COME HOME TO JAZZ: Herb Lubalin
THAT NEW YORK: Brownjohn, Chermayeff and Geismar
THE AGE OF THE AUTO: Lester Beall
LOVE OF APPLES: Gene Federico
About U. S. - Experimental Typography By American Designers
Offered here is a complete pristine set of the “About U. S. - Experimental Typography By American Designers” published by the Composing Room in 1960. The four volumes by Herb Lubalin, Brownjohn, Chermayeff and Geismar, Lester Beall, and Gene Federico are housed in a Publishers slipcase with paper label. The finest copies of this set we have handled, undoubtedly protected by the (rare) slipcase.
- Percy Seitlin [text] and Herb Lubalin [design]: COME HOME TO JAZZ. New York: The Composing Room, 1960. First edition. Saddle-stitched booklet bound in orange letterpressed wrappers. 16 pp. Elaborate graphic design by Herb Lubalin. The first volume of the four-volume set “About U. S. - Experimental Typography By American Designers” published by the Composing Room in 1960. A fine copy.
- Percy Seitlin [text] Brownjohn, Chermayeff and Geismar [design]: THAT NEW YORK. New York: The Composing Room, 1960. First edition. Saddle-stitched booklet bound in gray letterpressed wrappers. 16 pp. Elaborate graphic design by Brownjohn, Chermayeff and Geismar. The second volume of the four-volume set “About U. S. - Experimental Typography By American Designers” published by the Composing Room in 1960. A fine copy.
- Lester Beall [design], Percy Seitlin [text]: THE AGE OF THE AUTO. New York: The Composing Room, 1960. First edition. Saddle-stitched booklet bound in tan letterpressed wrappers. 16 pp. Elaborate graphic design by Lester Beall. The third volume of the four-volume set “About U. S. - Experimental Typography By American Designers” published by the Composing Room in 1960. A fine copy.
- Percy Seitlin and Gene Federico: LOVE OF APPLES. New York: The Composing Room, 1960. First edition. Saddle-stitched booklet bound in tan letterpressed wrappers. 16 pp. Elaborate graphic design by Lester Beall. The fourth and fina volume of the set “About U. S. - Experimental Typography By American Designers” published by the Composing Room in 1960. A fine copy.
[4] 7 x 9.5 saddle-stitched brochures with 16 pages in publishers printed wrappers. THAT NEW YORK is a photo-illustrated poem by Percy Seitlin with b/w photographs by Len Gittleman, Raymond Jacobs, and Jay Maisel and the incomparable typographic design of Robert Brownjohn, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar. Along with WATCHING WORDS MOVE, THAT NEW YORK was one of the experimental works that came out of the short-lived partnership of Robert Brownjohn, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar -- before Brownjohn's heroin addiction caused the firm too disband and forced Brownjohn to seek a country with more liberal drug laws. The rest they say, is history. LOVE OF APPLES is poem by Percy Seitlin photo-illustrated by William Bell and incomparably designed by Gene Federico. The publisher's wrappers are printed with briefs on the writer, designer, and the series. A timeless piece of visual poetry with a timeless message that Mr. Federico considered a career highlight.
“What a perfect name: The Composing Room! A company bearing that name was primariy a typesetting house, but they were so much more than that. They were instrumental in pushing typography beyond the realm of merely displaying copy. They were purevyours of good taste, and harbingers of new aesthetics. They made designers and artists realize what they didn’t know. As gallery owners they were one of the few NY institutions to consistently display graphic design.
“In 1959 a German graphic arts magazine, Der Druckspiegel, approached The Composing Room to showcase some cutting-edge American typographic design. Dr. Robert L. Leslie, Hortense Mendel, and Aaron Burns, who ran The Composing Room, responded by proposing to create four self-contained pieces to be inserted into the magazine. This is how they described the project: “In presenting experimental American typography to the European graphic arts community through the pages of Der Druckspiegel, we wanted to doubly utilize the opportunity offered by such a cultural exchange by showing the work of American designers and providing our European colleagues with something characteristically American to read about America. With this in mind, we decided to have a text created especially for us and to choose Percy Seitlin for the job. He is an American writer who feels that portraits of America are best painted ‘warts and all.’”
