Gunther Kress (1940-2019) was a world leading linguistic and semiotic theorist, notably in the fields of critical discourse analysis, social semiotics and multimodality. Language, learning and literacy were central themes throughout his work including the development of a new, social semiotic theory of learning. Gunther was a Professor of Semiotics and Education in the School of Culture, Communication and Media, UCL Institute of Education, UK. He previously held positions at several other universities notably East Anglia (UEA) and University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). Gunther was an insightful and highly original scholar. He authored many ground-breaking publications including Social Semiotics (with Bob Hodge), Early Spelling, Learning to Write, Reading Images (with Theo van Leeuwen), Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, and Multimodality, Learning and Communication (with Jeff Bezemer).