Paul Rand

Paul Rand packaging.

My graduate thesis at Yale was a long, dissertation-style treatise on the history of the square. Only one member of the graduate faculty actually took the time to read it — and that was Paul Rand. "With what little time I've had to read Jessica's thesis, I have to conclude that the quality of the content deserves commendation," he wrote in my written review. "But it looks like you designed it in three days," he told me later. "It looks," he said, staring straight at me to make sure I got the message, "like a piece of crap." Naturally, he was right: about the designing it in three days part, anyway. (Crap, I would later learn, is in the eye of the beholder.) But by then, I'd come to expect these sort of no-nonsense pronouncements from my thesis advisor. "The development of new typefaces is a barometer of the stupidity of our profession!" "Graphic design is not surgery!" Rand was irascible, unforgiving and impossible. Exalted standards of excellence were a point of pride with him. He loved form, hated market research, and fervently believed in the power of good design. He didn't suffer fools — or anyone for that matter — gladly. Periodically, I would visit him at his home in Weston, Connecticut, where we would sit at his kitchen table and talk. As we talked, he would think of books he wanted me to read, and he would go and fetch them, often sending me home with duplicate copies of his favorites — many of them on architecture, philosophy, art, even Judaica. I was the only Jewish girl in our class, and when he wasn't playing the tough guy in the studio at school, he treated my like a granddaughter, even down to administering just the right dose of guilt. "You disappeared like a phantom!" he wrote me in a letter when I'd failed to visit him for a month or two. Like both of my grandfathers, Rand was at once paternal and taciturn, deeply principled and given to great, gusty bouts of laughter at the slightest provocation. I'd bring him chocolates. He'd make me tea. We'd sit for hours and argue. I loved every minute of it. I don't remember talking about design so much as just talking — about life, about ideas, about reading. "You will learn most things by looking," he would say, "but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free." Once, he complained about the inadequacy of a text he wanted to assign the students, faulting his then-current translation of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant's essay, "On The Plastic In Art" from 1922. He knew I'd been raised in France and asked me to provide a better translation for him, which I did. And he knew enough French to know mine was, at least for his purposes, the better version: not because I was a better translator, but because by that time, under his tutelage, I'd become a more observant student of design. And it was this, more than anything, that I learned from him: how to really look — deeply, ruthlessly, penetratingly — and see. Years later, after I was married, I happened to be in Philadelphia with my husband when Mr. Rand was in town to give a lecture. Now frail and in his early 80s, we arranged to pick him up and deliver him back to his hotel at the end of the evening. As we helped him out of the taxi, he stopped, put his arm around me — we were the same exact height — and gave me a squeeze. Then he turned sternly to Bill. "You know, I'm not at all sure you're good enough for her," he barked. "But you'll do." I felt so relieved and grateful that he chose, in what would be our last conversation, to critique my husband — and not my thesis.

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2011/october/jobs-v-rand

— Graphic Wit “Paul Rand: The Play Instinct” 1991

— Lecture, A Paul Rand Retrospective, Cooper Union, Oct. 3, 1996

Paul Rand

But Rand must have felt that he had triumphed over the chaos set in the end. In 1996, a month and a half before his death, he and Heller appeared at Cooper Union. Heller writes: "Over one thousand attendees, at least half of them young students (many more, boasted the school's Dean, than attended David Carson's lecture the previous Spring) packed the hall for Rand's penultimate appearance." His ultimate appearance, at MIT, earned him an invitation to teach at the cutting-edge Media Lab from a professor of aesthetics and computation--two academic disciplines that Paul Rand, the hard-working aesthete, employed by the century's largest computer conglomerates, probably never studied.

