Paul Rand: Life and Career

Paul Rand

Paul Rand was an American director and graphic designer, popular for his logo designs in the corporate industry, including the logo of UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT. He was one of the first American commercial artists to embrace and practice the Swiss Style of graphic design. He was a professor emeritus of graphic design at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut where he was taught from 1956 to 1969, and from 1974 to 1985. He was accepted into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1972.

Early Life and Education

Paul Rand was originally born with the name ‘Peretz Rosenbaum’ on August 15, 1914 in Brooklyn, New York. He accepted design at a very young age, painting signs for his father’s grocery store as well as for school events at P.S. 109. His father did not believe art could provide his son with sufficient livelihood, and so he got Paul to attend Manhattan’s Haaren High School while taking night classes at the Pratt Institute. Paul was mostly “self-taught” as a designer. He learned about the works of A.M. Cassandre and Moholy-Nagy from European magazines such as Gebrauchsgraphik. Paul also attended “Parsons The New School for Design and the Art Students League of New York.” Influences and other works Development of Theory Though Paul was a hermit in his creative process, doing the vast majority of the design load despite having a large staff at varying times in his career, he was very interested in producing books of theory to explain his philosophies.

Moholy-Nagy may have influenced Paul’s passion for knowledge when he asked his colleague if he read art criticism at their first meeting. Paul said no, prompting Moholy-Nagy to reply “Pity”. Heller further explains on this meeting’s impact, noting that, “from that moment on, Paul consumed books by the leading philosophers on art, including Roger Fry, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey”. These theoreticians would have a lasting impression on Paul’s work; in 1995 interview with Michael Kroeger discussing, among other topics, the importance of Dewey’s Art as Experience, Paul explains on Dewey’s appeal :

[… Art as Experience] deals with everything — there is no subject he does not deal with. That is why it will take you one hundred years to read this book.

Even today’s philosophers talk about it. Everytime you open this book you find good things. I mean the philosophers say this, not just me. You read this, then when you open this up next year, that you read something new. As it is obvious, Dewey is an important source for Paul’s hidden point of view in graphic design; on page one of Paul’s groundbreaking ‘Thoughts on Design’, the author begins drawing lines from Dewey’s philosophy to the need for “functional-aesthetic perfection” in modern art. Among the ideas, Paul pushed in “Thoughts on Design” was the practice of creating graphic works capable of retaining their recognizable quality even after being blurred or damaged, a test Paul routinely performed on his corporate identities.

Modernist Influences

Undoubtedly,the key ideology that drove Paul’s career, and hence his lasting influence, was the modernist philosophy he admire. He celebrated the works of artist s from Paul Cezanne to Jan Tshichold, applications in graphic design. In “A Designer’s Art”, Paul clearly demonstrates his appreciation for the suppressed connections. From Impressionism to Pop Art, the mainstream and even the comic strip have become ingredients for the artist’s cauldron. What Cezanne did with apples, Picasso with guitars, Leger 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 defamiliarise the ordinary. This idea of “defamiliarising the ordinary” played an important part in Paul’s design choices. Working with manufacturers supplied him the challenge to make use of his corporate identities to create “lively and original” packaging for mundane items, such as light bulbs for Westinghouse.