Renowned publicity and poster designer Eswar Rao, who had worked in over 2,500 films across multiple Indian languages, died on Tuesday. He was 84.
Born in Palakollu, Andhra Pradesh, Eswar movie to Chennai quite early in life to pursue his dream of being an artist.
He joined the Ketha institute of poster making in Chennai and worked for a few years until he got his big break.
Veteran filmmaker Bapu signed Eswar on 27 February 1967 for his directorial debut, the Telugu movie Sakshi (1967), which introduced the superstar Krishna.
The posters of the film caught the attention of producer Nagi Reddy of Vijaya Productions and he immediately roped in Eswar to design posters for their Hindi film Ram Aur Shyam (1967).
In 2011, Eswar released his book Cinema Poster, which highlights the developments in the poster designing industry between 1931 and 2000, the year he retired.
A few years ago, he was nominated for a special category in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the only individual to have designed more than 2,000 film posters.
Besides winning several state awards, Eswar had been invited to the then USSR by the Indo-Soviet Cultural Society and later to Hollywood to study its poster making techniques.
Eswar had designed posters for 1,000 Telugu films, 500 films in Tamil and Kannada each and 150 in Hindi and a few other languages.