Week 4 The New York School - A History of Graphic Design

A HISTORY OF
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Chapter 19 – The New York School
SUMMARY
Although talented European immigrants who had fled
the political climate of totalitarianism in Europe introduced
modern design in America during the 1940s, an
original American approach to modernist design gained
international prominence in the 1950s and continued as
a dominant force in graphic design until the 1970s. An
egalitarian society with capitalist values, limited artistic
traditions before World War II, and a diverse ethnic
heritage engendered an original approach to American
modernist design. Where European design was often
theoretical and highly structured, American design was
pragmatic, intuitive, and less formal in its approach to
organizing space. Emphasis was placed on the expression
of ideas and an open, direct presentation of information.
Novelty of technique and originality of concept
were much prized in this highly competitive society, and
designers sought to solve communications problems
while satisfying a need for personal expression.
More than any other American designer, Paul Rand,
who had a thorough understanding of the modern
movement, especially the works of Paul Klee, Wassily
Kandinsky, and the cubists, initiated this American approach
to modern design. New York City attracted him
and other talented individuals and by the middle of the
twentieth century, New York had become the incubator
for creativity. In addition to Rand, other pioneers of the
so-called New York School presented in this chapter are
Alvin Lustig, Alex Steinweiss, George Tscherny, Bradbury
Thompson, Saul Bass, and three partners in the
New York design office of Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and
Geismar: Robert Brownjohn, Ivan Chermayeff, and Tom
Geismar.
Rand’s strength was in his ability to analyze a message,
reduce it to a symbolic essence, and communicate the
message through dynamic visual form. He often altered
or juxtaposed ordinary, universally understood signs
and symbols to reinterpret meaning and support a message,
such as the barbed wire on the 1940 cover of Direction
magazine. Rand employed visual and symbolic contrast,
and used collage and montage as a means to bring
concepts, images, textures, and objects into a cohesive
whole. He defined design as the integration of form and
function for effective communication, and from 1941
until 1954, Rand applied his design approach to advertising
at the Weintraub agency, where his collaborations
with copywriter Bill Bernbach became a prototype for
the art/copy team that worked closely together to create
a synergistic visual/verbal solution. Their work presented
visual puns and wordplay supported by Rand’s whimsical
integration of photography, drawing, and logo, as
in the Ohrbach’s campaign. After leaving the agency,
Rand became an independent designer more involved
in trademark and corporate design. His book Thoughts
on Design, which includes over eighty examples of his
work, inspired a generation of designers.
Alvin Lustig applied his design methodology to album
covers and book and jacket designs for New Directions
in New York. His solutions incorporated symbols that
captured the essence of the contents, as on the cover
for 27 Wagons Full of Cotton by Tennessee Williams, on
which a magnolia flower is brutally nailed to rough wood
siding to symbolize the violence and hatred behind the
civilized façade in human affairs. Alex Steinweiss, the
art director of Columbia Records, searched for visual
forms and shapes to express music. His approach to
spatial organization was informal. Design elements
were typically placed on a field with a casual balance
sometimes bordering on a random scattering of forms,
as shown in the collage on the album cover of Ludwig
van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. George Tscherny
headed the graphic design department of the New York
design firm George Nelson & Associates before opening
his own design office in 1956. Tscherny possessed an
ability to capture the essence of the subject and express
it in simple terms that were elegant, to the point, and
disarmingly simple. His visual vocabulary consisted of
a variety of techniques, including type, photography,
calligraphic brush drawing, and bold, simple shapes cut
from colored paper. Regardless of technique, his process
of reducing complex content to an elemental graphic
symbol remained constant.
Bradbury Thompson was one of the most influential
graphic designers in postwar America. His designs
for Westvaco Inspirations demonstrated a thorough
knowledge of printing and typesetting combined with
an adventurous spirit of experimentation. Letterforms,
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings, and
tools of print production, such as the halftone screen

A HISTORY OF
GRAPHIC DESIGN
and four-color process plates, were design elements
in his visual vocabulary. Overprinting achieved depth,
unexpected new colors, and interesting patterns. During
the 1960s and 1970s, Thompson turned increasingly to a
classical approach to book and editorial design, focusing
on readability, formal harmony, and the use of old style
typefaces.
