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Paul Rand, Master of Brand Identity

IBM14

At the New York Times, Ken Johnson reviews Everything is Design: The Work of Paul Rand, a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York:

Considering the punchy, wildly inventive covers he created in the 1950s for books by Henry James, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse, you might suppose that he aligned with the liberal intellectual wing of that period’s culture. From the late ’50s on, when he began working directly for corporations to shape their public identities, it seems he pledged allegiance to corporate America.

What he did for companies like IBM, ABC and, unfortunately, Enron, was to give each a unified public identity by visual means. He didn’t just create logos; he applied his designs to many facets of a businesses, from business cards and letterheads to product packages, and he required absolute uniformity in all those aspects. What was the secret of Mr. Rand’s success? One of several books about design that he wrote and illustrated is open to a page where he talks about the logo he created in 1962 for ABC, the image of three sans-serif, lowercase letters on a disc. Referring to a picture of the logo that’s heavily, almost but not quite illegibly blurred, he asks, “How far out of focus can an image be and still be recognized?” Pretty far, if it’s a Rand design.

That’s important because, unlike fine art works, graphic images are meant to survive less than ideal conditions. Awareness of that necessity is a big part of what makes Mr. Rand a godfather of today’s image-saturated media world. If it gives some politically oriented viewers pause to think of his evidently unwavering faith in American capitalism and of how he imprinted corporate identities on the minds of millions, that just makes his story all the more interestingly complicated.

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There’s also an interesting review of the exhibition by Amelia Stein at The Guardian:

Rand liked to argue that manipulation is integral to design. It is a designer’s job, he wrote in Thoughts on Design (1947), to manipulate ingredients in a given space – to manipulate symbols through juxtaposition, association and analogy. These days, it is difficult to separate logos and branding from other, more insidious forms of manipulation. A recent return to flatness in corporate design – emblematized by Apple’s decision to abandon skeuomorphism in 2013 – could be seen as an attempt to invoke Rand’s heyday, when consumers trusted a brand’s visual cues to communicate some essential truth.

This is an important aspect of Rand’s legacy, enormous and complicated as it is. Although Everything is Design stops short of addressing the lasting implications, artistic and otherwise, of Rand’s work, it provides us with a necessary basis from which to do so… [Looking] at Rand is valuable if we want not just to be as good as Rand, but to understand the complexity of what it is to be good.

The exhibition runs February 25 — July 19, 2015.

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Logocentrism: Jessica Helfand on Paul Rand

thoughts-on-design

Paul Rand’s classic 1947 essay Thoughts on Design is being re-published next month by Chronicle Books1, and Design Observer has just reposted a wonderful essay by Jessica Helfand on Rand, originally published in The New Republic in 1997:

Looking back on his prolific career, it is paradoxical to think that the man who gave graphic life to such technological giants as IBM, IDEO (the international technology think tank based in Northern California), and Steve Jobs’s NeXT should himself have been so averse to the computer. How could Rand, the devout modernist, be so openly resistant to the progressive changes brought about by the machine, the symbolic child of modern industry? It is as though the same geometric forms that embodied the logic of mechanical reproduction, the same formal vocabulary that inspired his mentors and defined the very spirit of modernism, were available to Rand only in theory.

Such contradictions underscored his entire career. The darling of corporate America for decades, Rand rejected the lure of city life, choosing to work alone in his home studio in Connecticut for the better part of his career. He claimed to despise academia, but he remained a devoted member of the Yale faculty for over 35 years. It is likely that the orthodoxy that characterized both his relationship to design and his relationship to God was an attempt to resolve these contradictions, to right the balances, to establish order in the studio and in the spirit. But the contradictory impulses remained: “Five is better than four, three is better than two,” he often announced to his students, claiming that the mind worked harder and received a greater sense of reward when resolving asymmetrical relationships on the page.

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Good Design is Good Business

cognitive-puzzle

Good Design is Good Business is a beautiful Tumblr archive of hi-res IBM visuals, compiled by Sue, an New York-based art director at Ogilvy for IBM.

