We were churning out ads as fast as the ad salesmen brought them to us, which was pretty fast-paced back then," he said. "Even when we were under the gun time-wise, Mary did superb work."
After Ms. Fowler went on her own, working out of her Buckhead condo, she continued to do free-lance work for Rich's. She added major clients such as Macy's, Federated Department Stores, Belk and Home Depot, plus interior designers, art galleries and hair salons.
One of her most notable projects was the layout for an illustrated book titled "Beyond Bauhaus, the Evolving Man-Made Environment" to commemorate a half-century of industrial design at Georgia Tech's College of Architecture. "The people there were blown away with the look of it," Mr. Burkholder said.
Her brother, Carl Fowler III of Atlanta, said he thought Ms. Fowler's interest in design was influenced in part by their mother, Dorothy Fowler of St. Simons Island, who at one time was a newspaper advertising illustrator, and also by the minimalist art of Japan that the family collected during the two years they lived there when Miss Fowler was a child. She went on to major in fine arts at the University of Delaware.
Mary Fleming Fowler, 55, of Atlanta died July 14 at Piedmont Hospital of breast cancer complications. A memorial service will be at 5 p.m. Aug. 25 in the Rutland Chapel of the First Baptist Church of Decatur. The family asks that donations in her memory be made to Homeless Pets Foundation at www.homelesspets.com. A.S. Turner & Sons funeral home is in charge of arrangements.
Ms. Fowler, who kept at least a couple of cats as companions for years, was a lover of all creatures and couldn't bear to see them harmed, said a friend, Chris Kaane of Atlanta. "Mary went so far as to lure some ants out of her kitchen with a trail of sugar instead of using a bug spray," she said. "She even was reluctant to pull weeds out of her garden."
Another friend, Ebeth McMullen of Atlanta, said last September Ms. Fowler was looking after some friends' cats who lived nearby when the neighborhood was hit with torrential rains and was flooded. "Mary waded through chest-high water to get to their apartment, put the cats in kitty carriers and brought them out to safety, holding them above her head," she said.
Her sister-in-law, Anita Kern of Atlanta, described the way Ms. Fowler wrapped holiday and birthday presents as a gift in itself.
"Mary didn't use wrapping paper," she said. "Instead she used art papers she selected carefully at a design shop for complementary colors, textures and scale of patterns. Her final products were elegant -- such attention to detail."
Mary Hughes Frye of Atlanta said Ms. Fowler took just as much painstaking care with birthday and other holiday missives that she made for friends.
"Mary made fabulous, inventive cards, often in what looked like gift boxes," she said. "One card that I remember well looked like a sushi snack, only the California rolls were made of paper."
There are no immediate survivors besides her brother and mother.
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