Saul Bass brought the New York School to Los Angeles
in 1950. He was influenced by Rand’s use of shape and
asymmetrical balance but favored the use of a single
dominant image as opposed to Rand’s complex compositions.
Bass had a remarkable ability to reduce messages
to powerful, simple pictographic images, which
enabled viewers to interpret content immediately. These
forms were often cut from paper with scissors or drawn
freely with a brush. Film producer and director Otto
Preminger commissioned Bass to create unified graphic
materials for his films, including logos, theater posters,
advertisements, and animated film titles. In 1955, Bass
created the first comprehensive design program unifying
print and media graphics for a film, Preminger’s The Man
with the Golden Arm. From this beginning, Bass became
the acknowledged master of the film title. In addition to
his film graphics, he created numerous corporate identity
programs and directed a number of films, including
the outstanding short film Why Man Creates.
The initial contribution of Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and
Geismar to American graphic design sprang from a
strong aesthetic background and an understanding of
the major ideas of European modern art, which had been
reinforced by their contacts with architect-teacher Serge
Chermayeff, Ivan Chermayeff’s father; László Moholy-
Nagy, with whom Brownjohn had studied painting and
design; and Alvin Lustig, with whom Ivan Chermayeff
had worked as an assistant. Solutions grew out of the
needs of the client, and design problems were characterized
by inventive and symbolic manipulation of imagery
and forms, including letterforms and typography. Images
and symbols were combined with a surreal sense of dislocation
to convey the essence of the subject on posters
and book jackets, such as the cover of Bertrand Russell’s
Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, on which the
atomic blast became a visual metaphor for the brain. In
1960, Brownjohn left the partnership and moved to England,
where he made significant contributions to British
graphic design, especially in the area of film titles, such
as the motion picture Goldfinger. The firm changed its
name to Chermayeff & Geismar Associates and played
a major role in the development of corporate identity,
which is the focus of Chapter 20.
Many of the pioneers of the New York School mentioned
here were either guest lecturers or served on the faculty
of Yale University’s graphic design program under the
direction of Alvin Eisenman and later Sheila de Bretteville,
the current director. The Yale program has contributed
to the advancement of graphic design and design
education throughout the world, as many of its alumni
have become prominent designers and educators; the
first among them to receive an MFA after Josef Albers
restructured the program was Norman Ives.
Editorial design in America was advanced during the
1940s by Fortune, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. In 1949,
Leo Lionni became the art director at Fortune and gave
the magazine a unique identity, primarily through the
innovative use of photography. Alexander Liberman
replaced Dr. Agha in 1949 as the art director of Vogue.
At Harper’s Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch continued as the
art director until his retirement in 1958. Otto Storch, a
student of Brodovitch, joined the McCall’s Corporation
as the assistant art director for Better Living magazine
and in 1953 was named art director of McCall’s, where he
applied his philosophy of editorial design that idea, copy,
art, and typography should be inseparable. Typography
was designed to lock tightly into the photographic image,
headlines became parts of illustrations, and type
was warped and bent or became the illustration. Cipe
Pineles, who was one of Dr. Agha’s assistants at Vogue,
made a major contribution to editorial design during the
1940s and 1950s, first as the art director of Glamour, and
later at Seventeen, Charm, and Mademoiselle. Pineles
was the first woman to become a member of the New
York Art Director’s Club. Henry Wolf, who had also studied
under Brodovitch, became the art director of Esquire
in 1953, and redesigned the magazine’s format, placing
greater emphasis on white space and large photographs.
When Brodovitch retired, Wolf replaced him at Harper’s
Bazaar. Wolf experimented with typography and implemented
his vision of the cover—a simple image conveying
a strong visual idea—such as “the Americanization
of Paris”—which was signified by a packet of “instant
red wine,” satirizing the spread of American technology,
customs, and conveniences.
