Volume 16–1.pdf

TYPOGRAPHIC
COMMUNICATIONS TODAY
merican
eszgn
zoneers
lthough the emi-
gres from Europe
numerically
dominated the
field of distin-
guished designers
in the United States, in the late
1930s and the 1940s there were a
small number of Americanborn-and-educated
designers
whose work equaled the best
created anywhere in the world.
Their influence was to be profound
and enduring, and their
ranks were to be swelled until the
27 The egg-shaped copy block discusses
the life of malarial parasites. Red
superior numbers in the text key the copy
to the pictures. For Scope magazine, the
Upjohn Company, No. 7, June 1944.
Lester Beall.
28 Here Bradbury Thompson catches the
evolution of a sneeze in a powerful and
witty spread that borders on great
surrealistic art, as it brings sound to the
printed page. Westvaco Inspirations, No.
177, 1949.
number of top-flight typographic
designers in the United States
transformed the country from a
Johnny-come-lately in contemporary
design, to the position of
leadership it enjoys today. Two of
these American design pioneers,
Paul Rand and Bradbury
Thompson, are still active in the
mid-1980s as designers and
teachers. Here we will look at
some of their early work, and the
work of Lester Beall and William
Golden. Together they
helped set a new tone and personality
for American typographic
design in the '40s.
American born and bred
designers like Beall, Golden,
Rand, and Thompson, though
deeply influenced by the 20th
century European art movements
and European designers,
were also influenced by contemporary
American culture, by
Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald
Marsh, Edward Hopper, Alfred
Ke chop o o
Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, to
name just a few. With hindsight
one can see how they blended the
best of European and American
art developments to evolve typographic
design that was vigorous
yet clear, derivative yet original,
beautiful yet functional.
The Follow-Up Was Fast
and Powerful
Lester Beall, William
Golden, Paul Rand and Bradbury
Thompson were the first of
the American design pioneers
in the '30s and '40s. Just a few
years after their careers had
started, and while the émigré
designers from Europe were
establishing themselves in the
United States, a larger group
of Americans were striking
new design chords with new
personalities and their fresh
approaches to blending vigor
and clarity for communication
and typographic design. Their
work, the later work of Paul
Rand and Bradbury Thompson,
and the work of many other
designers in the United States
and abroad are reviewed in
Chapter XIII of Typographic
Communications Today.
29 This bell swings in process colors and
the type comes alive with it. Bradbury
Thompson, Westvaco Inspirations, No.
194, 1953.
30 A multiple exposure of a saxophone
player and off-register overprinting in
primary colors vitalizes image. Bradbury
Thompson, Westvaco Inspirations, No.
210, 1958.
Paul Rand
Paul Rand's professional
career began in 1937, when, at
the age of 23, he became art
director for Apparel Arts magazine
and then of Esquire.
In his book, Thoughts on
Design, Rand wrote:
"Graphic design—which
fulfills esthetic needs, complies
with the laws of form and the
exigencies of two-dimensional
space: which speaks in semiotics,
sans-serifs, and geometries;
which abstracts, transforms,
translates, rotates, dilates,
repeats, mirrors, groups, and
regroups—is not good design if
it is irrelevant.
"Graphic design—which
evokes the symmetria of Vitruvius,
the dynamic symmetry of
Hambidge, the symmetry of
Mondrian; which is a good
gestalt; which is generated by
intuition or by computer, by
invention or by a system of coordinates—is
not good design
if it does not co-operate as an
instrument in the service of
communication.
"Visual communications of
any kind, whether persuasive
or informative, from billboards
to birth announcements, should
be seen as the embodiment of form
and function: the integration of
the beautiful and the useful...
"Ideally, beauty and utility
are mutually generative. In
the past, rarely was beauty an
end in itself The magnificent
stained glass windows of
Chartres were no less utilitarian
than was the Parthenon or the
Pyramid of Cheops. The function
of the exterior decoration of
the great Gothic cathedrals was
to invite entry; the rose windows
inside provided the spiritual
mood. Interpreted in the light of
our own experiences, this philosophy
still prevails:"
A New Way of Seeing...
New Ways of Showing
The tremendous impact of
Bradbury Thompsons typographics
developed through the
pages of Westvaco Inspirations,
a four-color magazine demonstrating
the capabilities qfprinting
papers. Thompson combined
a hands-on knowledge of typography
and printing with an