Paul Rand (August 15, 1914 – November 26, 1996) is one of the most influential figures in American graphic design. During his long career, he established many of the definitions of the term "graphic designer." Rand’s work includes advertising design, illustration, industrial design, and typography, with clients from a broad range of industry. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy said Rand was "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." Three dominant principles seem to comprise Rand's design philosophy: the influence of the fine arts, firm belief in modernist fundamentals, and the practice of defamiliarizing the ordinary. THE EXOTERIC SENTIMENT: RAND'S ADVERTISEMENTS The final thought of Rand's Thoughts on Design states, "Even if it is true that commonplace advertising and exhibitions of bad taste are indicative of the mental capacity of the man in the street, the opposing argument is equally valid. Bromidic advertising catering to that bad taste merely perpetuates that mediocrity and denies him one of the most easily accessible means of aesthetic development." In attempting to bring "aesthetic development" to the masses, Rand consistently converted familiar objects into commanding symbols. In A Designer’s Art, Rand describes his motivation for finding inspiration in the potentially banal: "From Impressionism to Pop Art, the commonplace and even the comic strip have become ingredients for the artist’s cauldron. What Cézanne 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 was faced with just such a problem when he was commissioned by Westinghouse Corporation to symbolically incorporate the nature of the company’s business in a new mark that would be simple, memorable, and distinct. In the resulting logo, Rand used basic graphic forms to evoke wires and plugs, electronic diagrams and circuitry, and molecular structures. The idea of defamiliarizing the ordinary played an important part in Rand’s design choices. Working with manufacturers provided him the challenge of utilizing his corporate identities to create interesting packaging for mundane items. Rand was quick to point out in A Designer’s Art that "ideas do not need to be esoteric to be original or exciting." He insisted that artistic quality did not depend on exalted subject-matter. For years Rand worked with light bulb manufacturers, cigar makers, distillers, etc., whose products were not in themselves unusual. "A light bulb is almost as commonplace as an apple," he wrote, "but if I fail to make a package or an advertisement for light bulbs that is lively and original, it will not be the light bulb that is at fault." CHALLENGING THE CREATIVE HIERARCHY: RAND'S ART DIRECTION Throughout his career, Rand broke away from the conventions of American typography and layout. He absorbed the visual language of Cubism, Constructivism, the Bauhaus and De Stijl, translating the innovations of European modern art into a new form of American design. He explored the formal vocabulary of the European avant garde art movements and developed a unique graphic style, characterized by simplicity, wit and a rational approach to problem solving. By drawing upon these influences, Rand linked the fine arts with popular graphic application. Between 1938 and 1945, Rand produced a series of cover designs for Direction, a culture magazine publishing avante-gardists such as Le Corbusier and Jean Cocteau. Rand worked for free, claiming that the removal of financial obligation inspired more honest art. The December 1940 cover of Direction, which uses barbed wire to present the magazine as both a war-torn gift and a crucifix, indicates the artistic freedom Rand enjoyed at Direction. In Thoughts on Design, Rand notes that it "is significant