In the last lesson,
I told you a little bit about myself.
In this lesson, I'll talk about the artists and designers who inspired me the most.
I studied photography as an art student,
and after graduating,
I became interested in graphic
design.
And so I began looking at graphic design books at the Minneapolis Public Library.
And one of the books I came across completely by accident was this book,
Pete Zawart's Monograph from 1966.
And it's pretty clear to me that if I had not come across this book,
I wouldn't be here today talking to you.
This book really changed my life.
Prior to this,
I really had no idea what European modernism was all about,
especially in regard to graphic design and typography.
But this book changed all that.
When I first took it off the shelf and I saw this cover with the large sans serif P and the black square,
I was immediately taken by its simplicity and its directness.
I couldn't help but pick it up.
When I opened the book,
I was completely blown away.
The designs were just unlike anything I'd ever seen before.
Again, this is the late 1970s,
and people at that time really didn't know that much about the Bauhaus,
not as much as we know now.
So this is all very new to me,
and it was just so beautiful,
and I loved it all.
I was just so taken by everything.
I was looking at contrasts of size and really thinking about that for the first time.
And more than anything else,
and somehow I got through all of art school without really thinking about this too much,
but the relationship of positive and negative space and visual hierarchy,
where you look first and second and third in a composition. All of this was coming clear to me now that I was looking at Zwart's work.
Piet Zwart was a typographer and a graphic designer in Holland,
in the Netherlands, in the early part of the 20th century and worked into mid-century.
And his early work was very much based on a lot of the ideas that were prevalent
in European modernism at the time,
especially constructivism, which was happening in Russia.
And you can see some of that stuff happening in his work. The emphasis on very simple colors,
red, blue,
off-white backgrounds,
sometimes other colors coming into it, black certainly,
but such an emphasis on positive and negative space and interaction of forms.
The typography was just really expressive.
So after looking at Zwart and becoming familiar with his work and literally checking out this book and taking it out of the library for weeks and weeks and weeks,
and just looking at it every day,
I was convinced this was the direction I was going to go with my life,
is to study this kind of work.
Piet Zwart introduced me to constructivism,
experimental typography,
and European modernist design.
So let's talk about my next influence,
Paul Rand.
The best introduction to Paul Rand is his own book,
A Designer's Art, that he wrote in the 19th century. And it's all about his work and his philosophy,
his teaching, and his practice.
When we open this book,
we immediately see this beautiful collage.
And we see the image of a broom.
It's actually a flat broom, a Shaker invention,
1800.
And it's a chapter in the book called
The Beautiful and the Useful.
And so right away,
we get a sense of what this is all about.
Applied art,
using the tools of the modernist design
using form and function in service to something outside of your own particular purposes.
Another beautiful Shaker design,
a door latch.
These examples are what Paul Rand used in his teaching.
And I was lucky enough to study with him when I went to graduate school.
The book itself is a great example of graphic design.
And one of the beautiful things about book design in general
is that you can learn so much about design just looking at books,
especially when they're designed by great designers like Paul Rand.
A lot of Rand's art is very simple.
And I always think of his work as being reduced down to the fewest possible elements,
taken away until you can't take away anymore.
When I was a student,
as I got to know him and as I became more familiar with his work,
I really fell in love with everything that he represented as far as being an artist and a designer.
He really taught us,
perhaps me in particular,
but I think everyone who was a student,
that to be a good designer,
you had to be a good artist first.
That it was all about capitalizing on your art and design skills in service to something outside of yourself.
In his own practice,
you see examples of work that is very inspired, very artistic.
And it's coming out of pure experimentation.
This image over here, for example,
this is a poster for the Aspen Design Conference,
a design conference in Aspen, Colorado.
And it's an egg shape with some splatters of black ink on top of it.
The egg being a symbol of perfection and simplicity and originality.
The black splatters being an expression of creativity,
of surprise, of chance.
And the combination of all those parts just working together to express a very simple idea.
When Rand was my teacher,
he was best known as a corporate designer.
He had designed the logo for IBM and for this company, Westinghouse.
And that's what he was really famous for.
And that's kind of what he taught us to be as corporate designers.
He was actually thinking ahead here,
thinking about the idea of an animated logo,
something we take for granted now,
but at that time was something that was fairly exotic.
This beautiful idea for the Westinghouse logo
coming from a mask,
that was his inspiration.
And you see that in this design.
It's a circuit board.
It's a W for Westinghouse.
But it's also a face.
A very famous UPS logo,
which no longer exists.
Color forms.
And the ABC logo.
Probably one of the best logos that he designed.
It's been around since 1960.
And in a certain form, it preceded that.
And this exemplifies everything that you need to know about logo design.
How a logo needs to function in its purest form.
Absolutely crisp, black and white.
But can also be recognized when it becomes abstracted.
In this case, very blurry.
Prior to being a corporate designer,
a lot of the work that Rand did was for retail design.
His bread and butter account in his younger days was Coronet Brandy.
And he invented this waiter whose head is the shape of a brandy sniffer.
And would deliver brandy in a nest.
Very, very fun.
Very playful.
Very whimsical.
Rand was also a designer of children's books.
And so we see here this beautiful use of typography to represent the body of a child.
With the hat and the shoes being the only parts that are recognizable.
And if we look at his children's book,
called Sparkle and Spin.
One of my favorite books.
You open it up and you immediately see stripes.
But they're not geometric,
perfectly geometric.
They're cut paper stripes.
So there's a little bit of irregularity.
In a beautiful title page.
Sparkle and Spin,
a book about words by Ann and Paul Rand.
So he worked with his wife on this book.
She was a writer,
he was a designer.
And the book is all about words.
So what are words?
Words are how you think inside.
And how to remember what you might forget about.
The collage over here, really beautiful.
So it's interesting to see this in regard to his work for IBM.
And Westinghouse and Cummings Diesel.
And all that really hard core corporate design.
That he was very good at.
Very famous for.
And then to see that in the context of this.
In this whimsical, very playful,
cut paper,
collage oriented,
very colorful work.
And it was so inspiring for me.
I thought, this is a great way to be a graphic designer.
To have your hands in both areas.
Both corporate work,
which pays the rent,
pays the mortgage,
puts food on your table.
Also can be done in a very beautiful way,
as he did for IBM.
And then books like this, children's books.
Other kind of work that's very playful, very expressive.
I love this spread.
It's all about a toy train.
Expressive typography at the top.
Very simple typography over here.
Just a beautiful use of color.
Beautiful experience.
Just a few more things about Paul Rand.
This little book,
which is called Art Direction Magazine.
And Rand did a number of the covers for this magazine.
But this one in particular is just so beautiful and so simple.
And you look at it and you see these letters on the cover.
And it's a typeface called Badoni,
which he's very famous for using.
He's used it in a lot of his work.
Very classic typography.
And you notice that the A and the D are missing.
Like,
well, OK, so what is this?
This is not telling me anything.
But in fact, it's telling me a lot.
The magazine is called Art Direction,
A and D.
And if you turn the book over,
you see the fragments of those letters back here cut up.
It's really not until you see the whole thing together
does it start to make sense.
So from this, I learned about engagement.
The idea that you can create something that's very abstract.
And if you get the interest of the viewer,
they will engage with it.
They'll take the time to figure it out.