“The four designers chosen were Herb Lubalin, Gene Federico, Lester Beall, and the Brownjohn, Chermayeff and Geismar studio. Each designer picked a piece or pieces of text by Seitlin to work with and designed a four stunning booklets. The Composing Room asked for a larger quantity to be printed which they could then bind and distribute in United States. They, of course, handled the incredibly intricate typesetting for all of them.” — The Herb Lubalin Study Center
From the 1980 AIGA Medal Profile: "Coming to terms with Herb Lubalin's work takes you quickly to the heart of a very big subject: the theory of meaning and how meaning is communicated -- how an idea is moved, full and resonant, from one mind to another. Not many have been able to do that better than Lubalin.
"Typography is the key. It is where you start with Lubalin and what you eventually come back to. However, "typography" is not a word Lubalin thought should be applied to his work. "What I do is not really typography, which I think of as an essentially mechanical means of putting characters down on a page. It's designing with letters. Aaron Burns called it, 'typographics,' and since you've got to put a name on things to make them memorable, 'typographics' is as good a name for what I do as any."
"Lubalin was a brilliant, iconoclastic advertising art director -- in the 1940s with Reiss Advertising and then for twenty years with Sudler and Hennessey. Recipient of medal after medal, award after award, and in 1962 named Art Director of the Year by the National Society of Art Directors, he has also been a publication designer of great originality and distinction. He designed startling Eros in the early 60s, intellectually and visually astringent Fact in the mid-60s, lush and luscious Avant Garde late in the same decade, and founded U & lc in 1973 and saw it flourish into the 80s.
"But it is Lubalin and his typographics -- words, letters, pieces of letters, additions to letters, connections and combinations, and virtuoso manipulation of letters -- to which all must return. The "typographic impresario of our time," Dorfsman called him, a man who "profoundly influenced and changed our vision and perception of letter forms, words and language."
"Lubalin at his best delivers the shock of meaning through his typography-based design. Avant Garde literally moves ahead. The Sarah Vaughn Sings poster does just that. Ice Capades skates. There is a child in Mother & Child, and a family in Families. If words are a way of making meaning, then the shapes of their letters give voice, color, character and individuality to that meaning.
"The shock of meaning, in Lubalin's artful hands, delivers delight, as well, delight that flows from sight and insight. "Lubalin," praises Dorfsman, "used his extraordinary talent and taste to transform words and meaning from a medium to an inextricable part of the message? and in so doing, raised typography from the level of craft to art." And it is in his paper U & lc that a lot of threads in Lubalin's life and career get pulled together. It is publication dedicated to the joyful, riotous exploration of the complex relationships between words, letters, type and meaning -- an ebullient advertisement for himself as art director, editor, publisher and purveyor of the shock and delight of meaning through typography and design. "Right now," he said, "I have what every designer wants and few have the good fortune to achieve. I'm my own client. Nobody tells me what to do." And 170,000 subscribers which, with a conservative pass-along estimate, yields 400,000 readers, benefit.
"Herb Lubalin's unique contribution to our times goes well beyond design in much the same way that his typographic innovations go beyond the twenty-six letters, ten numerals and the handful of punctuation marks that comprise our visual, literal vocabulary. Lubalin's imagination, sight and insight have erased boundaries and pushed back frontiers.
"As an agency art director, he pushed beyond the established norm of copy-driven advertising and added a new dimension. As a publication designer, he pushed beyond the boundaries that constrained existing magazines -- both in form and content. In fact, some said he had pushed beyond the boundaries of "good taste," though in retrospect that work is more notable today for its graphic excellence than for its purported prurience. Lubalin helped push back the boundaries of the impact and perception of design -- from an ill-defined, narrowly recognized craft to a powerful communication medium that could put big, important ideas smack in the public eye.
"And finally, he pushed back what were believed to be the boundaries of design for entire generations of designers who were to follow. For such a quiet, gentle person to have accomplished so much is testimony indeed to the power of ideas in the hands of a master. "[Copyright 1981 by AIGA]
“According to Tom Geismar, the origin of Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar’s vibrating typeface prefigured the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll aesthetic.
“I believe that the ‘Electronic Banking’ ad was the first use of this lettering (1959),” Geismar told me. “It was then used shortly thereafter, in a cleaned up form, for the ‘That’s New York’ experimental typography booklet that appeared in Der Druckspiegel, the German graphic arts magazine, I believe in 1960. The piece was one of a series produced under the sponsorship of The Composing Room.”
