TRIBUTE TO A LEGENDARY GRAPHIC DESIGNER
History has been sufficiently beneficent to produce designers who could meet the existing challenges with appropriately imaginative solutions. Occasionally, history outdoes itself and produces a designer who imparts such startlingly new concepts to our visual language that the beneficiaries of the following decades are blessed with a wealth of visual idioms.
In 1937, two leading national magazines put their art directorial trust in the hands of a young designer only twenty-three years old. The designer was Paul Rand, a former student at Pratt Institute and Parson's School of Design.
Rand continued his ministrations at Esquire and Apparel Arts for four years. Any suspicion that Rand's art directorship might be a meteoric streak of bright precocity was abruptly put to rest by a number of astonishing covers he created for Apparel Arts and particularly for a small magazine called Direction. Early brightness was quickly recognized as the harbinger of genuine brilliance. Rand's subsequent work further established him as a mature designer of first rank and as an articulate theorist whose ideas would radically affect the shape and contour of contemporary visual design.
For thirteen years, until 1954, he was the art director (now called creative director) for the William Weintraub Agency. Responding to that milieu with its new demands, Rand steadily broadened the scope of his work.
The printed page and the graphic problems of poster, book, promotional and package designs demanded Rand's total attention. He also taught intermittently at Pratt Institute and Cooper Union. In 1946 Rand compiled a statement of his personal observations and philosophy, which was published in a handsome book designed by him and titled "Thoughts on Design."
Rand searched out the potential graphic wealth that lay in the selling message itself, employing a host of visual devices to captivate the reader. Each of his campaign represented a personal visual journey that called for daring and imagination to set it apart from the surrounding banality. The Disney hat ads were exquisitely designed abstractions that kept the reader endlessly fascinated by the counterpoint between an antique Brummel figure and an up-to-the-minute chapeau. Each campaign was invested with a special kind of graphic humor. The hallmarks of his style were the studied casualness of the Rand script, a light and unselfconscious typography always accompanied with a refined sense of space.
In 1954 Rand ended the agency phase of his career. By this time, his abilities had become universally recognized
This could only be realized by his functioning as an independent designer. Rand became the design consultant to numerous large and influential companies—IBM, Westinghouse, and United Parcel Service, among others. He brought these companies into a position of graphic esteem, establishing for them corporate design programs of human proportion. Corporate communication, he has shown, can be socially enriching if it is intelligently conceived and imaginatively executed. Because of his exquisite sense of visual symbolism, Rand is continually called upon to design trademarks for a host of business enterprises, many of which have become renowned. Apart from his very active and far-flung design practice, he has continued his interest in education, occasionally teaching and lecturing. As a steady and perceptive writer on design, he continues to expand his list of articles.
Because Rand has kept and nourished the faith, we are that much richer. Design can communicate that much more because of his additions to our visual language. History, it was observed earlier, manages to provide us with benefactions and Paul Rand is one of those special gifts to our time.
Paul Rand (born Peretz Rosenbaum, August 15, 1914-November 26, 1996) was a well-known American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs. Rand's education included the Pratt Institute (1929-1932), the Parsons School of Design (1932-1933), and the Art Students League (1933-1934). He was one of the originators of the Swiss Style of graphic design. From 1956 to 1969 and beginning again in 1974, Rand taught design at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Rand was inducted into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1972. He designed many posters and corporate identities including the logos for IBM and ABC. Rand died of cancer in 1996.
 Rand's Apparel Arts covers of the early forties were primarily collages employing quasi-Dadaist ideas and techniques. By utilizing a commonplace object to have more than its conventional meaning, Rand actually antedated the satire of the “objet trouvé” art movement that arose at least two decades later. His most coherent project was the series of covers he produced for Direction. Appearing over a period of several years, these covers had a collective impact that was revolutionary. Each individual cover was a radically inventive departure from the prevailing editorial dross. By drawing upon the creative discoveries of a host of modern art movements, Rand linked the fine arts with popular graphic application. The imagination, vitality and quality of those covers have probably not been equaled by any editorial designer of recent times. Many of them have become classics.
 The memorable 1940 cover showing a photograph of a barbed-wire cross ranged against the casually written tag summed up with extraordinary poignancy the contradictory aspects of man's behavior to man. That interplay of ideas and his abstract use of large letterforms opened new modes of visual symbolism for all modern designers. Rand showed that even the simplest of objects, given different contexts, bears within it several thicknesses of meaning. It takes the magic of the designer to seize the concealed and make it apparent, and to transform the commonplace into the rare.
 At a very young age, Rand painted signs for his father’s grocery store as well as for his school events. Rand’s father did not believe art could provide his son with a sufficient livelihood, and so he required Paul to attend Manhattan’s Harren High School while taking night classes at the Pratt Institute, Rand was by-and-large “self-taught as a designer.
 He published children's books with his wife, Ann Rand, which are notable for their clear and youthful style. They lived for many years in Weston, Connecticut, in a home of Paul's own design.
In his last book, "From Lascaux to Brooklyn," he wrote: "The design of a logo is largely the process of intuition, trial and error, skill, and good fortune. The ideal logo is simple, elegant, economical, flexible, practical, and unforgettable."
Among his books are "Thoughts on Design," "Design and the Play Instinct," "Paul Rand: A Designer's Art," "Design, Form, and Chaos" and "From Lascaux to Brooklyn."
In 1937, Paul launched his first career at Esquire. In spite of a schedule that paid no heed to regular working hours or minimum wage scales, he managed in these crucial years to find time to design an impressive array of covers for other magazines, particularly Directions.
From 1938 on, his work was a regular feature of the exhibitions of the Art Directors Club.
In 1954 he received the gold medal from the Art Directors Club for his Morse Code advertisement addressed to David Sarnoff of RCA.
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