DESIGN JOURNAL 8

   
     During the first wave of modern design in America, the graphic ideas were rooted from the European immigrants who seek to escape political totalitarianism. While borrowing the idea from the European designers, American designers in the 1950s and 1960s added new forms and concepts which were pragmatic, intuitive, and less formal in its approach to organizing space. The most influential American designers during that period includes Herb Lublin, Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Henry Wolf and Gene Federico. 

     Herb Lubaliin's achievements include advertising and editorial design, trademark and typeface design, posters and packaging. Known as typographic genius. He was instrumental in forming the International Typeface Corporation, an organization that confronted the issue of design piracy. He said "Sometimes you have to compromise legibility to achieve impact?". He understood photo-typography's flexibility and he thought that type should express content and governed by visual words. He created fonts Avant Garde, Serif Gothic, and Lubalin Graph. 

     Paul Rand define design as the integration of form & function for effective communication. He initiated unique american approach to design and was editor for four magazines. He suggested that design should be playful, visually dynamic and unexpected. He manipulated form and reduce communication content without making sterile or dull shapes. He used collage and montage to form cohesive whole. 

     Saul Bass brought the sensibilities of the New York School to LA in 1950. Reduced his graphic designs to a single dominant image, often centered in the space. The simplicity and directness of his work allowed the viewer to interpret the content immediately. He also created numerous corporate-identity programs, including those for AT&T, the Girl Scouts, and United Airlines.

AT&T (1984)
Original design by Saul Bass

AT&T (2005) 
Redesigned by Interbrand

     Henry Wolf became art director at Esquire in 1953. Then at Harper's Bazaar in 1958. Sought to make the magazines he designed visually beautiful. 

     Logotype refers to "a company brand mark consisting of only letterforms". Visual identification systems that were developed in the 1950s went beyond trademarks. Corporate-wide consistent design systems were produced. These systems needed to project cohesive images and corporate identity because many corporations were becoming multinational in scope. Corporate identity refers to "a system of visual elements used in a comprehensive program to project a consistent image of the company."

     Herb Lubalin's typographic design of Marriage, Mother and Child, and Families logos showed meanings within the type. He abandoned traditional typographic rules and practice and looked at the characters of the alphabet as both visual forms and a means of communication. Words and letters could become images; images could become a word or a letter. He practiced design as a means of giving visual form to a concept or message, as in the proposed logo for Mother and Child magazine, in which the ampersand enfolds and protects the "child" in a visual metaphor for motherly love. Below are Lubalin's logotype examples.  

 

     Paul Rand revised the trademark for International Business Machines (IBM) which was developed from an infrequently used typeface called City Medium (designed by Georg Trump in 1930). The original design is shown with outline versions and the eight and thirteen stripe versions currently used. He used geometric slab-serif typeface designed along lines similar to Futura. Another example of Paul Rand logotype is the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) trademark. The continuing legacy of the Bauhaus and Herbert Bayer's universal alphabet informs this trademark, in which each letterform is reduced to its most elemental configuration. Below are Rand's logotype examples.

     Herb Lubalin created layout designs for the periodical Avant Garde, a square-format magazine that published essays, fiction, and articles. Its logotype consisted of ligatured capital letters. The magazine would employ full-page typographic titles, which at the time was a largely new idea. Below is Lubalin's example of layout. 

 

     Henry Wolf became the art director at Esquire and in 1953 and art director of Harper's Bazaar in 1958. He experimented with typography, making it large enough to fill the page on one spread and then using petite headlines on other pages. His vision of the magazine cover was an exquisitely simple image conveying a visual idea. 

 

     Typographic expression in the advertisement became more playful from 1950s onwards. In addition to white space, the dominant factor in the American designers' advertisements were "concept". They used the basic elements such as large, arresting visual image, concise headline of bold weight, body copy factual and entertaining writing. They removed the boundaries separating the synergetic relationship between visual and verbal components to make them completely interdependent, fused into conceptual expression of ideas. In the 1950s and 1960s, a playful direction called figurative typography emerged among New York graphic designers: letterforms became objects, and objects became letterforms.

     Gene Federico was one of the first graphic designers who delighted in using letterforms as images. In his 1953 double-page advertisement from the New Yorker magazine, the perfectly round Os of Futura form bicycle wheels.

      

     Milton Glaser's Bob Dylan poster in 1967 transcending subject and function, this image became a symbolic crystallization of its time. Black silhouette with brightly colored hair patterns inspired by art nouveau sources. 

 

     Herb Lubalin's advertisement for Avant Garde's antiwar poster competition in 1967 used unity and impact result from compressing complex information into a rectangle dominated by the large red headline.