Paul Rand was one of the most influential graphic designers of the 20th century. His valued contribution to the design medium is remarkable and acknowledged by clients and critics alike. His work received recognition in his early twenties due to his groundbreaking innovation in design, typography and graphic design.

However, it was the area of corporate identity design during the mid of his design career, that he shot to worldwide fame. He is regarded as the one who has actually set standards for the creation of corporate logos, and that too, by devising the pre-requisites of modernity, simplicity and ease of recognition. Many of these logos or their basic designs are still in use.

INNOVATION:

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.

1. Typography:

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 letters of a word (name or title of a person or entity). And he excelled at that, as seen in his logos for IBM, EF and Yale University Press.

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.

2. Simplicity:

Simplicity was a common element of everything and anything Paul Rand created, whether it was a page design, a magazine cover, an ad, or a logo. And everyone loved it. He was always of the opinion that the design of a logo must be simple, in order to appeal aesthetically.

3. Rebellion:

In the 1940s, Paul Rand broke away from the conventional standards of typography and layout, and started incorporating Swiss style of design into his creations. He merged American visual culture into European avant-garde (modern art) design, integrating Cubism, Constructivism, the Bauhaus and De Stijl into his work.

Poster for the New York Subways Advertising Company, designed by Paul Rand in 1947.

Poster for the UCLA, designed by Paul Rand in 1996, one of the last creations before his death.

CORPORATE IDENTITY DESIGNS:

The most important achievement on Paul Rand’s portfolio is in the area of Corporate Identity Design and logotypes. His talent and excellent execution was apparent in the logos he designed for many firms from a broad range of industries like IBM, Apple, UPS, ABC Television, NeXT, Enron, the Cummins Engine Company, El Producto Cigar Company, Compton Advertising and Westinghouse Electric Corporation and many more.

IBM:

The image that virtually became Paul Rand’s identity was his corporate identity design/logo for IBM. Rand was selected to revamp the IBM logo by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., the president of the multinational giant in 1956. Paul’s concept of expanded typography within a contained format gave birth to a new corporate identity.

The IBM logo with the three letters in bold font was a design concept that gave birth to corporate and public awareness at the same time.

Paul Rand’s design of the IBM logo was modified in 1960, and the striped logo design was unveiled in 1972. Rand also designed packaging materials for IBM from the early 70s to the early 80s.

He also came up with a very eye catching poster design for IBM, with an eye in place of the letter ‘I’, and a bee in place of the letter ‘B’. The poster was used in-house for a conference/event.

ABC:

In 1961, Paul Rand designed a new logo for ABC (The American Broadcasting Company). Now used for over 40 years, it is the current “ABC Circle” corporate identity design, with a circle encompassing the three lowercase letters ‘abc’. The typeface/font used in the ABC logo is a simple geometric design inspired by the Bauhaus school of the 1920s.

In September 2007, a shimmer was added across the circle, giving the design a new look. The ‘abc’ logo is a clear example of simplicity in Paul Rand’s design creations. The use of black and white indicates the formality in his work.

UPS:

Another design that added stardom to Paul Rand’s corporate identity design portfolio was that of UPS, the United Parcel Service. Designed in 1961, the UPS logo displayed an iconic package and shield, in black and white. While the color scheme was again a sign of Rand’s simplicity theory in design, he also retained the shield believing that it had symbolic importance for the men who wore it.

The logo was modified in April 2003, retaining the letters ‘UPS’, with large font in it. However, the colors used are yellow and brown, with the same shield theme.

NeXT:

When Steve Jobs created NeXT, the new education computer company, he also realized and understood the purpose and power of a logo. This realization was made obvious by a payment of $100.000 for the corporate identity design/logo created by Paul Rand in 1986. Maybe, because of similar reasons, Steve Jobs once called Paul Rand, “the greatest living graphic designer.”

Others examples of Corporate Identity Designs by Paul Rand:

Paul Rand enjoyed a very long career, achieved fame at a surprisingly young age, and saw his principles adopted by whole generations of design professionals and students. He is no longer alive but still lives in his creations, and the identity he gave to corporations, institutions, entities and even ideas. Rest in Peace.