(via Quipsologies)

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Paul Rand’s Book Jackets and Covers

Steven Heller’s fascinating School of Visual Arts lecture on the book covers of Paul Rand:

(via David Pearson)

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Midweek Miscellany

Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design’s Golden Age — new from Steven Heller and Louise Fili, published by Thames & Hudson.

50/50 — Designer Andrew Henderson, curator of Lovely Book Covers, is going to spend 50 days designing 50 covers based on the 50 most influential books of the last 50 years.

See also: Matt Roeser’s New Cover project.

Why She Fell — An interesting article by Daniel Mendelsohn on Spider-Man and Julie Taymor’s ill-fated musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, in the NYRB:

What made Spider-Man unusual among superheroes when he debuted wasn’t so much the arachnid powers he derived from the radioactive spider…, but his very ordinariness. Bullied at school, worried about girls and money, fussing at and fussed at by his foster parents, the kindly Aunt May and Uncle Ben, Peter Parker is a regular lower-middle-class Joe with pretty average teenager problems… It’s not hard to see how all this made Spider-Man popular among teenaged comic book readers in the 1960s, that decade of the teenager. Indeed, the series marked the beginning of what one historian of the genre called a “revolution” — a newfound interest on the part of comic book creators in emphasizing the protagonist’s “everyday problems” rather than the glamour of being a superhero… The emphasis on Spidey’s ordinary humanness explains why this series, as opposed to a number of other superhero comics, is laden with “heavy doses of soap-opera and elements of melodrama.”

Sheep — Philosopher Simon Blackwell reviews How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish for The New Republic:

It is wrong to think that the sentence is a mere slave, whose function is to bear content, which, while being the really important thing, is also something that could equally have been borne by another. Change the shape and ring, and you change everything. The balance, the alliterations, the variation, the melody, the lights glimmering in the words, can work together to transform even an ugly thought into something iridescent, as when Eli Wallach in The Magnificent Seven expressed his character’s indifference to the suffering he brings the peasants in one perfect, albeit perfectly brutal, sentence: “If God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep.” As Fish says in his analysis of this example, here the “air of finality and certainty” is clinched by “the parallelism of clauses that also feature the patterned repetition of consonants and vowels” and then, of course the inevitability of that last dismissive word. If the devil has the best tunes, sometimes the bandits have the best sentences.

And finally…

The aforementioned Steven Heller on the paintings of Paul Rand at Design Observer:

[He] proceeded to tell me how he liked working in all media, including photography and painting and how it influences what he does and how rarely these “other things” are seen in print or elsewhere. Actually, he used excellent judgment insofar as the paintings and watercolors were appealing for their humor and craft, but they were paeans to Klee (and even Cezanne). They were not his true métier (pardon my French). They showed his interests and represented his eye, but painting was not his signature work…

What is there to say about these paintings and watercolors? Are they building blocks or respites from the rigors of graphic design? When I said, “Paul, one of the things I like about you, is that you don’t pretend to be a painter” he had a knowing look. I don’t think he wanted to be a painter, but he wanted to integrate art into graphic design, which he did so very well.

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100 x 100: IBM Centennial Film

Moving chronologically from the oldest person to the youngest, 100 x 100 features one hundred people presenting the achievements of IBM recorded in the year they were born. The film gives a brief history of the company and features — as you might expect for the company that worked so closely with Paul Rand — some lovely typography:

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Q & A with David Drummond, Salamander Hill Design

“I haven’t changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it…. It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That’s what modernism means to me…” — Paul Rand

There is something of a Modernist tendency in the design of David Drummond. It is not in a strict adherence to the grid or Accidentz Grotesk (or anything quite so obvious), but rather in the thought and purpose underlying his work. There is always a clarity and assurance to the concept and composition. There is never erroneous detail or ornament. Form most definitely follows function. To describe David’s work this way, however, is something of an injustice. His designs are far wittier (and much less pedantic) than one thinks Modernism ought to be.  But then again, whoever said Modernism couldn’t be funny or irreverent? Not Paul Rand.

