What Is Paul Rand's Progression

Paul Rand: 100 year Journey

Paul Rand the American modernist and one of the founding innovators of the Swiss Style Movement once said “Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.” His designs hold true this quote; they are simple, but bear a positive lasting impression. The name may not ring a bell, but his work is seen around the world; he created the famous IBM and United States Parcel Service logo, just to name a few. Paul Rand would have been 100 years old and his work is and will forever be an important component of the graphic design industry.

Rand, very fortunate to have parents with an open mind, hence, born and raised in a strict Orthodox Jewish home could have halted his career as a graphic designer because Orthodox Jewish

law forbids the creation of images that can worshipped as idols. Given this information Rand was a risk taker from childhood as he knew that the strict rules as an Orthodox Jew, he would, against his parents' wishes, secretly draw models shown on the magazine stands in his father’s grocery store.

Later on in life, he will change his name born, August 15, 1914 in Brooklyn, NY as Peretez Rosenbaum; and later name change to Paul Rand to jump his career. His father eventually allowed him to attend the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY , but There He grew bored quickly and voiced during an interview with Steven Keller “had literally learned nothing at Pratt; or whatever little I learned, I learned by doing myself”. (Friedman,1989). From there he thought starting his career with a part-time job started his career as an illustrator producing what he called ‘junk’, would aid in his progression,but admittedly stated he learned more about graphic techniques than he had at Pratt. According to Green , By this point Rand had already entered the emotional pitfall of complacency, boredom, grandiosity,(Greene 179) this would have hindered his future if he continued on this route, but instead around 1930 Rand launched his first freelance project by a few minor accounts in the mid 1930’s Rand

worked as an art director for Esquire and Apparel Arts magazines from 1937 to 1941. As his work developed, Rand assimilated the philosophy and visual vocabulary of European art and design, in particular that of the Bauhaus, Constructivism, Cubism, De Stijl, and Futurism. Rand believed that lines, shapes, and colours could become message-conveying signs and symbols in visual communications while simultaneously functioning as elements in an artistic composition. This experience allowed Rand to adapt the creative strategy by “loosening his mind and letting in alternative ways of thinking” (Greene, 2012, p. 179).
During the 1950s and ’60s, as American corporations were turning to graphic designers to create contemporary trademarks and consistent graphic standards, Rand became a prominent proponent of such visual-identity systems. Now ubiquitous trademarks designed by Rand include the logos of Westinghouse (1960), ABC (1962), and IBM (1972). His designs for corporate annual reports were also broadly influential.