JOAN Rix Tebbutt was an inspirational teacher at the Glasgow School of Art and a pioneering designer.

As artist, scribe, climber, sailor, gardener and friend, Joan Tebbutt excelled. Each person who came under her spell was made to feel special. Joan was born in Norse Road, Scotstoun in 1910, the daughter of Arthur Tebbutt and Gwen Rix. The family had recently moved from London to Glasgow where her fatherwas employed as a draftsman by Yarrows Shipbuilders.

Joan lived in Glasgow for most of her 94 years.

Her lifelong love of the outdoors stemmed from childhood days at Portavadie on Loch Fyne, where her mother, an active Christian Socialist, took her four children to spend each summer under canvas. Joan eventually became the proprietor of an ancient gipsy caravan which was towed to Portavadie and parked at the head of the bay. This amazing structure and its associated lean-to attachments was to become the focus of Joan's life for many years Gwen's firm ideas about social justice extended to the education of her children - who were regularly moved from school to school to ensure that they received educational experiences in accord with Gwen's philosophy. Joan always expressed a certain pride in having been expelled from Hillhead High School for her mother's refusal to allow her to wear uniform.

Joan attended Glasgow School of Art, where she studied calligraphy under the late Ailsa Craig and was awarded a Diploma in Lettering and Book Design, in 1933. Joan then taught in various schools in Glasgow until, during the war, she went to teach in Keswick, where she developed her love of the Lake District and its mountains. In 1947, she returned to Scotland and took up a post in St Bride's School in Helensburgh, where she remained for the next 16 years. She had a remarkable gift for making the visual world intelligible and exciting to children. Her art room was always full of amazing visual images, posters, reproductions, an astounding range of coloured textiles, plants, food and treasures of all kinds. Design was central to her art curriculum:

all her pupils were taught the elements of printmaking, bookbinding, lino-cutting and lettering. She not only inspired pupils and students into adventure and exploration of their artistic side, but also introduced many of them to the hills, to cooking on a campfire and to the spiritual fulfilment of the outdoors.

In 1963, Joan accepted an invitation to join the Glasgow School of Art to teach, first as a lettering specialist, and later in the first year of the four-year degree course. Here, she became a member of a teaching team of artists and designers responsible for this first important rung on the ladder of becoming a professional artist. She established splendid rapport with many of the students.

At the school of art, Joan developed a new confidence in her own abilities as a designer, almost a liberation. Joan had known Sandy (Sidney Morris) Cockerell for many years and had been a significant member of his community, first at Letchworth and then in Cambridge.

Sandy was a bookbinder in his father's firm. As well as producing traditional bindings of very high quality, Sandy repaired ancient and rare books and made handmade marbled papers. This extraordinary collaboration between designer and craftsman over many years, culminated in the production of a collection of exquisitely-designed vellum bindings for a series of rare books, commissioned by Colin Hamilton and Kulgin Duval. Her fine lettering must be among the most beautiful ways of titling books of any period.

These bindings were initially exhibited in an exhibition, Thirty Recent Bindings, at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 1981. A further collection of the bindings was exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow in 1998, in Joan Rix Tebbutt - Artist and Calligrapher. Most recently, the collection was again exhibited in Books Which We ThinkYou Might Enjoy Binding, at The Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, last September.

Joan had a passion for hills and the sea. By her late 30s she was on the hills, summer and winter, climbing many of the classic routes with some of the leading men in the Scottish Mountaineering Club. A skiing accident brought an abrupt end to her climbing career, but she was still sailing her dinghy on Loch Fyne in her late 70s. Her later years were devoted to family, to friends and to her allotment. She cooked and talked and gardened until almost the final year of her life.

With the devastating onset of blindness, Joan regretted that she could no longer "see what is most important to me - line with line, shape, form, pattern".

Nevertheless, the beautiful books, the pieces of exquisite calligraphy, the many sketches and paintings all provide a lasting legacy of this most remarkable woman.

Joan Rix Tebbutt, artist, calligrapher and teacher;

born November 6, 1910, died 2005.