Geismar says “I would credit the design of the lettering to Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar. I think we all had a hand in it, but it’s not clear. By the way, the lettering is very simply made: it’s just two pieces of identical Kodalith film, slightly offset.”
“We never had any specific plans for the alphabet,” he adds. “We had actually designed a few different alphabets during the 1960’s, at a time when we often made up titles and headlines as paste-ups of photostat images of lettering. I always said that, for our rather eclectic approach, we had a ‘bag of tricks’ that we would apply as appropriate. This alphabet was one of those ‘tricks’. It’s very much part of the ‘word as image’ approach that we have always believed in.” — Steven Heller
Robert Brownjohn (1925–1970) enrolled at the Institute of Design in 1944. He became a protégé of Moholy-Nagy and much of the structur- al quality in Brownjohn’s graphic design can be traced to his influence. Upon graduation, Brownjohn initially worked as an architectural planner in Chicago before returning to the Institute of Design to teach.
Architectural Forum noted that he “may have been the most talented student ever to have graduated from Chicago’s Institute of Design.” He personified Moholy-Nagy's idea that art and life can be integrated: “The true artist is the grindstone of the sense; he sharpens his eye, mind and feeling; he interprets ideas and concepts through his own media.”
In his short but intense life, Brownjohn helped to redefine graphic design, to move it from a formal to a conceptual art. His projects exemplify every aspect of his relationship to design, including emphasis on content over form and preferences with ordinary and personal images. His spirit of invention and designs for living in the machine age were balanced with references to the aesthetic models that Moholy-Nagy admired.
Here is the C. Ray Smith essay that accompanied Ivan Chermayeff and Thomas Geismar’s recognition as AIGA Medalists in 1979: “Finding relationships, as Ivan Chermayeff (1932 – 2017) has said, is what graphic design is all about. It is also what poetry is about—analogy, simile, metaphor, meaning beyond meanings, images beyond images. In the work of Chermayeff and Geismar, images are words, have meanings, communicate. They make visual images that are graphic poetry.
“Chermayeff and Thomas Geismar (1931 – ) combine their special kind of poetic communication with efficient practicality. Throughout their career they have shown two interests and directions: first, an emphasis on process or—to use the designers' by-now 20-year-old slogan—“problem solving”; and second, an exploration of a remarkable wide variety of aesthetic approaches to make their images. Their success at problem solving over the years has permitted them to plan, design and supervise an impressive number of corporate graphics programs across the broadest international framework. They are acclaimed for their methodology—for the clarity and organization of their graphics systems, for their pursuit of consistent details that work at every size and scale to solve the problems of multilingual programs. As a consequence they have collected commissions for corporate programs the way other designers collect book jacket commissions—Burlington Industries, Chase Manhattan Bank, Dictaphone, Mobil Corporation, Pan Am and Xerox, to name a few. Their work includes logos, symbols, letterheads, signs, annual reports, posters, bags and boxes and banners, trucks and airplanes, tank cars and tote bags, T-shirts and ties, television titles and credits.
“Designer Rudolph de Harak recalled in his presentation of the AIGA Medal that as early as 1959, when Chermayeff and Geismar were having an exhibition of their work in New York City, a news release stated that their design office “operated on the principle that design is a solution to problems, incorporating ideas in relation to the given problem, rather than a stylistic or modish solution.” Twenty years later, de Harak observed, “Their philosophy is still the same.”
“Our work starts from the information to be conveyed,” Ivan Chermayeff explains, “and only then goes on to make the structure subservient to that information or make the structure a way to help express the idea.”
“Chermayeff and Geismar met at Yale in the mid-1950s when so many ideas that are now a part of our lives were germinating. Chermayeff was born in London, the son of the distinguished architect-teacher Serge Chermayeff. He studied at Harvard, the Institute of Design in Chicago, and received a BFA at Yale. Geismar was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and studied concurrently at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, then received an MFA at Yale. There, both designers discovered a common interest in the design of alphabets or typefaces; they met doing research on papers about typeface design.
“Their degrees completed, Geismar went into the Army where he worked as a designer of exhibitions and graphics. Chermayeff went to work in New York, first for Alvin Lustig, then for CBS designing record covers. In 1957, they opened their own practice in New York.