In the late 1960s, factors including television, public concerns
over the Vietnam War, environmental problems,
and the rights of minorities and women produced a need
for a wider variety and different types of magazines. A
new, smaller-format breed of periodicals emerged to ad-

A HISTORY OF
GRAPHIC DESIGN
dress the interests of specialized audiences, such as New
York, an independent city magazine; Print and Communication
Arts, which spoke to a growing national design
community; Ramparts, the journal of record for 1960’s
protest; Ms., the journal of the women’s movement;
West, an expression of California culture; and Rolling
Stone, a rock-and-roll newspaper turned tabloid magazine.
Among the editorial art directors who helped shape
the viewpoints and philosophies of these publications
were Dugald Stermer at Ramparts, Bea Feitler at Ms.,
and Mike Salisbury at West and Rolling Stone. Ramparts
was characterized by consistent, classical Times Roman
typography set in two columns per page, and full-page
illustrations or photography. Feitler had an original
approach to typography and design and created vitality
through the use of diverse typographic styles, scale, and
bold color. Salisbury utilized vernacular artifacts in West
to capture a feeling of popular culture, and the element
of surprise brought visual vitality to Rolling Stone. His
freewheeling design approach influenced the layout of
many popular, specialized, and regional periodicals for a
decade.
The ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach ushered in the era
of “the new advertising.” For each campaign, it developed
a strategy surrounding important advantages,
distinguishing characteristics, or superior features of
the product. Bill Bernbach and his colleagues evolved
a visual/verbal syntax through which word and image
were fused into a conceptual expression of an idea so
that they become completely interdependent—like “think
small” and the image of the Volkswagen beetle. Because
concept was dominant, visual organization was simple
and symmetrical, with a large image, concise headline,
and body copy that contained factual information. The
new advertising developed along side the “new journalism,”
in which subjective responses replaced objectivity
as a component of reporting.
Typographic trends in the 1950s and 1960s brought new
approaches to graphic design. Gene Frederico spearheaded
figurative typography, a playful direction taken
by New York graphic designers, in which letterforms
became images, such as the wheels in Frederico’s ad
for Woman’s Day, or the visual properties of words
themselves, or their organization in space, were used
to express an idea. In Don Egensteiner’s “Tonnage”
advertisement, for example, the word tonnage takes on
a connotative meaning as it crashes down into the text
below, and the rotated type takes advantage of reading
patterns to reinforce the top-to-bottom flow toward
the body copy. Another typographic trend that began in
the 1950s was a renewed interest in nineteenth-century
decorative and novelty typefaces, which had been rejected
due to the influence of the modern art movement.
Robert M. Jones, the art director of RCA Victor Records
and founder of Glad Hand Press, inspired this renewal by
means of the graphic ephemera produced at the press
and his record album designs, which incorporated wood
type. Phototypography, the setting of type by exposing
negatives of alphabet characters to photographic paper,
became commercially viable in the United States in 1936
when the firm Photolettering was established, although
it took several decades for it to replace metal type. A major
advantage to phototypography was the reduced cost
of producing new typefaces. During the 1960s, the expansion
of phototypography was accompanied by new
designs and reissues of old designs, including Victorian
faces, The new technology brought about a proliferation
of type designs that rivaled the increased production of
the Victorian era.
Herb Lubalin, who was hailed as the typographic genius
of his time, defined the aesthetic potential of phototypography.
He abandoned traditional typographic rules
and practices and looked at characters of the alphabet as
a means of giving visual form to a concept or a message.
Lubalin explored the creative potential of type through
“typograms,” visual typographic poems in which concept
and visual form merge. An example is his “Mother
and Child” logo, in which the ampersand enfolds and
protects the child in a visual metaphor for motherly love.
Lubalin intensified the printed image to achieve impact
and expressed content by experimenting with the elastic
and dynamic qualities of phototypography, including
tight letter spacing, word spacing, and leading; condensing,
expanding, touching, and overlapping characters;
and enlarging and reducing type to extreme scales.
