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A full-scale survey of Paul Rand, who branded even his own name. It's too bad that Nike CEO Phil Knight can't appeal to Paul Rand for help. As the ubiquitous Swoosh becomes as much a symbol of corporate greed and exploited Southeast Asian workers as it is of athletic prowess, Rand might have a fix quicker than Knight could dispatch Michael Jordan to Singapore. Think of three resonant, established logos, and, chances are, at least one of them was created by Rand, the father of modern branding. With his succinct philosophy that "the trademark should embody in the simplest form the essential characteristics of the product or institution being advertised," Rand practically created the corporate logo culture. Were IBM, Westinghouse, UPS, or ABC on your list? All Rand's. (In case you're wondering, the CBS eye is William Golden's.) Rand wrote manual after manual for in-house designers about how to polish their logos, but he also knew how to have fun with the process and ratchet down the corporatism and jargon. One of his posters for IBM replaced the "I" and the "B" with an eye and a bee, leaving only the signature striped "M." (Management embargoed it, on the grounds that "It wasn't IBM.") In a Westinghouse annual report, Rand showed the sticks and dots of the "W" being blown away. Steven Heller's book is the first full-scale survey of Rand's work since his death two years ago, and the only one not undertaken by the man himself (talk about branding). After wrangling for years with subpar copywriters, Rand knew better than most artists the importance of delivering the right message through text, too. He wouldn't have been disappointed in Heller, his friend and frequent interlocutor, who has a smooth, conversational style in this monograph and knows well enough not to even attempt to upstage his subject. It's a wise decision, as Rand, uninterrupted, offers pronouncements like: "A cigar is almost as commonplace as an apple, but if I fail to make ads for cigars that are lively and original, it will not be the cigar that is at fault," and, "Catering to bad taste, which we so readily attribute to the average reader, merely perpetuates that mediocrity." Heller sketches a history of so-called "good design" in the U.S. through chapters that thematically survey Rand's career--implying that Rand had pulled everyone else behind him, first in advertising, then in book design, and then in the corporate logo game. It's likely that this is a fairly accurate assessment, and Heller supports it with tantalizing biographical information amidst examples of the design work. Illuminating is the fact that Rand, who almost single-handedly brought European modern graphic design to the United States, got his entire import out of the pages of a magazine--a single copy of Gebraushgrafik, from a tiny bookstore next door to the Brooklyn Paramount theater. No Bauhaus pilgrim better understood the power of grids and the burning need "to turn down the typographic volume" in American advertising. Exactly why Rand felt such affinity for Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, A.M. Cassandre, and E. McKnight Kauffer is shrouded in (self-aggrandizing?) mystery, but it's clear that he was always a stranger in a strange land. Born in 1914, his first drawings were of the Palmolive babes from the ads hanging in his father's Brooklyn store. In high school, he attended Pratt by night and broke with his family's Orthodox Judaism. Rand changed his name from Peretz Rosenbaum while looking for his first job. He was one of the few Jews in the advertising world then. Amusing is Rand's brash presentation style. He usually gave corporate chiefs only one logo to "choose" from, accompanied by a booklet explaining why his design was not merely attractive, but inevitable. "'I was convinced that each typographic example on the first few pages was the final logo,'" Steve Jobs recalls of Rand's book for NeXT, which showed the four letters, then paired them with the computer's signature black box, and then arranged them in a square. Jobs thought he was getting lovely typography, but Rand's final logo was more than that. "'I was not quite sure what Paul was doing until I reached the end. And at that moment I knew we had a solution... Rand gave us a jewel, which in retrospect seems so obvious.'" Ironic is the story behind the logo maker's own moniker. "He figured that 'Paul Rand,' four letters here, four letters there, would create a nice symbol," remembers a friend. Then he proceeded to affix the icon of his identity--no naming consultant could have planned it better--to every piece of his work, including that for clients. He threatened to quit when one boss asked him to remove his name from a Dubonnet ad in the 1940s. It was the only advertising he ever had to do. And someone else paid to distribute his brand. A trendsetter for decades, Rand ran into criticism from younger designers after the 1991 publication of "From Cassandre to Chaos," in the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design. His article was a criticism of "deconstructive" or "experimental" graphics, a movement that was new and hip and had a growing number of fans at the time. Reviews of his second book, Design, Form and Chaos (1993), made him sound cranky and defensive: "Rand's wholesale condemnation of recent design becomes a blunt instrument for dismissing whatever comes in his path," J. Abbott Miller wrote in Graphis in 1993. 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. ALEXANDRIA LANGE is a staff writer at New York magazine. |
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