GRAPHIC DESIGN HISTORY 2009: Post 3

** PAUL RAND'S **

CONTRIBUTION TO TYPOGRAPHY

Paul Rand was a prominent advocate of employing a wide variety of techniques such as typography, painting, collage, photography, and montage - creating a combination of elements to produce a distinctive and modern visual image, whether it was a poster, a magazine cover design or a corporate identity design/logo.

Paul Rand’s distinctive style was a result of his talent and extensive design education. It inspired his success at the merger of modern typography with nineteenth-century engravings.

Rand strove to unite letters, finding unique graphic ways of bringing together

l e t t e r s of a word (name or title of a person or entity). And he excelled at that, as seen in his logos for

Typography was one of his strongest command areas, and with his impeccable understanding of both visual content (image/illustration) and technical content (typography/typeface), he produced designs which lasted decades. Balance, uniformity and equilibrium of spacing were the three common elements of

Paul Rand’s typography related work.

RanD was one of only a few American designers who explored the formal vocabulary of European avant-garde movements including cubism, constructivism and de stijl and was influential in bringing what was called the New Typography -- the rejection of archaic and sentimental type and layout treatments -- to the United States. His work is characterized by wit, simplicity and a bauhaus approach to problem solving.

Rand was a pioneering functionalist who relied on strong visual ideas and dynamic typography to convey a message. ''Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are at best superficial ornamentation unless logically employed,''