“As designer Harak recalled: “Their work burst forth in the late 50s and early 60s smack in the middle of what is considered to be the time of the graphics revolution in this country. The mid-50s in New York was an exciting time, charged with creative electricity, the sparks flying from all the arts. In architecture, the United Nations building and Lever House had just gone up, and the way was paved for New York's first building by Mies van der Rohe in the late 50s. In the arts, Abstract Expressionism was being nudged aside by Pop painting and sculpture, to be followed by Op works. In the theater, Jerome Robbins had just done ”West Side Story.“ The jazz world was stunned by the passing of Charley Parker and razzle-dazzled by the cacophony of Ornette Coleman, Erick Dolphy and John Coltrane.
”In graphics, the establishment designers were Will Burtin, Alvin Lustig, Paul Rand, Lester Beall and Saul Bass, to name just a few. Art Kane was seriously contemplating leaving the drawing board for his cameras, and Jay Maisel had just started on his career as a photographer. Henry Wolf was turning the magazine industry on its ear with his fresh approach to design at Esquire, and Lou Dorfsman was already almost legendary at CBS. It was in this climate that Chermayeff and Geismar found themselves as partners, eager to incorporate their talents and skills.
“It is one thing to open a design shop today,” de Harak pointed out, “and to solicit work from an already generally alert design-oriented management. It was quite another issue in the late 1950s.”
“Yet around 1960, Chermayeff and Geismar started the craze for abstract corporate symbols with the one they designed for the Chase Manhattan Bank. They have produced over 100 such corporate symbols in the years since, including those for Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Screen Gems and the Bicentennial celebration.
“We try to do something that is memorable for a symbol,” Tom Geismar notes, “something that has some barb to it that will make it stick in your mind, make it different from the others, perhaps unique. And we want to make it attractive, pleasant and appropriate. The challenge is to combine all those things into something simple.”
“In meeting that challenge, Chermayeff and Geismar have explored as varied and different a collection of approaches and techniques as any designers now working.
“We do not have an office style,” Ivan Chermayeff has said, “like some designers who concentrate on graphics systems, such as grids. And we don't have a special style of illustration like those who are collectors of historical style motifs—Art Deco or 19th century typography. We are not involved in style and fashion in that way.”
“Instead, Ivan Chermayeff and Thomas Geismar are anthologists, assemblers and compilers who reduplicate the things they put together, multiply them ten fold—or more. It is the technique of repetition—what they call “collection.” In the process, they transform whatever they collect, give it a new turn and imbue it with new meaning. This technique of repetition, reduplication or multiplication—starting with a single item and reiterating throughout a corporate program—is a unifying element in their work.
“Chermayeff and Geismar collect samples of old typefaces and street signs because such things communicate directly. They are especially addicted to old art of anonymous printers and sign painters that show unconventional, nontraditional inventiveness of an improvisational nature—accidents, laissez faire, spontaneity and whimsy. It is the 1960s addiction for happenings. In fact, Chermayeff and Geismar's work often has the air of a graphics happening—casual, but hardly accidental.
Lester Beall’s 1992 AIGA Medal Citation by R. Roger Remington: Creativity speaks to the heart of the process of graphic design. What were the creative forces that allowed Lester Beall (American, 1903 –1969) to produce consistently treat art and design over the span of a 44-year career? Over this span of time, Beall produced solutions to design problems that were fresh and innovative. He studied the dynamic visual form of the European avant-garde, synthesized parts into his own aesthetic and formed graphic design applications for business and industry that were appropriate, bold, and imaginative. In his mature years he led the way with creative and comprehensive packaging and corporate identity programs that met the needs of his clients. Along the way in his work manner and style, Beall proved to American business that the graphic designer was a professional that could creatively solve problems and at the same time deal with pragmatic issues of marketing and budget. The qualities and values that led to Beall's effectiveness are timeless and provide contemporary practitioners with an historical reference base upon which to evaluate present standards.
Beall felt that the designer “must work with one goal in mind—to integrate the elements in such a manner that they will combine to produce a result that will convey not merely a static commercial message, but an emotional reaction as well. If we can produce the kind of art which harnesses the power of the human instinct for that harmony of form, beauty and cleanness that seems inevitable when you see it? then I think we may be doing a job for our clients.” For Beall that creativity was present at every stage of the design process. He said, “the designer's role in the development, application and protection of the trademark may be described as pre-creative, creative and post-creative.”
Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1903, Beall's early childhood years were spent in St. Louis and Chicago. He was educated at Chicago's Lane Technical School and graduated from the University of Chicago. He began his design career in 1927. By 1935 Beall had decided to move to New York and in late September of that year had opened a studio/office in his apartment in Tudor City on Manhattan's east side. In 1936, while maintaining the office in New York, he moved to Wilton, Connecticut where he established his home and studio in a rural setting. He was to remain in Wilton until 1950. Many of the significant works from this period were done in this location. Through the 1930s and 1940s Beall produced innovative and highly regarded work for clients including the Chicago Tribune, Sterling Engraving, The Art Directors Club of New York, Hiram Walker, Abbott Laboratories and Time magazine. Of particular interest was his work for the Crowell Publishing Company which produced Colliers magazine. The promotional covers “Will There Be War?” and “Hitler's Nightmare” are powerful designs which distill messages of the time. In these works he utilizes angled elements, iconic arrows, silhouetted photographs and dynamic shapes, all of which captures the essence of his personal style of the late 1930s. Also of interest in this period are the remarkable poster series for the United States Government's Rural Electrification Administration. In all Beall designed three series of posters between 1937 and 1941 with the simple goals of increasing the number of rural Americans who would electrify their homes and increasing public awareness of the benefits of electricity. His poster for the ill-fated “Freedom Pavilion” at the 1939 World's Fair was another dynamic example of this time in which he used what he called “thrust and counter-thrust” of design elements.
Beall had moved his office to 580 Fifth Avenue around 1940. He worked there as well as from his home in Wilton, Connecticut. In 1949 he purchased Dumbarton Farm in Brookfield and, in 1950, he moved to consolidate all his operation there. He had developed some of the farm's out buildings into a professionally-praised office and studio space. During the 1950s and '60s Beall's design office expanded both in its staff and scope, adding associate designers and mounting full-scale corporate identification campaigns for large companies such as a Caterpillar Tractor, Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, The New York Hilton and Merrill Lynch, Fenner Pierce and Smith, Inc. His identity program for International Paper Company from 1960 was his most extensive identity program and is noteworthy for the graphics standards manual, one of the first to be so fully articulated.
Beall maintained, throughout his life, a core of sources which stimulated his perception, creativity and methods of making art and design. He was a highly visual person with a great need to express himself. Always first and at the center of his ways of working were his form experimentation in the drawing and painting of the human figure. He was always at work in his studio, whether it was creating design, art or photography. His wife, Dorothy Miller Beall, characterized her husband as “first of all an artist, not only because of a vital and important talent, but because of an emotional spiritual quality, a very special attitude.” His daughter Joanna remembers this fine art expression as “a major part of his thinking.” Beall, in his memoirs, confirms this by recalling that “all through my life as a designer, I have spent considerable time developing myself as an artist. I am constantly drawing, with particular emphasis on the figure, which I find fascinating though difficult in term of evolving something that is not completely abstract but certainly not literal or realistic.”
Photography also was a lifelong interest to Beall and an important part of his creative process. He experimented with photography and photographic processes almost from the beginning of his career in design in Chicago. Cameras, a photographic studio and a darkroom were always necessary for his visual experiments. In the '30s he had seen the experimental photographic work of the European avant-garde designers such as Herbert Bayer, El Lissitzky, and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Beall would experiment regularly with photograms, and with straight photography both in and out of the studio. Even today, many of Beall's photographic images remain unusual and innovative visual experiments. Beall carried his camera with him on all his travels. These images formed an image bank from which he drew inspiration for his lectures. Others found their way into direct graphic design application for his clients such as in the cover for ORS, a journal for health services professionals. A more complex photographic technique is used on the cover of What's New, a house organ of Abbott Laboratories. This image from 1939 shows a complex integration of photographic and graphic elements, set in a scale which juxtaposes the size relationships of foreground and background.