Lubalin also made significant contributions to editorial
design through his work for the Saturday Evening Post,
Eros, Avant Garde, and U&lc. Avant Garde, a lavishly visual
periodical that published visual essays, fiction, and
reportage, was one of Lubalin’s most innovative achievements.
The logotype he designed for this magazine was
developed into a family of sans-serif typefaces under the
same name.
In 1970 Lubalin, phototypography pioneer Edward
Rondthaler, and typographer Aaron Burns founded
International Typeface Corporation (ITC) and began to
publish a tabloid-size journal, U&lc, designed by Lubalin,
to demonstrate and publicize ITC typefaces. Lubalin
saw the designer’s role as projecting a message from a
surface using three interdependent means of expression:

A HISTORY OF
GRAPHIC DESIGN
photography, illustration, and letterforms. The complex
and dynamic design style of U&lc had a major impact on
typographic design of the 1970s. The works of graphic
designers Ernie Smith and Alan Peckolick and lettering
artists Tony DiSpigna and Tom Carnase share similarities
with Lubalin’s work while achieving original solutions to
a diverse range of problems.
George Lois, who had worked at Doyle Dane Bernbach
during the late 1950s, adopted the Bernbach philosophy
that fully integrated visual/verbal concepts were vital
to successfully conveying a message. His designs are
deceptively simple and direct, such as the Esquire magazine
cover in which Muhammad Ali, who was stripped
of his world heavyweight championship title because
he was a conscientious objector and refused military
service, posed as Saint Sebastian, a famous religious
martyr who was condemned by Roman Emperor Diocletian
and shot by arrows. The powerful image combined
with a simple line of type, “The Passion of Muhammad
Ali,” captures the reader.
KEY TERMS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE; THE FIRST PAGE NUMBER OF THEIR APPEARANCE IS LISTED)
Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and Geismar, page 396, The initial contribution of these three to American graphic design
sprang from a strong aesthetic background and an understanding of the major ideas of European modern art. A communicative
immediacy, a strong sense of form, and a vitality and freshness characterized their work in the early months
of the partnership. Images and symbols were combined with a surreal sense of dislocation to convey the essence of the
subject on book jackets and posters. A fine sense of both typography and art history enabled them to solve problems
through inventive and symbolic manipulation of forms and imagery. Solutions grew out of the needs of the client and
the limitations of the problem at hand (Figs. 19-25 through 19-27).
Doyle Dane Bernbach Agency, page 403, opened its doors at 350 Madison Avenue in New York City with a staff of
thirteen and less than half a million dollars in client accounts. Bill Bernbach was the partner with responsibility for the
creative area, and his initial staff consisted of art director Bob Gage and copywriter Phyllis Robinson. They developed
a strategy surrounding important advantages, distinguishing characteristics, or superior features of a product. In their
approach, a synergistic relationship between visual and verbal components was established. Because concept was
dominant, the design of many of their advertisements was reduced to the basic elements necessary to convey the message:
a large, arresting visual image, a concise headline of bold weight, and body copy that staked its claim with factual
and often entertaining writing instead of puffery and meaningless superlatives (Figs. 19-46 through 19-49).
Visual/verbal syntax, page 403, word and image fused into a conceptual expression of an idea so that they become
completely interdependent, the Bernbach approach evolved during the 1950s and 1960s by Bill Bernbach at the New
York advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach.
“The new advertising,” page 403, In new, small boutique advertising agencies emphasis was placed on creativity rather
than on full marketing services. An attempt was made to create more honest, literate, and tasteful appeals to the market
audience.
Figurative typography, page 404, a playful direction taken by New York graphic designers during the 1950s and 1960s.
This approach, spearheaded by Gene Frederico took many forms: letterforms became images, such as the wheels in the
Frederico’s ad for Woman’s Day (Fig. 19-50), or the visual properties of words themselves, or their organization in space,
were used to express an idea, such as in Don Egensteiner’s “Tonnage” advertisement (Fig. 19-51), in which the visual
form of the word takes on a connotative meaning.
