Donal McLaughlin Jr. | Designed U.N. crest, 102

Donal McLaughlin Jr., 102, an architect who helped design the original U.N. emblem toward the end of World War II, died Sept. 27 at his home in Garrett Park, Md. He had esophageal cancer.

A Yale University-trained architect and interior designer, Mr. McLaughlin was recruited to the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime precursor to the CIA.

He was assigned to the OSS's presentation branch as chief of its graphics division and worked on visual presentations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and espionage-oriented fare such as cigarette-paper packages showing diagrammatic instructions for derailing German trains.

He was part of an OSS team led by architect and industrial designer Oliver Lundquist that in 1945 was asked to design all graphics for the United Nations Conference on International Organization that led to the signing of the U.N. charter.

The team was assigned to create displays, certificates, maps, and guides for the delegates as well as what became its most enduring contribution: an official form of identification for the delegates. This became the prototype for the U.N. logo.

Mr. Lundquist, who died in January, said that the team had a contest to develop an appropriate design and that Mr. McLaughlin, graphics director for the conference, came up with the best one.

The design was a top-down view of the globe showing all continents but Antarctica, cradled between two olive branches, symbolizing peace.

The color was an important element of the design. Shades of blue were chosen to form a contrast with red, a color associated with war.

"I dreamed once of seeing my designs in brick and stone," Mr. McLaughlin joked to the Yale alumni magazine in 2007. "And instead, the thing I'm best known for is a button."

- Washington Post