Paul Rand - Graphic Designer

  

He began his professional career in 1934 as a part time illustrator. His portfolio grew quite rapidly and it was around this time he changed his name from Peretz Rosenbaum to Paul Rand. He had been persuaded that his overtly Jewish name might cost him work, no matter how impressive his portfolio might be. The name came from an uncle and Rand liked the way that the letters in this new name were even and that they worked well in written form, almost like a brand name.

In 1936 he was employed to help create layouts for Apparel Arts magazine. His “talent for transforming otherwise mundane still-life photographs into dynamic compositions” led to him becoming a full time employee of Esquire, a publishing company. By the age of 23 he was the Art Director at Esquire. While at Esquire he also did freelance work. In 1938 he was commissioned to design some covers for Direction a magazine with an ‘anti-fascist bias’. This was one of his most important projects. He wasn’t paid for the work but he did have complete creative control and this is reflected in his work, as it shows the free development of his style. His first cover for Direction, in November 1938, featured a cut out of a map of Czechoslovakia, which was photographed on a copy camera and given a shadow to give it a 3D effect. Two thick red lines criss-cross against a white background. As suggested by the biographer Steven Heller the lines represented “the German annexation.” Rand said of this first cover that it “pinpoints the distinction between abstract design without content and abstract design with content. You can be a great manipulator of form, but if the solution is not apt, it’s for the birds.” He did covers for Direction until 1945, which, resulted in varied methods.  To save money and due to the economy Rand did his own photography on a copy camera and instead of typeset he used his own handwriting. I think this emphasises the originality of his covers for Direction and keeps them looking modern and relevant today. The Direction covers were the first step in marking Rand’s visual style.

 

In 1941 Rand joined the Weintraub agency. Shortly before World War II American companies were spending a lot of money on advertising their products and America experienced an advertising boom. William H. Weintraub, a former partner at Esquire, decided to take advantage of this growth in advertising and opened his own advertising firm. Here Paul was allowed to run the art department without obstruction from the partners. Here Rand’s influence on the change in approach to American advertising began. Before the 1940s advertising was a commercial art rather than a design art. A printer or a Boardman mostly composed adverts. Rand wanted to fuse the two and didn’t see why advertising couldn’t be creative or abstract or witty. He was a believer that form follows function but didn’t think this meant you had to be obvious or boring. The agency’s clients included, among many others, Dubonnet, Disney Hats, Revlon and El Producto cigars. El Producto was a very successful campaign and reflects Paul’s belief that visual communication could be simple yet effective. Rand re-created the El Producto logo, something he did on every account he worked on. The adverts consisted of line drawings collaged with photographs of cigars. The cigars were given human characteristics, which created a comic like feel to the ads.  

This meant that a different narrative could be applied to each poster. The El Producto campaign also reflected Paul Rand’s use of wit and humour. Rand commented on his use of humour that “… the first priority is the idea—and my train of thought just happens to be funny.” Rand’s approach to drawing, sketchy and rough, was alluring and unique at the time. In 1954 Rand left the Weintraub agency and although Rand learnt, while at the agency, that design was a powerful instrument in communication it didn’t dispel his interest in art, it increased his attention to creativity and modernism.

While at Weintraub Rand had also started designing book layouts and book jackets. In 1944 he designed his first book jacket for a title called The Cubanist Painters. 

        It was his first effort at pure abstractism. He used a simple sans serif font for the title over blotches of block colour. His title pages were always minimalist and recognisable by his abstract imagery, unusual typography and bold colours.

         

        In 1947 he published his first book Thoughts on Design. His philosophy on design was already becoming well known and Thoughts on Design fused Bauhaus analysis with Jungian psychology. It became a bible of modern graphic design and included a collection of his work and thoughts on the role of humour, the balance of form and function among other themes. In 1956 after he had left the Weintraub agency he designed and illustrated a children’s book called I Know A lot of Things. This was the first of a series of books written by his second wife Ann Rand. Illustrating children’s books was a very different conceptual change for Rand, as he was not used to designing for the strange and unknown audience of children. However Rand’s mischievous humour worked well in creating simple, playful and witty images that children were drawn to. He designed several titles and they gave him a freedom to exercise his play instinct, which he later wrote about.