that the crucifix, aside from its religious implications, is a demonstration of pure plastic form as well . . . a perfect union of the aggressive vertical (male) and the passive horizontal (female)." In ways such as this, Rand was experimenting with the introduction of themes normally found in the "high arts" into his new graphic design, further advancing his life-long goal of bridging the gap between his profession and that of Europe’s modernist masters. THE ESSENCE OF MODERNITY: RAND'S LOGOS In 1954, Rand began his career in corporate identification, his most widely recognized contribution to graphic design. His logos adhered to principles of simplicity, ease of recognition, and absolute appropriateness to their subject matter. Many of his logos, though decades old, are still in use. Rand’s defining corporate identity was his IBM logo, which as design critic Mark Favermann notes "was not just an identity but a basic design philosophy that permeated corporate consciousness and public awareness." In 1956, Rand introduced what IBM refers to as the "IBM continuity logo." This modernization was a relatively subtle change from the company's previous logo, in part to communicate that any changes would come within an overall continuity. The new logotype replaced the former Beton Bold type font with City Medium. The letters took on a more solid, grounded and balanced appearance. In 1972, the logo was again updated by Rand. Horizontal stripes now replaced the solid letters to suggest "speed and dynamism." The IBM logo epitomizes the ideal of minimalism, proving Rand’s point that a logo "cannot survive unless it is designed with the utmost simplicity and restraint." The logo became the basic unifying element that tied all IBM printed material together, and led to the company's creation of the first corporate design manual. According to graphic designer Louis Danziger, "He almost singlehandedly convinced business that design was an effective tool. [. . .] Anyone designing in the 1950s and 1960s owed much to Rand, who largely made it possible for us to work. He more than anyone else made the profession reputable. We went from being commercial artists to being graphic designers largely on his merits." MCMODERNISM: THE MENU DESIGN These principles remained essential throughout the menu design process. In order to channel Paul Rand, the product needed to incorporate three key elements: familiar subject matter, a synthesis of high and low art, and modernist aesthetics. I concluded that McDonalds would be an appropriately base starting point into which to inject Rand's design philosophy. Rand was, after all, admired for his ability to elevate "lowly" subject matter to the aesthetic level of fine art. The next step was to employ the modernist philosophy Rand had so revered. This manifests itself in the final product in both the brevity of the food descriptions and the simplistic minimalism of the "M" logo that replaces the restaurant name. By abbreviating the content of the menu, I hoped to achieve a level of clarity and efficiency characteristic of Rand. The remaining formal decisions were guided by an attempt to use fine art methods in a commercial art context. Employing techniques such as cut paper and economical line drawing, I attempted to incorporate the aesthetic of the European masters which had inspired Rand, while still adhering to the modernist principle of functional simplicity. In a final jab at his notorious ego-centrism, I completed the composition with a Rand-esque signature. Arguably one of Paul Rand's most important legacies is the validity that he gave to the profession of graphic design. Who better to choose for inspiration than a man to whom we as designers owe much of the respect we know today?