Perhaps it is simply better to say that David’s designs are the epitome of good ideas well executed. Their apparent effortlessness make it easy to underestimate his work. It is only when one tries to imagine how the cover could have looked otherwise that you truly realise his originality and what he has rejected or removed to get to his apparently simple designs. It should not be a surprise that Paul Rand is inspiration. After all, it was Rand who said:

“Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.”

Somehow that seems to get to the core of David’s work.

I am absolutely thrilled to post this interview. David’s work has received awards from AIGA, Communication Arts Magazine and Print Magazine and he is one of the finest book cover designers working today.

We corresponded by email.

How did you get into book design?
I was working in Montreal for an ad agency when I got a call from McGill-Queen’s University Press.  On the recommendation of my sister, whose book they were publishing, they were interested in looking at my portfolio. That was the catalyst to start breaking out on my own.

When did you open your own studio?
I opened Salamander Hill Design in 2001

Approximately how many publishers do you work with?
I just checked the folder on my computer titled “Presses” and there are about 40 in there. Some are very active and some not at all. It kind of goes up down. Some of them are self published authors as well. There are maybe about 10 that I have longstanding relationships with that feed me with work pretty regularly.

How many covers do you work a season?
Hard to say really. I have so many that are all at varying stages of production. Right now, if I count the books on my list, there are about 30. What I have come to realize is that it is really important for me to always have a lot of work on the go. It helps to keep me in the zone where I can do my best work. I really do think the creative faculty is like a muscle that you have to keep flexing.

You were previously an art director for a marketing and communications company. Has this informed your book cover design?
This is going to sound funny but I wouldn’t really describe myself as a book cover designer. My approach to cover design is pretty much the same that I apply to any area of visual communication. I see the project as solving a visual problem, whether it is a book cover, illustration, logo or package design. Even though I have always entered work in book cover design competitions through the years, it has also been equally important for me to enter competitions like Communication Arts Design Annual to have the work judged in the larger context of graphic design as a whole.

Do you still do corporate identity work and packaging design?
Lately I have been getting back into identity work more and more. I guess I must have been missing it. Last year I decided to branch out and do some illustration work for magazines and that has been really exciting. The tight deadlines and fast turn-arounds force you to make decisions faster. I really hope to develop that more this year. Just last week someone e-mailed me about doing a poster for film festival in Italy. It always amazes me when a job like that lands in your in-box out of the blue.

Could you describe your book cover design process?
In a nutshell: present the cover brief to yourself as a problem that has to be solved. Then I try and bombard my brain with images from all kinds of sources to see if I can trigger something. For me it is about finding the visual hook. If that doesn’t work right away I tend to put it aside and take my dog Beau for a walk. I am sure all the local farmers that pass me on the road in their pick-up trucks must wonder about me and my dog walking far from home in all kinds of weather but I would honestly say it is an important part of my creative process.

I tend to like showing one concept whenever possible. I would say this is true for all of my design work. It shows the client that you have taken a stand and believe in the solution. That doesn’t mean you haven’t produced many different concepts along the way. I am sort of brutally self critical and if something isn’t working or if I am forcing it too much I put it aside and start again. I work with a lot of different clients with different protocols and some of them require that multiple concepts be presented up front. When that is the case I still try and make a strong case for the one I believe in.

I think the key to doing your best work is having a great client relationship. My brother is a poet and he compares publishing a book of poems to launching a pebble off the Grand Canyon and waiting for the sound of it hitting the bottom to come back to you. That is a bit the way I feel when I start working for a new client when you aren’t familiar with their approval process. Sometimes you launch your design out there and then — silence. I have a relationship with most of my clients where I know they want to be surprised by a solution. It does set the bar high each time but I need that challenge.

