blog 5

Paul Rand was an American graphic designer who is said to be possibly one of the most influential of his time. He was one of the founders of Swiss Style design, which emphasized cleanliness and readability. He grew up as an Orthodox Jew originally named Peretz Rosenbaum. Although he later changed his name to move away from his heritage and used the name as a symbol for himself. He worked early on creating stock images for a syndicate. Later he taught at Yale University.

He is most famous for his branding logos for some of the most prominent corporations for even today.  What is told of most of his branding designs was his ability to meet the needs and desires of the companies’ goals through his logos. On his bibliography on http://www.paul-rand.com Mark Favermann states about his IBM branding identity “was not just an identity but a basic design philosophy that permeated corporate consciousness and public awareness.”

Much of his philosophy of design was based around idea of keeping with “utmost simplicity and restraint”.  Along with this Rand based much of his branding identities with the idea of keeping the brand recognizable even after the image had been “blurred or mutilated”. Much of his own influence though had been from other artists/designers from the same time such as Jan Tschichold and Paul Cezanne. Which most of Rand’s works had similar qualities such as Tschicholds legible yet wildly interesting typography. Obviously much of his work is based on modernist ideas which he saw as “it means integrity; it means honesty; … it means simplicity; it means clarity.” These ideas carry over in the sense in which his work consisted of a simple shape and typography such a great example of which is the abc logo which incorporates a simple circle, with nice typographic abc overlaid in white above it. Much of this came from his need to “defamiliarizing the ordinary”.

Later when he began producing books about his design theory he drew from John Dewey (an American philosopher who helped found functional psychology) whose philosophy for “functional-aesthetic perfection” obviously drew from modernist ideals.