On any given day we take in thousands graphic design pieces: from product packaging to textbook covers, nearly every inch of our world is covered in an advertisement, a logo or some form of branding. This has become the norm, but in the early-mid twentieth century this cultural phenomenon created by the graphic arts was just beginning to emerge. A notable pioneer of this design frontier was typographer, designer and innovative businessman, Paul Rand. He produced numerous advertisements, corporate logos and even children’s books that changed the way design interacts with the general public and altered the way designers and their clients conduct business. Before this design revolution came many great art movements: Cubism, Constructivism, De Stijl, Expressionism, Bauhaus (just to name a few) and Rand used these movements as inspiration for his own style. As I will further explain, he came to appreciate a relationship between geometric form and color through the works of artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Adolphe Mouron Cassandre and Moholy Nagy as well as an understanding of line through the works of artists such as Paul Klee. Rand developed elements from these artists and fused them with the American Modernist Movement that grew out of the 1930’s. Modernism was a movement that continued to change and grow as the twentieth century progressed. During Rand’s time, modernist art expression started to merge with American pop culture. Other designers of the time, such as Lester Beall, Saul Bass and Bradbury Thompson embraced this exposure of design to the mainstream through advertising, logo design, poster design, book jackets, packaging, etc. Most of these artist’s works from the time incorporate bold color, basic geometric form, playful typography and a obvious experimentation with formal decision-making. These elements are repeated in Paul Rand’s work but in a style that is indicatively his own. Born and raised in New York City, Rand was educated at well known art schools, such as the Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design. He started working in magazines, which grew into a successful career as an art director for Esquire and a cover artist for Apparel Arts Magazine and Direction. Rand then focused his passion for print design work into advertising, creating ad campaigns for El Producto Cigar Company, Coronet Brandy and many other recognizable brands of that time. Later in his career, Rand took on more freelance work, designing everything from posters to corporate logos and even a series of children’s books. Paul Rand believed in the importance of transforming the familiar, often mundane, visual world with aesthetically pleasing, yet simple design that could appeal to a mass cultural base. He believed “Design is the method of putting form & 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.” Rand looked for what he considered a proper balance of visual content (the image) and technical content (type). He strived for a “functional-aesthetic perfection” of modern art. Rand also incorporated symbolism into his work, part of what he referred to as “New Advertising”, the idea that design should create a relationship between the designer and the viewer through the interpretation of these simple symbols. Other Modernist designers of the time, such as those mentioned above, seemed to follow more of a social agenda through their work but Rand operated more like an opportunist, using his design skill to further his reputation as well as his pocketbook. In 1986, Rand reportedly took $100,000 for designing the NEXT logo. Steve Jobs, creator of NEXT, once even called Rand “the greatest living graphic designer”, an almost unopposed conception in today’s design world. But was Paul Rand really the “greatest” or did he just market himself accordingly? He even signed most of his works, as if they were pieces of fine art rather than print designs for mass consumption. In most interviews, Rand seemed quite dogmatic, praising his own work and criticizing post-modernist design. There is no doubt that Paul Rand was a highly influential designer of the twentieth century who aided the transition of art into the mainstream, but perhaps he is given far too much credit and not enough critical perspective. In the 1940s, Paul Rand strayed from conventional standards of typography and layout, and started incorporating Swiss style of design into his creations. He merged American visual culture into modern design, incorporating Cubism, Constructivism, the Bauhaus and De Stijl into his work. This poster for the New York Subways Advertising Company was designed by Rand in 1947. He incorporated geometric forms and colors that can be seen abstractly or as a target, symbolizing the idea of “hitting the bull’s-eye,” in the ability to reach a large audience through advertising in the subway. Rand was best known for his corporate logo designs. He revolutionized how businesses identify themselves through simple yet functional logos and packaging, further bringing design as an art form into the mainstream. His most famous logo design was for International Business Machines Corporation. In 1956, Rand created a typeface for the company called City Medium, which provided a more solid, grounded and balanced presence than Beton Bold, the logo’s former typeface. Then, in 1972, Rand finalized the logo by running horizontal bars through the letters (in two versions, 8-bar and 13-bar), to signify the "speed and dynamism" of the corporation. This design exemplifies Rand’s desire for simplicity, his attention to symbolism and his unique branding style that is still imitated today. The logo has been the official logo of International Business Machines Corporation since 1972 and remains a globally recognizable brand today. After some success, Rand desired to make more playful designs. This desire manifested itself in children’s books which Paul’s wife Ann wrote and he illustrated. The books are geared toward children so they feature much less symbolism and complexity of thought but still contain those bold Rand images combined with purposeful text layout. Paul and Ann Rand collaborated on four children’s books, “ Spin & Sparkle” (1957), “Little 1” (1962), “Listen! Listen!” (1970), and “I Know a Lot of Things” (1973). Paul Rand influenced a wide range of the print design work we see today. Many corporate logos, such as Rob Janoff’s 1977 Apple logo and Saul Bass’ 1984 AT&T logo, have a clear resemblance to Rand’s simple style. Other contemporary designers such as, Alan Fletcher, Edward Johnston and many others, seems to have taken elements from Paul Rand’s bold style and incorporated them into their own, creating successful new designs with geometric shapes, basic color and simple typography. Re-designing a menu reminiscent of Paul Rand’s innovative style is a difficult task. It requires a delicate balance of text and image working together to convey a single, legible concept. With this in mind, I decided it would be best to divide the menu into sections so that each section would have corresponding text and image to rely on. The images are food icons I created that mimic Rand’s use of geometric forms and basic color in corporate logos. I condensed the text to balance the logos and left plenty of white space to frame each section. The finished product was a twenty-first century Rand-inspired menu that I can only hope did justice to the name.