My wife works as a horse groom for a big show barn and gets up at 5:00 in the morning to get ready for work. Consequently I start my day around the same time. It’s funny — I live in farm country and basically keep farmer’s hours. The lights are also on in the neighbouring barns when I start my day. I focus on idea generation in those early hours and leave the more mundane production stuff to later in the day when my energy is flagging.  The Tron, Inception, Dark Knight soundtracks come in handy at that point to keep me going.

What are your favourite books to work on?
Hard to say really. For the nonfiction stuff I love working on covers that have a great title that presents the subject in a new way. That really tends to help get the ball rolling.

What are the most challenging?
Books on the economy/Wall Street, Canadian Federalism, the Supreme Court, Native Peoples. I say this because I have done so many of them and each time you have to find a new way of presenting it. So far I have always managed to find a new take on it. I keep going back to the well and so far it hasn’t gone dry.

Do you see any current trends in book design?
Not a big fan of trends. Whenever I have been asked to judge design work for competitions the work that always grabs you are the ones that present a strong concept with a clean and simple execution. I think that is the key to producing work that is timeless.

Where do you look for inspiration, and who are some of your design heroes?
I look for inspiration pretty much everywhere. Paul Rand is a big design hero of mine because he kept on creating right to the end. I pretty much knew early on in my career that, because I’m such an oddball, the path of becoming creative director in a big agency was not really an option — not much of a schmoozer.

For me it has always been about the work.

Who else do you think is doing interesting work right now?
So many designers really. I would probably choose designers outside of the book design world like Montreal design firm Paprika — their work never ceases to surprise me.

What does the future hold for book cover design?
I truly feel privileged to get up in the morning and find a new design brief for a cover design in my in-box. Doing this type of work is a perfect fit for me and I hope to continue doing it for as long as it lasts.

And lastly… You (somewhat famously) live in a rural municipality in Quebec with a population of less than 500 people. What can you see from your studio window?
I live in a big rambling farmhouse built in 1825 on about 140 acres of land in Elgin, Quebec. The back fence line is the American border. Our farm sits at the base of the Adirondacks just where the Chateauguay Valley begins. My office is on the second floor with a view out the back. The view is always changing. Depending on the time of the year there are sheep, cows, horses, wild turkeys, deer, and an assortment of barn cats outside my window.

Wonderful! Thanks David.

David’s work can be seen at his blog and at the website for Salamander Hill Design.

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A [EYE] GA

I’ve had some really encouraging feedback about my post on Peter Mendelsund’s Kafka redesigns, and this morning I received a surprise email from AIGA in New York about it that included the cover for the AIGA Annual Graphic Design USA: 3 designed by Paul Rand. It’s too good not to share:

Thanks all.

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Peter Mendelsund and the Art of Metamorphosis

I posted about Peter Mendelsund’s reinterpretations of Kafka for Schocken Books rather breathlessly earlier this week, and I wanted to revisit them now I’ve had some time for greater reflection.

The covers are exceptional designs and surprising reinterpretations of Kafka. What particularly interested me, however, is that they are also a surprising direction for Mendelsund to go in.

As Peter himself notes in his original post, the natural impulse when designing Kafka is to draw on the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th Century. These movements — which smashed together fine art, design, typography, photography, montage, and film — burgeoned in Central and Eastern Europe in aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the First World War, a period when Kafka himself was writing (he died in Vienna in 1924).

Unsurprisingly, recent reinterpretations of Kafka (at least the ones that have eschewed the non-design of an author photograph) have incorporated elements taken from Surrealist photography, modernist posters, and silent film.

The influence of the avant-garde is often apparent in Mendelsund’s work. Covers such as The Idiot, Crime and Punishment and The Double and The Gambler by Fydor Dostoevsky, House of Meetings by Martin Amis, and K. by Roberto Calasso all incorporate elements of Suprematism, Constructivism, DADA and other stark European art movements of the early 20th Century. The new covers, however, which focus on the humour in Kafka’s writing, move in a new direction and incorporate elements from the optimistic age of American mid-century modern design.