Phototypography, page 405, the setting of type by exposing negatives of alphabet characters to photographic paper
dawned in 1925 with the public announcement of the Thothmic photographic composing machine invented by E. K.
Hunter and J. R. C. August of London. A keyboard produced a punched tape to control a long, opaque master film with
transparent letterforms. As a given letter moved in position in front of a lens, it was exposed to photographic paper by
a beam of light.

A HISTORY OF
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Typogram, page 406, brief, visual typographic form in which concept and visual form are merged into a oneness.
International Typeface Corporation (ITC), page 408, established by Aaron Burns, thirty-four fully developed type families
and about sixty additional display faces were designed and licensed during its first decade. Its fonts had large x-heights
and short ascenders and descenders; these became the prevailing characteristics of fonts designed during the 1970s
and early the 1980s (Fig. 19–65).
KEY PEOPLE AND THEIR MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE; THE FIRST PAGE NUMBER OF THEIR
APPEARANCE IS LISTED)
Paul Rand (1914–1996), page 390, More than any other American designer, he initiated the American approach to modern
design. He began the first phase of his design career as a promotional and editorial designer for the magazines
Apparel Arts, Esquire, Ken, Coronet, and Glass Packer. A thorough knowledge of the modern movement, particularly the
works of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and the cubists, led him to the understanding that freely invented shapes could
have a self-contained life, both symbolic and expressive, as a visual communications tool. He manipulated visual form
(through shape, color, space, line, and value) and skillfullly analyzed communications content, reducing it to a symbolic
essence without turning it sterile or dull, making him widely influential while still in his twenties. His collaborations with
copywriter Bill Bernbach became a prototype for the now ubiquitous art/copy team working closely together to create
a synergistic visual/verbal integration. Thoughts on Design, his 1946 book, illustrated with over eighty examples of his
work, inspired a generation of designers (Figs. 19-1 through 19-7).
Bill Bernbach (1911–1982), page 391, the copywriter who collaborated with Paul Rand; the duo became the prototype for
the now ubiquitous art/copy team working closely together to create a synergistic visual/verbal integration.
Alvin Lustig (1915–1955), page 392, During a design career in a life cut short by illness, he incorporated his subjective vision
and private symbols into graphic design. His design methodology—searching for symbols to capture the essence
of the contents and treating form and content as one—received a receptive response from its literary audience. In 1945,
he became the visual design research director of Look magazine, a position he held until 1946 (Figs. 19-8 through 19-12).
Alex Steinweiss (b. 1916), page 392, named art director of Columbia Records, he searched for visual forms and shapes
to express music. Often he approached space informally; elements were placed on the field with a casual balance sometimes
bordering on a random scattering of forms (Fig. 19-13).
Bradbury Thompson (1911–1995), page 393, emerged as one of the most influential graphic designers in postwar America.
His designs for Westvaco Inspirations, four-color publications demonstrating printing papers, made a significant
impact. A thorough knowledge of printing and typesetting, combined with an adventurous spirit of experimentation,
allowed him to expand the range of design possibilities. He discovered and explored the potential of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century engravings as design resources. Large, bold organic and geometric shapes were used to bring
graphic and symbolic power to the page. Letterforms and patterns, such as the details from halftone reproductions,
were often enlarged and used as design elements or to create visual patterns and movements. During the 1960s and
1970s, Thompson turned increasingly to a classical approach to book and editorial format design. Readability, formal
harmony, and a sensitive use of old style typefaces marked his work for periodicals such as Smithsonian and ARTnews
(Figs. 19-14 through 19-18).