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“Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions, there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”

These remarkable words were spoken by Paul Rand (1914 – 1996), the most important and undoubtedly, the most gifted graphic designer of our time. Paul Rand’s design expertise covered advertising design, illustration and industrial design, and typography. He was known as an artist, painter, and lecturer and recognized for creating outstanding design mechanisms. More importantly, Paul Rand became increasingly famous in the 1950s for his corporate logo designs.

He was one such pioneer whose work in advertising design and typography has an astounding influence on the design profession. One of his most important achievements was to bring up commercial art from the low caliber of masses, to the discipline of fine arts. Not to forget, Paul Rand was famous for creating simple designs, but nothing he crafted, was without concept.

Early Life:

Peretz Rosenbaum aka Paul Rand was born in 1914 in New York. He studied at the Pratt Institute, the Parsons School of Design and the Arts Students League, New York. However, he was much of a self-taught designer. Paul’s father had the impression that studying art would not be enough to earn a living, so he had to be enrolled in night classes simultaneously with high school.

He loved to design and the first corporate identity he created was that of his name. He shortened his original name to ‘Paul Rand’, showing his sense of symmetry and balance, with four alphabets on one side and four on the other. Being an infant prodigy, Paul Rand’s work received worldwide recognition in his early twenties, especially for page design.

Design Career:

Paul Rand’s design career is divided in four phases. Having established his own office in 1935, he worked as the art director of Esquire-Coronet and Apparel Arts magazines for two years.
In the second phase of his career, advertising, he created a series of cover designs for Direction, a culture magazine, from 1937 to 1941. Here, Paul Rand worked for free, without being paid, as he thought he could produce more honest art without financial obligation. These covers immediately caught attention due to their propaganda-free style, identifiable imagery, and often hand-written text.

From 1941 to 1954, he served as the advertising director at the well-known William H. Weintraub Agency in New York. Here, Paul Rand and his team produced advertisements that combined type and image in a remarkable pictorial manner. In the mid 1950s, he became a freelance graphic design consultant and created corporate identification images for various leading American corporations.

Achievements:

Paul Rand received extensive acknowledgment for his talent and groundbreaking designs. In the 1950s, he was voted one of the ten best art directors in the USA. He also won many design awards, including Gold Medals from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and the Art Directors Club of New York. He was elected to the latter’s Hall of Fame in 1972. Rand was also a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI).

His work has been exhibited at the National Museum, Stockholm (1947), and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1954), and in exhibitions of the Alliance Graphique Internationale in Paris, London, and Lausanne.

Teaching:

The fourth part of Paul Rand’s career was when he started teaching design and other related elements. He taught at the Cooper Union in the year 1942 and at the Pratt Institute in 1946. He was associated in a similar teaching capacity with the Yale University’s Graduate School of Design and the School of Architecture as a Professor of Graphic Design from 1956 to 1992.

Books and Publications:

Paul Rand wrote several design related books and articles throughout his lifetime. He published his non-descriptive book, “Thoughts on Design”, with reproductions of almost one hundred of his designs and some of the best words yet written on graphic design, in 1946. It was a publishing event that gave him added strength, improving his international reputation and identifying him as an influencing designer, from Zurich to Tokyo.

The 1985 publication, Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art gave insight to his work, influences, beliefs and a number of reprinted essays from his illustrious graphic design career. As seen in his text Design, Form and Chaos published in 1994, Rand was also highly critical of many aspects of contemporary graphic design practice.

Paul Rand also published many children’s books with his wife Ann Rand, which are known for their clever artwork. One such example, “Sparkle and Spin”, is a Mid-century children’s classic re-published by Chronicle books.


Paul Rand passed away in 1996. He was suffering from cancer. He was labeled the ‘greatest living designer’ by one of his clients. The design theory put forward by Paul Rand will remain with us for a long time, with much appreciation shown by people who still idealize him.

After his death, many of Paul Rand’s books were donated by his widow, to the Arts of the Book collection at Yale University. Yale turned down this offer, refusing to accept a collection of a teacher and design maestro who taught on their campus for decades, a collection worth millions if sold and trillions if valued.

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