In the same year IBM, a computer technology and consulting company, commissioned him to redesign their logo. This was the job that secured Rand’s reputation and success in the corporate identity world. 

After the Second World War many energy, technology and information corporations excelled. Visual identity became important to these corporations and by the mid-1950s it had become one of the biggest and well-paid design specialities. As these conglomerates grew, theories on corporate communications also grew. Systems and formulas were put into place that designers complied to. These design methods were dubbed ‘International Typographic Style’. Advocates of this style, or the Swiss Style as it was also know, believed that cleanliness and readability were key elements. However corporate identity design requires creativity and was better if it didn’t conform to standardisation. Eliot Noyes, IBM’s consulting director for design, hired Rand to try and reinvent the company trademark so that it reflected the quality and success of the company.

Initially he modified the bold typeface, set in an Egyptian style font, however the identity could not be changed all in one go. Rand was design consultant for IBM for over 35 years and the original redesign took over 4 years to develop.

Rand added stripes to the logo in 1962. The stripes were inspired by the lines on legal forms to stop counterfeiting of signatures and Rand felt that this added an authority to the logo but also put people in the mind of technology. By weighing up the stripes he had modernised and simplified the trademark so that it could be duplicated, rotated and colourised and therefore be used in many variations. Rand had the right to alter the logo in any way and designed a poster for an in-house event. The poster was brightly coloured and had witty illustrations of an eye (for the I) a bee (for the B) and a blue striped version of the trademark’s M. Distribution of this poster was at first forbidden as management thought that staff would be encouraged to “take liberties” with the logo. However this image has now become on of the most recognised examples of Paul’s work and has been widely circulated. Through Rand and Noyes work on the IBM project they established a very successful corporate identity system that had not previously existed and was duplicated at other companies throughout the world.

Rand by and large designed trademarks rather than corporate identities and designed and redesigned logos for companies including Westinghouse, UPS, abc, NeXt and USSB.

He designed his marks to be modern and simplistic and he felt that this was the key to a long lasting mark.

In 1977, Rand went back to teaching Graphic Design, which he had first ventured into at Yale in 1956. He hoped that he could give to education what he had not received himself from his own education. He challenged his students, as he believed this was the only way to achieve high quality work and although he may have been stern this was only due to his passion and dedication to his craft.

Paul Rand’s career led him to be a force to be recognised for designers and students throughout the world. His work and philosophies have influenced the shape of the design world today. Towards the end of his career he received criticism and mixed reviews of his thoughts and writings. He had become very serious about himself and the graphic design world around him. Michael Beirut commented that Rand due to his scathing attacks against new directions in design, he had lost his relevance. Michael Beirut commented that “ [Rand said] Much contemporary graphic design, […] is degrading the world as we know it.” It wasn’t argued that Rand’s achievements weren’t outstanding but that his comments on design were outdated and almost contradictory to his strive for modernism. Yet Rand remained consistently committed to design and the ideas he had about how to use type, images and graphic forms will continue to be timeless. I personally feel that although designers today have very different approaches to Paul Rand his legacy can still be seen and felt in modern practices.

Bibliography

Books, Journals and Articles

Bowermaster, J, The Graphic Genius of Paul Rand, Connecticut’s Finest, Winter 1989

Favermann M, Two Twentieth-Century Icons, Art New England Vol 18 Issue 15, May 1997

Hellfand, J, Logocentrism, New Rupublic, Vol 217 Issue 26, December 1997

Heller S, Paul Rand, Phaidon Press  Ltd, London, 2001

Heller S, Thoughts on Rand, Print Magazine, May/June 1993, Vol 51 Issue 3

Hurlburt A, Paul Rand, Communication Arts, March/April 1999

Rand P, How I got the idea in McAlhone, B and Stuart D, A Smile in the Mind, Phaidon Press Ltd, London, 2004

Websites

www.paul-rand.com

www.paul-rand.com/books_thoughtsOnPaulRand.shtml

www.areaofdesign.com/americanicons/rand.htm

www.typotheque.com/articles/paul_rand.html

http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/C20th/bauhaus.htm

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