"Dont try to be original, just try to be good"

Paul Rand. Many of you may know who he is. I did not.
However, I do know the companies associated to these logos.

How is this possible? How is it that I know all of these pieces of work, yet not the artist?

Paul Rand has a unique way of looking at his art. He is not looking to recreate the wheel, he is more so looking at make a good quality image.

I feel like when I try to be creative, I feel like I need to create something new. Yet, creation is at its best when the artist takes from what he sees around him.

Influences

Saul Bass, who never went to college, described himself as "a subway scholar", as told by his daughter Jennifer, he read voraciously during his long subway trips from Brooklyn to Midtown Manhattan, "soaking up a wide array of imagery, from comic books and films to magazine covers."(1)

In one of his bookstore browsing trips, he discovered György Kepes's Language of Vision (1944),  a book of student exercises by Hungarian artist and designer who had worked in Germany with Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy. Reading the blurb on the book cover he discovered to his amazement that Kepes was teaching at the Brooklyn College. Needless to say he enrolled immediately.

These are a couple of examples of György Kepes work as a photographer, clearly showing the influence of László Moholy-Nagy.

László Moholy-Nagy

Saul greatly admired the work of the surrealists, particularly Magritte, and also the work of Man Ray, Paul Rand, whom we have discussed in class, and Cassandre, all of whom were mentioned in Kepes's book.

 Magritte's "The Son of Man"

Man Ray's "Ingre's Violin"

A short motion graphics piece using the works of Cassandre, created in After Effects as you can probably see.

(1) From Saul Bass, A Life in Film & Design, by Jennifer Bass & Pat Kirkham, Laurence King Publishing, 2011

Paul Rand

I found some cool things about Paul Rand that related to the videos we watched in class. This article explains his process when he was designing the UPS logo among other things. Here's the part that discusses UPS:

For UPS his challenge was to transform the out-of-date shield into a modern image. He streamlined the contours, used a lower case letter and placed a simple drawing of a package on the top of the shield. “I didn’t try anything else,” Rand admitted. 

“If you show them more than two ideas” Rand would say, “you weaken your position. (...) You make one statement, and this is it”. This doesn’t mean Rand’s ideas always came floating, He often made fifty sketches before showing one. “If you think it comes easily, it’s not easy. I can solve any problem in the world, but it does not always come instantly.” But very often the first idea that came into his mind was the solution.

The quotes from Rand really give you a feel for what he was like and how he worked. He seems like an interesting guy and has a lot of good tips for logo design, and design in general. Another article describes his presentation method and how Steve Jobs reacted to it when being pitched the NeXT logo. Here's the section on that:

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 design," 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." 

Here is an image from Rand's NeXT booklet and the final logo:

Paul Rand is a very well known graphic designer. He was one of the originators of the Swiss style of graphic design and taught design at the University of Yale. Some of the big names he designed for were UBM, UPS, and ABC. Paul Rand was inducted into the One Club Hall of Fame in 2007. Paul Rand did die from cancer in 1996 but his work will always be remembered.

Here is an interested video of Paul Rand teaching and showing some of his knowledge of graphic design.



I thought this video was also interesting. It is Steve jobs talking about Paul Rand and how he worked.

The Maeda Connection

Processing was built by 2 MIT students, Ben Fry and Casey Reas, in 2001. And who was their adviser who couldn't see the need for such a program? John Maeda! Luckily Ben and Casey ignored Johns misgivings and went ahead with the program. If you want to read the article click here. He also tells a funny antecdote about Paul Rand too.

Designers...

Paul Rand - Rand was probably successful because he believed that good design was part of life. Steve Jobs, who hired Rand to create a logo for NeXT called him "the greatest living graphic designer" shortly before his death. And while some in the graphics industry didn't like him, it is indisputable that Rand's work transformed the industry into what it is today.

Scott Kim - Kim is a designer in many aspects of web games and toys. He specializes in ambigrams and inversions, which are really quite cool. Like what Dan Brown did in "The Davinci Code." You can even buy Scott Kim greeting cards with ambigrams on the front.

John Maeda - Maeda is a designer who also works at MIT. One of his missions is to teach people how to use simplicity in such a complex global environment. He collaborated with Reebok to make shoes, and his designs can be found in many other places.

3 Designers

Paul Rand-started out his career with designing stock images for a syndicate that supplied graphics to various newspapers and magazines. eventually he became one of the biggest American Graphic designers. he designed some well known logos for different companies like IBM, ABC, Ford Motor Company

Scott Kim- designer known for designing puz ambigrams zles and

Graphic

John Maeda- started out as a computer designers and in the 90's when computer-aided design began he influenced and helped typographers and page designers explore the freedom of the web

Paul Rand

Paul Rand not only created logos for various well-known businesses of today but created children’s books with his wife, Ann. Together they worked on four children’s books, Ann as author and Paul as the illustrator. I thought this would be interesting to post since everyone has seemed to take the liberty of writing about his successful career as a graphic designer, creating significant logos in today’s society, such as UPS, ABC, and IBM. He was on top of the world in the 1950s and 60s but continued his work up until his death in 1996. Here is the cover of one of the books her illustrated with his wife.

A look at Paul Rand

Shortly before his death, Paul Rand was asked by John Maeda to speak at MIT. When Maeda asked, "what is the difference between an artist and a designer" Rand replied, "There is no difference between a designer and an artist. They both work with form and content. I try to create art, whether I make it or not is not up to me, it's up to God."
Rand sounds like quite a character. He has designed logo's for all the biggest companies; IBM, ABC, UPS, and Westinghouse to name a few. So many Iconic brand logos started with him, chec out his gallery here

Paul Rand

Paul Rand is most famous for designing the logos of several large corporations. The familiar logos from this image were all designed by Rand. His most famous logos were created in the 1950s and 60s, but his work continued to receive plenty of recognition until his death in '96.