Games taught at the RCA from 1946 to 1953 and it was during this time that he was given the commission that would make his career. In 1951 he won the competition to design a symbol for the Festival of Britain. 

In his studio, this son of immigrants began working out in matchbox-size sketches how Britain should represent itself to the world. The design he alighted on showed a helmeted Britannia above a compass rose in Union Jack colours. This early draft was sombre, even martial with Britannia's Greek helmet, and hardly in keeping with the Festival's message about postwar recovery and optimism. 

Then Games happened to catch sight of his wife hanging up the washing in the breeze outside. He added a string of red, white and blue bunting to the compass points and a newly cheerful, jaunty Britannia appeared across the country on stamps, banners, posters, flags and brochures. 

Looking at a copy of the 1951 Festival Guide, filled with advertisements for British brands, you realise just how ahead of his time Games was. Advertising still tended towards mini-essays, rather than catchy single slogans. The advertisement for Coalite Smokeless Coal takes 120 words to puff its product, Bass Worthington Beer 142 words and Cow & Gate baby food 172 words. 

When Games was asked to design a poster for one of Bass Worthington's rivals, he used just one word: Guinness. He turned the curve of the G into a smiling face and the upright bar into a full pint glass. Games was part of the new Mad Men generation of artists and designers who stripped away text and fussy drawings and replaced them with a single, instant image. 

Posters for The Times, British European Airways, Shell, BP and British Rail followed. In the 1950s he designed starkly graphic covers for Penguin Books. He also turned his hand to invention, designing a coffee percolator known as the Cona Rex, made from the scrap of old Spitfires. He worked voluntarily for the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, drawing badges, banners and posters. 

Games's faith was of great importance to him and it is fitting that his centenary will be marked with an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in London. When the children were growing up, the rabbi would come for tea and remark with pleasure that the Games' house was the only one he visited that was full of art and books. 

David Gentleman remembers Games, who died in 1996, for his sense of mischief. "There was always a sense of irony, of cocking a snook at some aspects of British values." In 1991, when the Royal Designers for Industry board asked Games to design a crest for their annual dinner, he redrew the Festival of Britain symbol with Britannia replaced by Margaret Thatcher, a handbag tucked in the crook of one arm. He had a favourite joke, too, about the tiled Swan mural he designed for the platforms of Stockwell station, which you can still see today. "You've got to step well back to see it properly," he used to say. "But I wouldn't recommend it."

Safer perhaps to catch the black and white swans with orange beaks from inside the carriage of a northbound Victoria Line train.  If you change at Oxford Circus, the Bakerloo will take you to London Zoo and its tigers with striped Tube-line tails. At Victoria, you can change to the Circle Line to Embankment station for a view across the river to the Royal Festival Hall. There, on a sunny day, you can imagine Britannia, strung with bunting, fluttering from flagpoles the length of the South Bank.