The psychologist Erich Fromm said, “Education for creativity is nothing short of education for living.” Beall's creative activities were powerfully influenced, enhanced and supported by the working environments that he established to support them. Whether he was working from his office near the Loop in Chicago, an office in a New York skyscraper or from the pastoral setting in Connecticut, Beall was sensitive to the importance of the space around him and how this could influence his creativity. In 1968 he wrote: “By living and working in the country I felt I could enjoy a more integrated life, and although I still need the periodic stimulation of New York City, the opportunity and creative activity in an area of both beauty and tranquility seemed to me to far exceed anything that a studio and residence in New York might offer—the way a man lives is essential to the work he produces. The two cannot be separated. If I could condense into a single idea the thinking we are trying to do here at Dumbarton Farm, it would be to achieve, through organic and integrated design, that power of inevitability. This has for a long time been an effort to work out a way of living for me and my family—and for the people who work with me. It gives me more time at home. It surrounds me with atmosphere I feel is pretty essential to good creativity.” With Beall it was not so much that he had his studio in the country, but that he had a way of life built around the country, part of which involved having his studio there at his elbow.
As with other pioneers of his era, Beall believed that the designer cannot work in a vacuum. He remarked, “all experience in fields directly or indirectly related to design must be absorbed and stored up, to provide the inspirational source that guides, nourishes and enriches the idea-flow of the designer.” Beall's own interests in other art forms provided further stimulus to his immense curiosity and creativity. Dorothy Beall wrote that Lester “believed that anyone interested in design must necessarily be interested in other fields of expression—the theatre, ballet, photography, painting, literature, as well as music, for from any of these the alert designer can at times obtain not only ideas related to his advertising problem, but genuine inspiration.” His books and periodicals were another great source of inspiration for Beall. He collected books and periodicals seriously from the beginning of his design career in Chicago. By the Sixties, Beall had accumulated a major personal collection of publications on creative forms such as art, design, photography and architecture. He also collected seminal magazines such as Cahiers d'Art and rare volumes such as the famous Bauhausbucher. Music was another important ingredient of Beall's creative environment. He was very familiar with jazz, having grown up with it in Chicago. While working in his studio there in the mid-'20s, he would often listen to live broadcasts on radio. Throughout his life, he would surround himself with music, be it jazz, or the classical compositions of Europeans such as Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Beall was a major synthesizer of the ideas of European avant-garde artists and designers into the mainstream of design for American business. An associate Fred Hauck, with whom he had shared office space in Chicago, was probably the major vehicle through which Beall received those exciting ideas from Europe. Hauck, who had lived and painted in Paris and had gone to Hans Hofman's school in Munich, returned to Chicago and shared with Beall an enthusiasm for the European artists and designers, especially the Bauhaus. Hauck showed Beall valued copies of the Bauhaus books and publications of the avant-garde which he had brought back with him. This interest as well as such publications as Arts et Metier Graphiques, and Bebrauschgraphik helped Beall consolidate his own thinking away from a limiting vision of design as ordinary middle-American commercial illustration and towards a new dynamic, progressive form of graphic communication.
Gene Federico’s 1987 AIGA Medal Citation by Steven Heller: Good design has been an anomaly in American advertising ever since the turn of the century when copywriters were given total rein over image makers. Unlike European advertising of the same period when the foremost artist/designers were made culture heroes, it was virtually inconceivable that an American art director could be more than just a layout person. This changed in the 1930s when the advertising pioneer Ernest Elmo Caulkins, realizing the strength of word and picture, devised the forerunner of the creative team. By 1939, when Gene Federico (1918 – 1999), a twenty-one-year-old Pratt Institute graduate with a special interest in typography, entered the profession, a few exceptional designers had already begun to change the look and content of some mainstream advertising, paving the way for a distinctly American modern style.
By the late 1940s, after an apprenticeship at an ad agency, a tour of duty in the Army and an unexceptional stint as a magazine art associate, Federico realized that graphic design was his passion and advertising his métier. Soon he became one of America's premiere advertising art directors and designers, bridging the often wide gap between the two jobs. His selection as the 1987 AIGA Medalist is important for two reasons: It honors someone who, for over four decades, has responsibly stretched the boundaries of advertising design with typographic elegance and conceptual acuity, and, as a principal of Lord Geller Federico Einstein, continues to contribute to an American graphic design vocabulary.