When asked how Rand would feel about his logo being phased out, Helfand quipped, “He would feel fine — as long as he was hired to design the new one.”

After the 2002 collapse of the company under the weight of its fraudulent business practices, [Paul] Rand's "E" took on a whole new meaning. Rechristened the "crooked E," it inadvertently became the most powerful anti-logo of its time. No parodist of corporate identity could have devised a more startling outcome. The Enron debacle created much soul-searching among the graphic design community, as artists pondered the ethical dimensions of their power to shape people's perceptions. Of all the things I read in Stephen Eskilson's Graphic Design: A New History, this passage startled me the most. Let the soul searching begin! Paul Rand took logo design very seriously, and his work in the field serves as the centerpiece of many of his books. Detailed accounts of the genesis of symbols such as Morningstar, Next, and Ideo appear in A Designer's Art, Design, Form and Chaos, and From Lascaux to Brooklyn; even rejected proposals, like those for The Limited and Ford, merit many pages of coverage. But Enron was designed too late in Rand's career to make any of his books. In Steven Heller's monograph, it's simply identified as one of Rand's last works, and it appears towards the very end, with no further comment, rounded up with a group of other, less notorious, logos. Perhaps the only thorough account of the launch of the Enron logo appears in Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald's 746-page history of the company's rise and fall: Despite the early hour — eight o'clock on the morning of January 14, 1997 — the mood in the room was jubilant. The big announcement was at hand. The planning had been very hush-hush, but now the employees were about to see the unveiling of Enron's new image for the world. On the far side of the room, [chairman Kenneth] Lay and [president Jeffrey] Skilling walked across the stage, stopping beside a large object covered by a massive cloth. Lay held up his hands, making barely audible shushing noises until he had everyone's attention. "Well," Lay said. "We've come a long was since 1985, when we were just a pipeline company with a vision — a vision of becoming the premier natural-gas company." A smattering of applause. "We have become much more," he said. "We're a force the world can be proud of, for everything we've been doing. Deregulating markets. Providing alternative services. Making markets more efficient." Applause again, louder this time. "So we tried to develop a new logo that would reflect the dynamic company Enron has become," he said. "It will be recognized as the logo of a company leading the energy industry into the next century, into the next millennium." The loudest applause yet. "It's a logo we can be very proud of." Lay gestured to the covered object. "And here it is!" Recorded trumpets blared. Lights flashed. Smoke enveloped the stage. Someone pulled a rope, lifting the covering cloth. On the stage rested a giant sculpture — a single titled E. Multicolored lights surrounded each prong of the letter. The crowd loved it. They celebrated the logo's birth for an hour, then trickled back to the office where delightful surprises awaited. The logo was posted in hallways; new letterhead and business cards were at their desks. It was official: Enron had a cool new icon to show the world. How sad the designer is mentioned nowhere. But maybe not! Because, well, wait for it: Within hours, the world would laugh it off the stage. Houston faxed the logo to Enron's offices in Europe. But in transmission the middle, yellow prong disappeared, leaving the new design meant to celebrate Enron's triumphant ascension looking more like an electric plug. Worse, to the Italians it resembled an obscene hand gesture, one that meant about the same thing as shooting a middle finger at an American. The European executives roared with laughter: now they had a new way to win Italian customers. Back in Houston, dismay grew: the yellow prong also vanished when run through the copying machine. Somehow, Enron had spent millions of dollars on a new business logo without bothering to check if it worked in business. Soon the hallway signs went down, the new cards and letterheads were shredded. With no fanfare, another logo was introduced, replacing the yellow prong with a green one. The symbol meant to carry Enron into the next millennium hadn't lasted a week. Embarassing, but not to its designer. Not only would he know nothing of Enron's ultimate collapse, Rand didn't even live to see the unveiling, having died weeks before in November 1997. It has yet to be revealed who performed the last minute yellow-to-green substitution that briefly snatched the design from the jaws of defeat. Nonetheless, faxability aside, the new symbol was rated a success. Identity consultant Tony Spaeth, for one, was enthusiastic about what he saw. "Enron would be Rand's last logo (it is likely that he knew this), and he said it was his best ever. That is a tall order," reported Spaeth his annual assessment of new logo programs for the February 1998 issue of the Conference Board's magazine, Across the Board. "But it is a fine mark: bold, one big idea, but richer in layered ideas and associations than might appear at first glance. Like great names, great marks often have more than one layer of possible meaning; this one is of course a big E, but one can also see in Rand's Enron ideas of household power as in a plug, industrial power as in stacks or towers, and connectivity (whether pipe or wire) between the E and N." There has since been some debate as to whether Enron was actually Rand's last logo; certainly it was his last of real consequence. I personally never cared for the