Paul Rand, Influential Graphic Designer

Graphic design is constantly on the move, and each new era of design is pushed by designers with imagination, passion for design and a desire to achieve excellence. These words merely hint at the talent of such a designer, who is forever linked to Modernist era of graphic design. His influence still resonates today, as do many of his designs in a world where designs come and go on what seems to be a weekly basis. Paul Rand changed both graphic designers and design through his innovation, wisdom and unique view on design and the design process.

Paul Rand’s career spanned more than 50 years and involved different areas of design work. Rand’s first career was as an art director for Esquire and Apparel Arts (Communication Arts, 1999). His main focus was on cover design, but on occasion Rand had the opportunity to do some layout work for the magazine as well. The second was as an advertisement designer of covers for a culture magazine publisher, “Direction (Communication Arts, 1999).” His third career, which has stood the test of time and still resonates today, was the development of corporate identification for companies such as UPS, Enron and ABC (Heller, 1997). Interwoven between his different career avenues, Paul Rand wrote books on design, taught design and produced children’s books with his wife (Communication Arts, 1999).

Paul Rand may be more responsible for the modernist movement in post World War II America than any other American designer of the time (Helfand, 1997). His influences from European artists and designers such as Picasso, Klee and Calder (Helfand, 1997) left a lasting impression on Rand; he then left a lasting impression on every graphic designer and artist that followed.

Prior to Rand, the advertisement designs were not created in the same manner in which a present day designer would assume. The layouts were controlled by the copy and copywriters who would sketch a design to be given to a layout artist to then polish. Rand saw the lack of design and cooperation between art and function. Rand said, “I was not going to let myself be treated like a job printer on Pitkin Avenue (Heller, 1997).” In other words Rand was not going to just be another person in the assembly line of a bad design.

Rand paved the way for what is now called “creative teams.” These teams paired the art director with the copywriter together in order to better serve both design and function. Now instead of adjusting the design to the copy the parts would become one and compliment each other.

Aside from the approach to the design in the 1930′s Rand changed the look and feel of the design as well. Rand brought the influences of the Bauhaus, Cubism, DeStijl and Constructivism into a world of illustration, static design and boring, traditional typography (Heller, 2007).
direction magazine design

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a photographer, typographer and master of Bauhaus in Weimer, Germany had this to say about Paul Rand,

“Among…young Americans it seems to me that Paul Rand is one of the best and most capable… He is a painter, lecturer, industrial designer, [and] advertising artist who draws his knowledge and creativeness from the resources of this country. He is an idealist and a realist using the language of the poet and the businessman. He thinks in terms of need and function. He is able to analyze his problems, but his fantasy is boundless (Heller, 2007).”

This ability to understand the value of the design to both client as well as designer and the desire to innovate and change design may possibly be what set Paul Rand apart from the crowd of other designers stuck in an antiquated way of thinking and designing.

Paul Rand’s so called claims to fame are the corporate identities which he produced for companies such as Next Computer, Westinghouse, Cummins Engine, Yale University, IBM, UPS and ABC (Heller, 1997). Several of which are still used today with little or no change whatsoever. Some people may view many of Rand’s corporate logos as “simple” or “plain.” Those elementary first impressions may be true, but simplicity is the beauty and the challenge that Rand loved. “From Impressionism to Pop Art, the commonplace and even the comic strip have become ingredients for the artist’s caldron. What Cezanne did with apples, Picasso with guitars, Léger with machines, Schwitters with rubbish, and Duchamp with urinals makes it clear that revelation does not depend upon grandiose concepts. The problem of the artist is to defamiliarize the ordinary (Rand, 1995).” The challenge of taking an ordinary object, reinventing and giving the object a new or altered meaning is nothing short of genius.

The knowledge Paul Rand gained through his own personal experience and through his own studies was not a secret by any stretch of the imagination. His sincere desire to educate for the sake of design is clearly exclaimed when he was quoted, “My interest has always been in restating the validity of those ideas which, by and large, have guided artists since the time of Polyclitus (Helfand, 1997).” Paul Rand, nothing short of a “Renaissance man,” wrote and published numerous books; the first of many of Rand’s insights into design books was simply titled, Thoughts on Design published in 1946. He went on to publish other works: Design, Form, and Chaos, Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art, his final book From Lascaux to Brooklyn, and several more publications overflowing with philosophy and theory (Helfand, 1997).

Paul Rand’s wisdom and unclouded perspective changed graphic design and the designer’s approach forever. In a lecture given by Paul Rand at MIT just days before his passing, the interviewer began with this question, “What is design?” Mr. Rand replied with,

“Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions, there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated (Maeda, 1997).”

References:
Helfand, Jessica (1997).Logocentrism. New Republic. 217,
Heller, Steven (1997). Thoughts on Rand. Print, 51, 3,
Heller, Steven (2007). Paul Rand. Design Issues, 13,
Maeda, John (1997). Thoughts on Paul Rand. IDEA Magazine, (1999, March/April). Pioneers Paul Rand. Communication Arts, from http://www.commarts.com/CA/feapion/rand/
Rand, Paul (1995). Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art. New Haven: Yale University Publishing.