Born on February 6, 1918, in New York's Greenwich Village, Federico was the middle child with two sisters. When the family moved to the Bronx, he attended P.S. 89 which, in keeping with a venerable New York City public school tradition, sponsored a number of poster competitions for city agencies and events. Federico's earliest advertisement was a poster painted in tempera for the ASPCA. When the family moved to Coney Island a few years later, he enrolled in Abraham Lincoln High School. This was the home of the legendary Art Squad led by Leon Friend, who taught intensive classes in commercial design and illustration for over fifty years. As an Art Squad member Federico was exposed to the work of the leading European advertising artists. One inspiration was an arresting, Cubist-inspired poster by A.M. Cassandre promoting the S.S. Amsterdam. Awed by its stark geometry and subtle hues, he modeled his own early poster style on Cassandre's use of bold lettering and dominant painted image. Though he designed pages for school publications, Federico explains that “it was the direct message of a poster that propelled me into advertising.”
Brooklyn's Pratt Institute was the next stage in his education. In its voluminous library, Federico pored though the current European design magazines and American design annuals soaking up the influence of Cassandre, Lester Beall and Paul Rand (the latter, only a few years older than Federico, was already making significant inroads into advertising design). At Pratt form became an enduring watchword, which Federico says is the basis of “a work so powerful that it is hard to find any weakness in it.”
Tom Benrimo, a popular advertising designer and illustrator at the time, was a formidable teacher who recommended that Federico take a job with his client, the Abbott Kimball Company, a small advertising agency in New York. One of Federico's first professional assignments was a clever conceptual piece entitled “Brains and Luck,” a brochure promoting the agency that was accepted into the 1939 New York Art Director's show. Concurrently, he took a few weeknight classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan under the tutelage of Howard Trafton. One Lesson was on the effects of dumb light in which Federico recalls “you just hang a naked lit bulb to see its effects on a model.” Another was Trafton's analysis of African sculpture, “his emphasis on distortion and negative space explained the root of all graphic experience.” On those seemingly endless, noisy subway rides back to his home in Brooklyn he would often discuss the evening's lessons with Norman Geller, a younger classmate, who years later would become his business partner.
In 1941, seduced by a job offer in the ad department at Bamberger's Department Store, he decided to migrate to Newark, New Jersey. There he could do good work, double his salary and most important, live away from home for the first time. Four months later, Uncle Sam offered a less comfortable home away from home. From April 1941 to November 1945 Federico was a GI first stationed in the United States and then sent to North Africa and Europe, where he served in a camouflage unit. Field work allowed the occasional respite to design manuals, posters, paint a mural for an officer's club and, in Oran, organize an enlisted man's art show. Federico returned from the war to the job at Abbott Kimball, where he stayed less than a year.
Federico's pre- and postwar design was exhibited in 1946 at the prestigious A-D Gallery in a show entitled “The Four Veterans.” Will Burtin, then art director of Fortune magazine, impressed by what he saw, asked the young designer to become his art associate. “I thought that I should try editorial,” he painfully recalls, “but I hated it. I loved Will, but I couldn't follow the way he designed. So completely analytical, he could take the most complex subject and then build it into a dramatic structure. It was brilliant, but it wasn't my kind of design.” Federico resigned after 10 months, and took a temporary job supervising layout at Architectural Forum where, admitting to his preference for the single image and a definite problem with achieving kinetic flow through pictures, he did merely a so-so job. At this point, he decided to freelance.
For a year and a half Federico struggled while his wife, Helen, worked as an assistant to Paul Rand. “With Helen's salary, we were able to manage,” he says. Rand suggested that Federico take a job at Grey Advertising where he met Bill Bernbach, Phyllis Robinson, Ned Doyle and Bob Gage. They left shortly to open an agency with Mac Dane, called Doyle Dane Bernbach. Three years later, Gage invited Federico to join the new firm, and he was given the Woman's Day magazine account. This resulted in a series of ads that revealed Federico's deft pictographic sensibility.