way the "pipeline" met the top of the first letter of Enron; it works fine for the N, but really needs a letter like U to work well at the top end. Unron, anyone? Also, I bet I would have preferred the doomed red-yellow-blue version. But all of this is entirely missing Professor Eskilson's point. The issue he raises is not the Enron logo's aesthetics, or metaphoric incisiveness, or suitability to xerographic technology. Instead, it's the "soul searching" that consumed the design community after the scale of the Enron debacle became known. Was one of our greatest practitioners complicit in legitimizing the activities of a massive criminal enterprise? Is Paul Rand our very own Leni Riefenstahl? I actually don't remember any soul searching. I do remember a bit of hey-you'd-never-guess-who-designed-the-Enron-logo gossip, but the reaction to the news was either schadenfreude or a bit of perverse pride, depending on one's opinion of the late Mr. Rand. If anything, the fact that the same person had designed the Enron logo and the IBM logo seemed to say nothing more than good logos and good companies didn't necessarily go hand-in-hand. Rand himself implied as much in his 1991 essay "Logos, Flags, and Escutcheons," saying "A logo doesn't sell, it identifies...A logo derives its meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around. A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it means is more important than what it looks like." And for those seeking Riefenstahl parallels, Rand adds, "Design is a two-faced monster. One of the most benign symbols, the swastika, lost its place in the pantheon of the civilized when it was linked to evil, but its intrinsic quality remains indisputable. This explains the tenacity of good design." So is this another instance where Stephen Eskilson's book gets it wrong? I'm afraid so. In fact, I would make a completely different argument: even if Paul Rand's logo helped legitimize Enron in its heyday, it played an even more important role in the aftermath of its collapse. Enron's success was built on one fundamental trait: the fact that the way it made its money was essentially — perhaps intentionally — incomprehensible. Any resemblances to electrical plugs and pipelines in the Rand logo were, if not unintentional, then less than useful to Enron's management. They seemed much more comfortable with the completely abstract aesthetic of another iconic designer, Frank Gehry. "Enron shares Mr. Gehry's ongoing search for the moment of truth, the moment when the functional approach to a probelm becomes infused with the artistry that produces a truly innovative solution," wrote Jeff Skilling in his introduction to the catalog of Frank Gehry's landmark 2001 exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum, for which Enron was a lead sponsor. "This is the search Enron embarks on every day, by questioning the conventional to change business paradigms and create new markets that will shape the new economy." Questioning conventions! Changing paradigms! New markets! Whatever it all meant, somewhere in there Enron was making lots of money. Sorting out how it all went down the drain was such a baffling exercise that when Malcolm Gladwell convened an online discussion to try to figure out what it was, exactly, that Enron did that was legally wrong, he got nearly 15,000 words worth of answers. You couldn't take a picture of Enron's crime: it all happened in the world of numbers and spreadsheets, of financial reports and affidavits. But there was something you could take a picture of, and that was Rand's logo. A company with a made-up name, incomprehensible business practices, and largely intangible assets suddenly had a vivid manifestation, a logo that once might have stood for nimbleness, balance and connectivity, now given new life as "the crooked E." "The flip side of the power and importance of a brand is its growing vulnerablity," wrote the editors of the Economist in a riposte to Naomi Klein's No Logo titled "The case for brands" and subtitled "Far from being instruments of oppression, they make firms accountable to consumers." The editorial goes on: "The more companies promote the value of their brands, the more they will need to seem ethically robust and environmentally pure. Whether protesters will actually succeed in advancing the interests of those they claim to champion is another question. The fact remains that brands give them far more power over companies than they would otherwise have." And indeed, the general public had no more convenient target than Rand's logo to express their feelings about Enron. A 2002 contest to redesign the Enron logo received entries that reimagined the crooked E as, among many other things, a sinking ship, tombstones, the shadows cast by tombstones, skidmarks, a flaccid penis, a dead Republican elephant, a toilet paper holder, and — perhaps as no surprise to Enron's Italian colleagues — a raised middle finger. Professor Eskilson got that part right: Paul Rand's creation was "the most powerful anti-logo of its time." Whether you believe this outcome was inadvertent or inevitable depends on what you think a logo is supposed to do. No one knew better than Rand, and I'm not so sure he would have been disappointed, or even surprised, by the outcome. The value of a corporate identity is supposed to be hard to calculate, but in the denouement of its meltdown, the Enron logo proved far from worthless. In fact, at least one version of it — the three-dimensional, LED-illuminated, rotating sign from Enron's corporate lobby known as the "Disco E" — cost exactly $33,000. That's how much it went for at a liquidation auction in December 2002, sold for an unknown purpose to a mysterious stranger in a gray Ferrari who, ironically, has never been identified.

