Inscribed Association Copy

THOUGHTS ON DESIGN

Paul Rand

Paul Rand; E. McKnight Kauffer [introduction]: THOUGHTS ON DESIGN. New York: Wittenborn, 1947. First edition. Quarto. Trilingual edition, with French and Spanish translations. Black cloth decorated in gilt. Photographically printed dust jacket. 164 pp. 94 halftone illustrations and 8 color plates. Textblock head mottled and light foxing to a couple of pages early and late. The dust jacket is lightly tanned to edges and the spine is neatly and completely missing. A very good or better copy in a good dust jacket. A very desirable title -- please refer to page 217 of Steven Heller mononograph PAUL RAND [Phaidon 1999] to view the usual condition when this book is normally found.

Inscribed by Rand on front free endpaper: "To Bob Fawcett / with more than / the usual admiration / Paul Rand 4 . 22 . 52 . " A nice contemporary association from a leading Art Director to a leading Commercial Illustrator

This is --quite possibly -- the most desirable Graphic Design book ever published. After a decade of establishing himself as the wunderkind of the emerging field of Graphic Design, Paul Rand sat down to codify his beliefs and working methodolgy into a single volume. THOUGHTS ON DESIGN was the result.

8.5 x 10.75 hardcoverbook with 164 pages, 94 halftone illustrations and 8 color plates. Trilingual edition, with French and Spanish translations. From the dust jacket: "Rand is aware of the complexity of the designer's function: he stresses this again and again. He has no patience with slickness, with facility; he is a severe critic of the hackneyed and the insincere. All this is dead wood to be cleared away."

Robert Fawcett (1903-1967) was best known for the series of illustrations he did for Sherlock Holmes, written by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr, published in Good Housekeeping and Collier's Magazine in l953. Like Paul Rand, Fawcett occupied the highest level of his profession, and was known as "the illustrator's illustrator."

"Robert Fawcett is not the only independent thinking illustrator in the country by any means, but he belongs to a minority. It is an important minority, though, because without turning its back upon the problems of communication that every illustrator must solve, it has a hardcore stubbornness that does not yield to the fad and manner of the moment. It is a minority of individuals who are jealous of their individuality and resist the anonimity of rubber-stamp picturemaking.

"Fawcett is as stubborn and positive as the best of them but his stubbornness and positiveness is born of conviction and competence. These qualities have carried him through thirty years of picturemaking without visible wavering or floundering. They have helped him produce an unusually consistent body of work of remarkable high quality.

"Now, at a little past fifty, it is a natural time for stock-taking. He is entitles to a certain feeling of smugness after a long backwards glance. He finds his name an important one in a very big and highly competitive field. Not a popular illustrator in the usual sense of the term, he has the deep respect and often the envy of his colleagues. He has been rightly called "the illustrator's illustrator."

--- Henry C. Pitz: An Appreciation of Robert Fawcett.
American Artist, October 1953.

If the word legend has any meaning in the graphic arts and if the term legendary can be applied with accuracy to the career of any designer, it can certainly be applied to Paul Rand (1914-1996). By 1947, the legend was already firmly in place. By then Paul had completed his first career as a designer of media promotion at Esquire-Coronet --and as an outstanding cover designer for Apparel Arts and Directions. He was well along on a second career as an advertising designer at the William Weintraub agency which he had joined as art director at its founding. THOUGHTS ON DESIGN (with reproductions of almost one hundred of his designs and some of the best words yet written on graphic design) had just published -- an event that cemented his international reputation and identified him as a designer of influence from Zurich to Tokyo.

A chronology of Rand's design experience has paralleled the development of the modern design movement. Paul Randıs first career in media promotion and cover design ran from 1937 to 1941, his second career in advertising design ran from 1941 to 1954, and his third career in corporate identification began in 1954. Paralleling these three careers there has been a consuming interest in design education and Paul Rand's fourth career as an educator started at Cooper Union in 1942. He taught at Pratt Institute in 1946 and in 1956 he accepted a post at Yale University's graduate school of design where he held the title of Professor of Graphic Design.

In 1937 Rand launched his first career at Esquire. Although he was only occasionally involved in the editorial layout of that magazine, he designed material on its behalf and turned out a spectacular series of covers for Apparel Arts, a quarterly published in conjunction with Esquire. In spite of a schedule that paid no heed to regular working hours or minimum wage scales, he managed in these crucial years to find time to design an impressive array of covers for other magazines, particularly Directions. From 1938 on his work was a regular feature of the exhibitions of the Art Directors Club.

Most contemporary designers are aware of Paul Rand's successful and compelling contributions to advertising design. What is not well known is the significant role he played in setting the pattern for future approaches to the advertising concept. Rand was probably the first of a long and distinguished line of art directors to work with and appreciate the unique talent of William Bernbach. Rand described his first meeting with Bernbach as "akin to Columbus discovering America," and went on to say, "This was my first encounter with a copywriter who understood visual ideas and who didn't come in with a yellow copy pad and a preconceived notion of what the layout should look like."

Rand spent fourteen years in advertising where he demonstrated the importance of the art director in advertising and helped break the isolation that once surrounded the art department. The final thought from THOUGHTS ON DESIGN is worth repeating: "Even if it is true that commonplace advertising and exhibitions of bad taste are indicative of the mental capacity of the man in the street, the opposing argument is equally valid. Bromidic advertising catering to that bad taste merely perpetuates that mediocrity and denies him one of the most easily accessible means of aesthetic development."

In 1954 when Paul Rand decided Madison Avenue was no longer a two-way street and he resigned from the Weintraub agency, he was cited as one of the ten best art directors by the Museum of Modern Art. The rest is design history.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a pioneer typographer, photographer, and designer of the modern movement and a master at the Bauhaus in Weimar, may have come closest to defining the Rand style when he said Paul was "an idealist and a realist using the language of the poet and the businessman. He thinks in terms of need and function. He is able to analyze his problems, but his fantasy is boundless."

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