Saul Bass (1919–1996), page 393, The sensibilities of the New York School were carried to Los Angeles by Bass when
he moved from New York to California in 1950 and opened a studio there two years later. Paul Rand’s use of shape and
asymmetrical balance during the 1940s was an important inspiration for him, but while Rand’s carefully orchestrated
compositions used complex contrasts of shape, color, and texture, Bass frequently reduced his designs to a single
dominant image. He had a remarkable ability to express the nucleus of a design with images that became glyphs, or
elemental pictorial signs that exerted great graphic power. Producer and director Otto Preminger commissioned him to
create unified graphic materials for his films, including logos, theater posters, advertisements, and animated film titles

A HISTORY OF
GRAPHIC DESIGN
for the 1955 design program for Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm. In addition to his film graphics, he created
numerous corporate identity programs (Figs. 19-19 through 19-22).
George Tscherny (b. 1924), page 395, headed the graphic design department for the New York design firm George Nelson
& Associates before opening his own design office in 1956. An intuitive and sensitive designer, Tscherny possesses
an ability to seize the essence of the subject and express it in stunningly simple terms. His vocabulary of techniques for
solving design problems includes type, photography, simple calligraphic brush drawing, and bold, simple shapes cut
from colored papers (Figs. 19-23 and 19-24).
Robert Brownjohn (1925–1970), page 396, a partner in the New York firm of Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and Geismar. He
had studied painting and design under László Moholy-Nagy and architecture under the distinguished architect-teacher
Serge Chermayeff. He left the partnership and moved to England, where he made significant contributions to British
graphic design, especially in the area of film titles.
Ivan Chermayeff (b. 1932), page 396, a partner in the New York firm of Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and Geismar. A son of
Serge Chermayeff, he had worked as an assistant to Alvin Lustig and a record album designer.
Thomas H. Geismar (b. 1931), page 396, a partner of the New York firm of Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and Geismar. He had
served two years with the United States Army as an exhibition designer and then freelanced.
Norman Ives (1923–1978), page 397, received his MFA in graphic design in 1952. While an undergraduate at Wesleyan,
he had developed a love for literature and the classics that became a part of his overall vision. His early paintings display
overtones of Jean Arp and Paul Klee, and in his typographic work can be found the playful approach and expressive
use of letters also seen in the work of Guillaume Apollinaire, Willem Sandberg, and Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman.
Leo Lionni (1910–1999), page 398, an art director for Fortune, he gave the magazine a unique identity, largely through
his innovative use of photography. In addition, he served as Olivetti’s design director in America and was co-editor of
Print magazine from 1955 until 1959 (Fig. 19-32).
Alexander Liberman (1912–99), page 398, art director for Vogue in 1943.
Cipe Pineles (1910–1991), page 398, made a major contribution to editorial design during the 1940s and 1950s, first as
the art director at Glamour and then at Seventeen, Charm, and Mademoiselle. She became the first woman admitted
to membership in the New York Art Director’s Club, breaking the barrier to the male-dominated professional design
societies (Fig. 19-31).
Otto Storch (b. 1913), page 398, joined the McCall’s Corporation as the assistant art director for Better Living magazine
and in 1953 was named art director of McCall’s magazine. Editor Herbert Mayes gave Storch a free hand to upgrade the
graphics in 1958, and an astounding visual approach developed. Typography was unified with photography as the type
was designed to lock tightly into the photographic image. Type warped and bent, or became the illustration. He ranks
among the major innovators of the period. His philosophy that idea, copy, art, and typography should be inseparable in
editorial design influenced both editorial and advertising graphics (Figs. 19-33 through 19-36),
Henry Wolf (1925-2005), page 399, became the art director of Esquire in 1953 and redesigned its format, placing greater
emphasis on the use of white space and large photographs. He later became the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, where
he experimented with typography, making it large enough to fill the page on one spread and then using small headlines
on other pages. Wolf’s vision of the magazine cover was a simple image conveying a visual idea (Figs. 19-37 through
19-40).
Peter Palazzo (1926–2005), page 400, the design editor of the New York Herald Tribune from 1962 until 1965. He received
considerable acclaim for his overall typographic design of this newspaper, the editorial design approach of the Book
Week Supplement and New York magazine, and the conceptual power of many of the images he commissioned. In the
weekly New York magazine section, he established a three-column grid and a consistent size and style for article titles,
which were always bracketed by a thick ruled line above and a thin rule below. His cover designs used simple, direct
symbolic images to make editorial comments on important issues (Fig. 19-41).