Mendelsund’s use simple geometric shapes, flat colour backgrounds, and stripe patterns are typical of work by Paul Rand and Alvin Lustig.

Hand-written lettering of the type we see in Mendelsund’s Kafkas is used to great effect in Lustig’s design for Kafka’s Amerika and is characteristic of several of Rand’s book covers.

As others have noted, the eye motif used by Mendelsund is also similar to Rand’s iconic IBM poster (and his unused logo for the AIGA). But in this instance at least, Rand is clearly not the only influence. His contemporary Rudolph de Harak used the same motif in his cover design for T.E. Lawrence By His Friends published by McGraw-Hill in 1963.

There are echoes too of an exhibition poster by American expatriate designer E. McKnight Kauffer who designed the cover for the Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses published in 1949 (and who was reputedly an influence on Lustig), and a George Salter cover for a Robert Bloch novel, The Scarf, published by The Dial Press in 1947.

The eye motif also recalls Bill Golden’s CBS logo designed in 1951 (repeated in the British Associated Televison ATC logo), which was itself inspired by a Shaker ‘All Seeing Eye’ symbol Golden had seen. And it is perhaps no coincidence that Mendelsund’s design for The Castle (and McKnight Kauffer’s poster) is reminiscent of the masonic Eye of Providence (also known as the “all-seeing eye of God”) familiar from the US one dollar bill.

Of course, not all of these elements and influences are new to Mendelsund’s work (see his designs for The Millennium Trilogy boxed set), and the new covers draw on some of his more familiar inspirations such as Jean Arp, a founding member of the DADA movement (and likely an influence on Lustig), and post-war European design (see Germano Facetti’s design for George Orwell’s 1984 designed in the early 1960’s).

But compare the Kafka covers to Mendelsund’s recent designs for The Snowman by Jo Nesbø  or C by Tom McCarthy, and the difference is striking. To look at these macabre designs for Knopf — which seem to owe more to the cut-and-paste of DADA, the punk aesthetic of Barney Bubbles or, perhaps, the anti-design of David Carson’s Ray Gun —  is like looking at the work of a wholly different designer.

That Mendelsund is capable of reinterpreting and subverting mid-century modern and making it his own not only demonstrates his creative flexibility, but serves to reminds us that one of his greatest strengths as a designer is his ability to surprise and delight us.

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Mendelsund vs. Kafka

Amerika | Peter Mendelsund

Peter Mendelsund on his remarkable (and unexpectedly Paul Rand-like) Kafka redesigns for Knopf imprint Schocken:

After all, what is it that makes Kafka, Kafka? The economy; the dark humor; the teasing inscrutability; the brilliance of the thought-experiments; the hieratic and esoteric flavor of the constructions; the disorienting cadence of the prose; the impeccable, internal, magical logic that drives the mechanical toy theaters of his work; the much discussed Jewishness (as if this was easy to parse); the “concrete abstractions” (in the words of Zadie Smith)…. I suppose what some find most relevant and compelling in Kafka is his ability to inspire in them that paradoxical feeling that great literature always aspires to arouse in readers—the feeling of the universality of their own alienation. Kafka is the ne plus ultra of alienation– alienation being arguably the defining emotional condition of the 20th century.

There is more at Peter’s blog JACKET MECHANICAL.

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10+ Flickr Groups for Book Design and Inspiration

10 Websites for Vintage Books, Covers and Inspiration” is one of the most popular posts on The Casual Optimist, and here, at long last, is the promised follow-up: “10 Flickr Groups for Book Design and Inspiration.”

There are a lot of amazing photostreams with book sets — Covers etc, insect54, Kyle Katz, mjkghk, Montague, Paula Wirth, and Scott Lindberg to name just a few that I’ve come across — but I’ve decided to focus this post on my favourite group pools because they collate the best of these individual streams together.