Paul Rands business card. Simple and unimpressive in design, but i imagine that his name carried such weight it did not need to be over-embellished.

Although Dewey is known best for his publications concerning education, he also wrote about many other topics, including experience and nature, art and experience, logic and inquiry, democracy, and ethics.

A collection of Rands own personal paintings.

Without a word, he took me by the arm, leading me into his bedroom where on three of the four walls were  — gulp — paintings and watercolors. “Sorry,” I said. “No offense intended.” He smirked in that impish way of his, and we went back to the living room where the Klees, other Modern objects and naïf artifacts were on display.        He broke the silence: “I am going to include a couple of those non-existent paintings in a portfolio Mohawk Paper will publish.” And then 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.        Nonetheless, when the Mohawk portfolio was published, it was a veritable creative biography — and a real insight. Rand had selected 18 disparate images, starting with a 1957 illustration of a paper-cutout hand with a striped top sitting on the finger. This was followed by “Sweet Dreams,” a 1970 photograph of his sleeping cat next to a pillow in wide striped fabric and this preceded “Gate Sign,” a 1975 photograph of a fragment of stenciled type … and so on. Each image was artfully selected, not to pedantically preface the next image, but in essence, to transcribe the visual dialogue he routinely had with all art forms — playful, deliberate and serendipitous. In this context the paintings made sense as studies or investigations of form. Yet on their own they still lacked —  to my eyes — the verve and inspiration of his graphic design. Even the sketchy anthropomorphic cigar drawing he did for his long-time client El Producto had more distinction. And Rand obviously knew this or we would have seen more of his “personal” work in his books and exhibitions. Recently, I was looking through the hundreds of outtakes from my book Paul Rand, to see if there was anything missing that should not have been cut. In fact, there were scores of great pieces from campaigns to posters, but nothing that truly irritated me by virtue of not appearing in the book. Then I stumbled upon a sleeve of transparencies of some of his paintings and watercolors, including a few sitting on a very serious easel (which I don’t recall seeing in his home). They were presumably important enough to be photographed, but their respective whereabouts is unknown. Some were simple brush sketches, while others were more finished in a Klee-like manner. There is a prosaic feeling — a sleeping dog and vase of flowers. There is a quiet simplicity as well. As a youngster, Rand was extremely adept drawing, coloring, highlighting and otherwise doing what he called “Uncle Joe” renderings of real things. He gave that approach up pretty early in his career in favor of what might be termed abstract “represent-ationalism.” Eventually his drawing became little more than glyphs. 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.

As designers, don’t we strive for the fabulous? Don’t we revel in what is Earth-shattering? There are many designers we idolize but, in my opinion, few who truly deserve it. Paul Rand was no flashy egotist. It wasn’t hype or a good public relations geek working in a corner of a studio, being paid to send a thousand press releases out on one design job, hoping someone will notice. Rand gained popularity and changed our industry by struggling against everything he knew and by which he was bound. He gambled and won; and his prize is also ours while we sit comfortably behind our computers. He made us all stars and our work worthy of doing. For that, he deserves the title, as opposed to it as his religious upbringing might be, of design God… or at least our design angel!