Dugald Stermer (b. 1936), page 400, left a studio job in Texas in 1965 to return to his native California and become art

A HISTORY OF
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director of Ramparts magazine. Public opposition to the Vietnam War and concern about a host of other social and
environmental issues were exploding, and Ramparts became the journal of record for the movement. The dignity and
readability of classical, traditional typography thus packaged the most radical periodical of the era (Fig. 19-42).
Bea Feitler (1938–82), page 402, responsible for the design of Ms. magazine, which depended heavily on diversifying
typographic style and scale to bring vitality and expression to this journal of the women’s movement. She had an original
approach to typography and design that depended not on consistency of style but on a finely tuned ability to make
appropriate choices uninhibited by current fashion or standard typographic practice (Fig. 19-43).
Michael Salisbury (b. 1941), page 402, A number of currents—the conceptual approach to cover design, the role of art
director expanding into editorial deliberations as personified by Dugald Stermer at Ramparts, and the growing taste
for nostalgia, ephemera, and popular culture partly inspired by 1960s pop art—dovetailed in his work. He became the
art director of West, the Sunday supplement of the Los Angeles Times, in 1967. He made West a vital expression of California
culture. The visual delights of vernacular artifacts were featured in editorial spreads researched by Salisbury and
designed with a combination of randomness and order in original layouts that intensified the pages of the publication.
In 1974, he redesigned the entire format of Rolling Stone. Typography was used differently for each article in an issue,
and the range of illustrations and photographic approaches knew no bounds (Figs. 19-44 and19-45).
Bob Gage (1919–2000), page 403, art director for the Doyle Dane Bernbach Agency.
Phyllis Robinson (b. 1921), page 403, Copywriter for the Doyle Dane Bernbach Agency.
Gene Frederico (1919–1999), page 404, one of the first graphic designers to delight in using letterforms as images. In his
advertisement for Woman’s Day in 1953, the perfectly round Futura Os form bicycle wheels (Fig. 19-50).
Edward Rondthaler (1905-2009), page 405, instrumental in perfecting the Rutherford Photolettering Machine, which sets
type by exposing film negatives of type characters onto photopaper.
John Alcorn (1935–1992), page 405, a specimen book designed by him introduced Morgan Press nineteenth-century
typefaces as phototypography from Headliners Process Lettering. This was one of many phototypography collections
making Victorian faces widely available (Fig. 19-52).
Herb Lubalin (1918–1981), page 405, A total generalist whose achievements include advertising and editorial design,
trademark and typeface design, posters, and packaging, he was hailed as the typographic genius of his time. Space
and surface became his primary visual considerations. He abandoned traditional typographic rules and practice and
looked at alphabet characters as both visual form and message communication. His wit and strong message orientation
enabled him to transform words into ideographic typograms about the subject. Avant Garde magazine became one of
his most innovative achievements (Figs. 19-53 through 19-65).
Aaron Burns (1922–1991), page 408, established the International Typeface Corporation (ITC).
George Lois (b. 1931), page 409, became the enfant terrible of American mass communications. His energetic efforts
to sell his work, including climbing out on the third-floor ledge of the A. Goodman & Company’s president’s office demanding
that his poster proposal be approved, combined with a tendency to push concepts to the very limit of propriety,
earned him this reputation. He adopted the Bernbach philosophy that fully integrated visual/verbal concepts were
vital to successful message conveyance. He wrote that an art director must treat words “with the same reverence that
he accords graphics, because the verbal and visual elements of modern communication are as indivisible as words and
music in a song.” His designs are deceptively simple and direct. His cover designs for Esquire challenged, shocked, and
often provoked their audience. Unexpected combinations of images and photographic montage techniques served to
intensify an event or make a satirical statement (Figs. 19-66 through 19-71).