I’ve also decided to highlight groups that are about specific subjects, genres, publishers, or designers, because I think these are more useful than the more general (but still interesting) book pools such as A+ Book Covers, Book Cover Club, and My Books

ABC Verlag Graphic Design books

1. ABC Verlag, Zurich — A collection of scans and images from Zurich-based ABC Verlag who specialized in graphic design and fine art books between 1962 to 1989.

1627

2. Antique Books — images of books, covers and illustrations that are a hundred years old or more.

Design and Paper: Number 13: Spread

3. Designers’ Books — “what’s on the shelves of designers and other smart creatives.” Not to be confused with the also excellent designers-books.com pool or Book Design pool.

Literature in America

4. Alvin & Elaine Lustig Design — celebrates the work of Alvin and Elaine Lustig, both renowned for their incredible book cover designs.

They Shoot Horses Don't They

5. The Penguin Paperback Spotters’ Guild — An astonishing collection of vintage Penguins, Pelicans, Peregrines, and Puffins. Also of interest: The Great Pan! Illustrated Pan Book Covers and Vintage Fontana Books.

Playback by Raymond Chandler Cover art by William Rose

6. Pulp Fiction — As you would expect: detective novels, crime fiction, adventure comics, trashy romance, weird science, blaxploitation and more. See also: The Old-Timey Paperback Book Covers and The Crime & Mystery Book Covers.

Thoughts on Design by Paul Rand

7. The Paul Rand Modern Graphic Design Fan Club — Like the Lustig Design group, this is not just a book pool, but it does, however, include many of Paul Rand’s iconic book designs, making it essential to this list in my opinion.

I Know an Old Lady, by Rose Bonne. Pictures by Abner Graboff.
8. The Retro Kid A collection of cool illustrated children’s books from the mid-1940’s through the mid-1960’s, curated by The Ward-O-Matic illustrator Ward Jenkins.

metropolis thea v marbou

9. The SciFi Books Pool Vintage science fiction covers from the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s.

computers

10. Vintage Paperbacks — The place for amazing paperbacks that aren’t Penguins. Curated by graphic designer and art director Gregory Boerum, the focus is on quality stuff with design interest from the 1960’s and 70’s.

So there we have it: 10 of my favourites. What are yours?

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Something for the Weekend, June 19th, 2009

50/50 — AIGA announce their 50 Books/50 Covers of 2008. Included in the fifty is the cover of Kenneth Hayes’ Milk and Melancholy designed by Toronto’s Underline Studio (pictured above).

Gxuu! — Linguist Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages, chooses her 10 favourite words from invented languages for The University of Chicago Magazine. Having been kind of fascinated with Volapük after reading William Gibson‘s  Spook Country, I was happy to see the inclusion of ‘pük’ (via the incomparable Kottke of course):

In Volapük, pük means “language.” It comes from the English word “speak” but it’s hard to tell (vol, means “world”, so Volapük is “world language.”) Unfortunately, it looks a lot like a different English word. And even more unfortunately, it shows up in various other words related to the concept of language: püked – “sentence” and pükön – “to speak.”

Nice Work — Mark Thwaite interviews novelist, critic and Emeritus Professor of English Literature, David Lodge about his new book Deaf Sentence for The Book Depository blog:

One’s ideal reader is intelligent, alert, open-minded but demanding, and equipped with what Hemingway called “a built-in shit-detector.” He/she does not actually exist. In a way you try to be that reader when you read and re-read your own work in progress, and not to kid yourself if something isn’t quite right. That’s a rather different matter from one’s “readership” which in my case, I’m aware, is probably well-educated, well-read, maybe Catholic, and getting more and more senior in years, like myself.

A Special Specimen — A lovely post by James Phillips Williams at amassblog about Paul Rand, Jan Tschichold and a very special type specimen book.

And speaking of Paul Rand, be sure to visit Daniel Lewandowski’s tribute site to the great man (via grain edit).

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