An essay about Paul Rand

Wanted: Art Director with a modern, creative touch. Need not be a Rand but must be able to inspire an art department.

Classified ad in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, 1953 (Rand, 33).

Paul Rand

Paul Rand was an American graphic designer, whose career spanned six decades and three generations. He was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 15, 1914 with the given name Peretz Rosenbaum. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, Rand rebelled from his strict roots, taking up secular interests such as drawing the human form and reading comic strips. His father owned a neighborhood grocery store, which was where Rand started his career at a young age. He painted signs for his father’s store and for school events at Public School 109.

Rand took night classes at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn while attending Manhattan’s Harren High School to satisfy his father’s demands. His father insisted that art was no way to make a living and insisted he continue in school. Rand then attended Parsons School of Design in 1932 and the Art Students League in 1933. He wanted to earn more money than his father had, so he focused on the commercial side of art. His first job was as an illustrator for Metro Associated Services, creating stock images for magazines and newspapers.

In 1935 Rand reluctantly changed his name from Peretz Rosenbaum to Paul Rand, convinced by his friends that his overtly Jewish name might be holding him back. Wyszogrod explained: “…he started looking for jobs, going from studio to studio, and they said, “What’s your name?” And he would say, “Rosenbaum.” And then they would ask, “What’s your first name?” And he was afraid to say Peretz, so he said, “Paul”. He remembered that an uncle in the family was name Rand. So he figured that “Paul Rand,” four letters here, four letters there, would create a nice symbol. So he became Paul Rand.” (Rand, 20).

After being hired as a freelancer to help produce layouts for Apparel Arts magazine, Rand’s career quickly took off. He was offered the full-time job as Art Director for Esquire Magazine at the young age of 23. His freelance work for Direction magazine, for which he exchanged a negligible fee for full artistic freedom, was an important step in the development of his style.   

Rand’s core ideology and one of his most impacting contributions to American design was the modernist philosophy. He was greatly influenced by European modern art and design and revered artists such as Paul Cezanne, Jan Tschichold, and German Bauhaus master Laslo Moholy-Nagy.  In A Designer’s Art, Rand states: “From Impressionism to Pop Art, the commonplace and even the comic strip have become ingredients for the artist’s caldron. What Cezanne did with apples, Picasso with guitars, Leger with machines, Schwitters with rubbish, and Duchamp with urinals makes it clear that revelation does not depend upon grandiose concepts. The problem of the artist is to defamiliarize the ordinary.” He exemplified this task of defamilarizing the ordinary early on through his distinguished layouts and later in making “lively and original” packaging for common objects such as lightbulbs. He explains, “ If artistic quality depended on exalted subject matter, the commercial artist, … would be in a bad way.” (Rand, 47).

Rand was most famous for his corporate identity work in the 50’s and 60’s for major companies such as IBM, ABC, Westinghouse and UPS.  Rand’s logos epitomized the ideal of minimalism and simplicity. In his book, A Designer’s Art, Rand states that “A trademark … cannot survive unless it is designed with the utmost simplicity and restraint.” (34). He continued to develop long-lasting corporate identities and other works until his death in 1996. 


paul rand : his work from 1946 to 1958
edited by yusaku kamekura
zokeisha, tokyo
alfred a. knopf, new york 1959

paul rand: a designer's art
yale university press
new haven and london
1985

paul rand
steven heller
phaidon press limited
regent's wharf
london
1999