Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Paul Rand: Inspiration and Process in Design Paul Rand: Modernist Master 1914-1996

paul rand design

Rand designed a modern logo with bright colours coming to life on stationery, brochures, packaging and buildings. It was a major break with the graphics that IBM had been displaying since its origins, post-World War I, and the repeated inconsistencies of their communication campaigns. After the war, from 1955 onwards, he distinguished himself with progressive graphic identities that served companies' interests. As an artistic director, he helped to transform the advertising industry by emphasizing the importance of graphic design and visuals over writing. He produced logos for large companies such as IBM, ABC, UPS, or Steve Jobs' NeXT, still legendary and almost unchanged to this day (except UPS).

paul rand design

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He became the art director for Esquire magazine at the age of twenty-three, taught graphic design at Yale, and created logos for many major corporations, including IBM, the American Broadcasting Company, and UPS. He felt that the designer, like the artist, creates a unique piece of work and its reproduction for commercial use is no different than the reproduction of an artwork for a catalogue or book. Paul Rand (born Peretz Rosenbaum; August 15, 1914 – November 26, 1996) was an American art director and graphic designer. He was best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT. He was one of the first American commercial artists to embrace and practice the Swiss Style of graphic design. Rand was American and knew the importance of developing a clear design style that appealed to the new Post War American consumer.

Paul Rand Graphic Designer

Notwithstanding his rich academic career in arts, Rand developed his graphic sense through self-education largely, as he voraciously read the European magazines, discovering the works of Cassandre and László Moholy-Nagy. Rand’s career spanned seven decades, and in that time his graphic designs, teaching (he joined the faculty of Yale University in 1956), and ideas broadly influenced several generations of American designers. His major writings include Thoughts on Design (1947), A Designer’s Art (1985), Design, Form, and Chaos (1993), and From Lascaux to Brooklyn (1996). IBM's new design mission - supported by Thomas Watson Jr., the son of the company's founder - visually transformed every aspect of the company, from electric typewriters to computers, advertising and architecture. The idea was to break with a conservative image and look towards the future, to illustrate IBM's renewed growth. Watson called on Eliot Noyes, a former colleague and architect who worked on curative design of the MoMa, among other things, to set up a team composed of Paul Rand (for graphics), Eero Saarinen (architecture) and Charles and Ray Eames (scenography, publications, videos).

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Born in Brooklyn from Orthodox Jewish parents, Paul Rand started practicing his art as early as 3 when he recopied commercials in his parents' shop. Well not exactly recopying, because the Jewish religion represses figurative representation. In 1934, after taking lessons at New York's Pratt Institute and the Art Students League, Rand began his career by making illustrations for a union that sold them to newspapers and magazines for advertising and articles. The following year, yearning for more control over his work, Rand went solo, creating layouts and ads for a small group of clients. Rand's experience as an ad man---his uncanny skill for marrying art and commerce---was the foundation for the next big phase in his career. By the mid-1950s, American corporations were taking notice of their counterparts in Europe, who in the previous few decades had embraced a cleaner, more unified approach to branding.

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5 Timeless Marketing Lessons For Today's Brands From Visionary Designer Paul Rand - Fast Company

5 Timeless Marketing Lessons For Today's Brands From Visionary Designer Paul Rand.

Posted: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 07:00:00 GMT [source]

After studying in New York City, Rand worked as an art director for Esquire and Apparel Arts magazines from 1937 to 1941. As his work developed, Rand assimilated the philosophy and visual vocabulary of European art and design, in particular that of the Bauhaus, Constructivism, Cubism, De Stijl, and Futurism. Rand believed that lines, shapes, and colours could become message-conveying signs and symbols in visual communications while simultaneously functioning as elements in an artistic composition. For example, in a 1947 poster promoting the New York Subways Advertising Company, Rand’s arrangement of dots and concentric circles in vibrant colours becomes both an illustrative image and a dynamic composition.

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Thomas Watson Jr., who had inherited the reins of IBM from his father, was especially envious of Olivetti, the stylish Italian typewriter company. Watson hired Elliot Noyes, a designer and curator for the Museum of Modern Art, to overhaul IBM's design company-wide. In 1986 Paul Rand worked with Steve Jobs, who had left Apple to create his own computer company, NeXT. With limited financial brand  and advertising budget, Jobs was looking for a "jewel" that would not require him to spend millions of dollars in advertising in order to connect, in the consumer's mind, the corporate logo with the company name.

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To view a photo in more detail or edit captions for photos you added, click the photo to open the photo viewer. Drag images here or select from your computer for Paul Rand memorial. Complement Thoughts on Design with Rand on the role of the imagination, then revisit the wonderful vintage picture-books he created with his then-wife Ann. The symbol is thus the common language between artist and spectator.

Everything Is Design, Design Is Everything – PRINT Magazine - PRINT Magazine

Everything Is Design, Design Is Everything – PRINT Magazine.

Posted: Mon, 02 Mar 2015 08:00:00 GMT [source]

The brief life of this designer left an indelible mark on the history of graphic design.

This Jacqueline Cochran ad from the early '40s shows Rand's approach to combining image and text. On that day Congress passed legislation to fund two and a half wars, hand what’s left of our privacy over to the CIA and NSA, and give the US president the power to shut down whatever part of the Internet he disagrees with. Your account has been locked for 30 minutes due to too many failed sign in attempts. Please contact Find a Grave at [email protected] if you need help resetting your password.

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Paul Rand was one of the twentieth century's most influential graphic designers. Born in New York City, Rand was educated at Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, and the Art Students League, where he worked with George Grosz. From 1936 to 1941 he served as the art editor of Esquire magazine, and he taught at the Advertising Guild, Pratt, Cooper Union, and Yale University, where he was a professor emeritus of graphic design. He has received awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Art Directors Club of New York and was given an honorary doctorate by the Philadelphia College of Art. An American designer whose life, although tragically brief, left an indelible mark on the history of graphic design was Alvin Lustig (1915–1955). He started out with the desire to be an architect and studied with Frank Lloyd Wright.

In his magazine covers, since the late 1930s, Rand adopted both European modernism and American spirit and functionalism in his graphic style. His distinctive signature was praised by László Moholy-Nagy, a master of the Bauhaus and one of Europe's most famous modernist designers, who had recently immigrated to Chicago. Despite the fact that Rand earned his ultimate success by designing corporate logos, however, the source of his reputation is based on his initial work on page design. In mid 1930s he was requested by Apparel Arts (now GQ) magazine to develop the page layout for their anniversary issue. Later he was offered a job at another prestigious magazine, Esquire-Coronet, as an art director. After first refusal, he accepted the offer, managing the fashion pages for Esquire.

He was an art director at the New York Times, where he now writes the Visuals column, and currently serves as co-chair of the MFA Design Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York. All images are copyrighted and strictly for educational and viewing purposes. Rand thought the striped IBM logotype gave the name visual rhythm and a less monolithic appearance.

These influences reflected in his work, which variously used---and often combined---collage, montage, hand-lettering, drawing and photography to bracing effect. Moreover, Rand’s graphic genius is also evident from his collaboration with the technology giant, Steve Jobs, on the NeXT Computer corporate identity project. The logo containing a simple two-dimensional black box presenting the four-letter company’s name manifested a visual harmony. Steve Jobs admired Rand’s graphic creativity and called him “the greatest living graphic designer.” Besides art direction, he taught at Yale University, as a Professor of Graphic Design. Additionally, he wrote several crucial works on design such as Design, Form and Chaos, Thoughts on Design and Design and the Play Instinct. In his final years he recorded his memoirs and focused on designing.

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