Random thoughts

It's only until you get to Steve Heller's Afterword at the back of this book that you get to know something about Paul Rand that isn't revealed in the book he wrote. Some of its reception, when it was published in the mid-eighties, wasn't to his liking and he detested any criticism of his work. Much of this was based on a Post Modernist approach to graphic design which came to full flower when the computer enabled anyone to design anything with a few keystrokes and not bother with decades of craftsmanship from the graphic arts world. Rand told Heller about his first book Thoughts on design (1947) "I knew this was one way to have all your work in one place, so if you ever run into a fire you don't have to worry about your samples". This is one of the problems I have with A designer's art. The text considers the broader aspects of design but only uses his work to illustrate a point. For example: The role of humor chapter has twelve work examples which give a rather poor analysis of humor visually, the About legibility chapter has three book title pages and a spread from an IBM 1977 Annual Report none of which really back up the points he makes in the text and Rand's own approach to legibility is questionable, there are some paperback covers where he uses rather unreadable handwriting (his own?) for the title, author and publisher. Of course there is some excellent design work in these pages, probably the logos are the work any designer would immediately think of when Paul Rand is mentioned, IBM, Enron, ABC TV created in 1962 and with Westinghouse still in use today. The clever UPS logo from 1961 was used up to 2003 then changed to a more skeuomorphic style. He produced some very creative work for his long time client IBM. I was though rather disappointed in the book even though it's considered a design classic. There isn't too much text in the twenty-seven chapters (including nine written between 1946 and 1984) so I regard it as really no more than Rand’s work sampler. Far better is the The Vignelli Canon by Massimo Vignelli, a much tighter and succinct look at design and like Rand's book using Vignelli’s work examples to back up the text.