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My friend Chris Mullen, who has died aged 81, had a long and successful career in art and design education that began at Norwich School of Art in 1972. As a lecturer teaching liberal studies on a vocational design course, he developed his ideas for better integration between contextual studies and studio practice while acquiring a reputation for entertaining performances in the lecture theatre.

After moving to the University of Brighton in 1989 as a senior lecturer, Chris taught on a new MA course in narrative illustration and editorial design with John Vernon Lord and George Hardie. From 1995 until retirement in 2005 he was research supervisor on the studio-based PhD course.

Outside teaching, Chris was an avid collector of books, magazines and printed ephemera on a wide range of subjects, and assembled a vast library with an emphasis on visual communication. This resource was freely shared with his students, who were surprised and inspired by this rich seam of unfamiliar visual material, much of which can be viewed on Chris’s website, The Visual Telling of Stories.

Many of Chris’s former students, some now with international reputations, such as Barbara Loftus and Clare Strand, have acknowledged how his compendium of obscure and overlooked imagery, in combination with his constructive criticism and sensitive encouragement, clarified their ideas and practice.

Chris was born in Liverpool, the elder son of Marjorie (nee Noel) and Peter Mullen. His father was a fundraiser for renal research and, after the family moved to Hertfordshire, Chris attended Watford boys grammar school from 1956 to 1963 where he and I became close friends. After graduating from the University of East Anglia in 1968 with a degree in history of art followed by a PhD (1971), he began his teaching career.

Chris’s research included a study of the relationship between cigarette pack design and popular culture that resulted in the book Cigarette Pack Art (1979). Another project was based on the American business magazine Fortune between 1930 and 1965. Interviews with contributing designers, photographers and illustrators led to exhibitions in 1985 at the University of East Anglia and the Rochester Institute of Technology in the US, plus an accompanying publication, Fortune’s America.

In 1968 Chris married Oriole Kirkby, and they had three children, Edie, Jack and Sam. They all survive him, together with three grandchildren, Isla, Felix and Anja.