Though some advertising designers, like Rand and Beall, signed their already distinctive work, Federico's signature was found in the construction of the typographical image. “Lester Beall opened my eyes to the idea that type could be used to emphasize the message,” says Federico talking about his roots. “One of his ads had the great line, 'To hell with eventually. Let's concentrate on now.' The 'e' in 'eventually' was very large and 'now' was the same size. The simple manipulation of these letter forms allowed the viewer to immediately comprehend the message.” Federico's method is also based on the integration of text and image and so he has always worked intimately with a copywriter. He says, “I too look for those simple elements in copy.” And warns that “when the designer doesn't read the copy to catch the sound of the words, he runs the risk of misusing the typography. If the rhythm of the words is disregarded, the copy is likely to be laid out incorrectly.” Federico's best-known ad for Woman's Day typifies this rhythmic sensitivity. It has the catch-line “Going Out,” and shows a photo of a woman riding a bicycle with wheels made from the two lowercase Futura 'o's in the headline. The aim of this ad was to persuade potential advertisers that three million-plus devoted readers went out of their way to buy this check-out counter magazine. The ads apparently did well for the client, but more importantly proved the power of persuasive visual simplicity in a field that often errs on the side of overstatement.
Federico's advertising approach is more related to attitude than style. Despite Lou Dorfsman's assertion that Federico is the prince of Light Line Gothic (admittedly on of his favorite typefaces), few of his ads conform to a single formula or evoke stylistic déjà vu. Nevertheless, one trait is dominant: his love of and skill with type. This talent matured during the mid-1950s. He fondly remembers, “It was then that Aaron Burns (who was working at the Composing Room) introduced me to a range of new typefaces. He would get so excited about new developments, and we would have fun working together.” This was more than the typical designer and supplier relationship; Burns also developed formative outlets for Federico and others to experiment with expressive typography. One was a series of four sixteen-page booklets (written by Percy Seitlin) that allowed designers total freedom to interpret a specific subject with type, photography and illustration. Herb Lubalin did one on jazz, Lester Beall did cars, Brownjohn Chermeyeff and Geismar did New York City and Federico did Love of Apples. “I wanted to try something where I used metal type in extreme ways without having to cut it-without cutting up proofs or playing with stats,” explains Federico about this masterpiece of descriptive typography. “For some time, I had known that if you stacked Title Gothics they would have a different look than traditional types. So the whole book was based on that simple idea.” But the aesthetics of type were not his only concern, as he says, “The message of the book was that nature's beauty is being radically altered. There's a line that reads 'When we, in business, industrial America began to get smart about apples, we packaged them and packaged them and packaged them until the apple itself became a package.' I illustrated that point with a photograph of an apple with a string tied around it.” In another designer's hands, this subtle environmental critique might have become a screaming polemic, yet Federico's elegant touch transformed these few pages into memorable visual poetry. One could say the same for a great deal of his advertising.
After the stint with Doyle Dane Bernbach, he went to Douglas D. Simon and then spent seven and a half years at Benton and Bowles. There he says “practically nothing happened,” though he actually created some memorable advertising for IBM's Office Products Division, including those for the introduction of the early electric and first Selectric typewriters. For the Selectric, the first office machine to use a type element, Federico wrote a slogan, “A new type of writer,” which, like some other excellent ideas for IBM, went unused. One of his favorites, and therefore the most frustrating rejection, is a 'knotted pencil,' a symbol to announce IBM's new 'Stretch' computer, which at the time could solve more problems than any other computer. With his creative-teammate copywriter Bob Larimer, Federico devised the archetype of one of today's favored visual cliches. Larimer has recently written about it, saying, “When longer ago than we care to admit we created an ad for IBM illustrated with a knotted pencil, we thought the symbol was totally original. Since that distant day, the knotted pencil has turned up repeatedly in art, advertising and commercial illustration.” Despite the reasons for IBM's rejection (and Federico never really found out why), it underscores the heart of the advertising dilemma: How effectively does good design contribute to selling an advertising concept? Federico says, “It depends on who is doing the selling. If I were a salesman like George Lois or Lou Dorfsman, I could sell almost anything. But you don't always have such good fortune. Your work is presented by account people who lack sufficient feeling for it.”
The need for more control over the quality and destiny of his work motivated Federico to start his own agency. However, the process was not rapid or easy. In the early 1960s at Benton and Bowles, Federico ran an art group that included Emil Gargano, Roy Grace and Dick Hess. There he met a copywriter named Dick Lord, who left to become creative director of Warwick & Legler and invited Federico to join him. Four years passed before taking up the offer to become art supervisor. Eight months later in early 1967, citing general malaise, both Lord and Federico decided to form a partnership called Lord Southard Federico. Southard, who was brought in to lure accounts, soon left making it Lord Federico. “That added a sort of regal sound to my name,” muses Federico. One day on the street, he ran into Norman Geller, his former classmate and subway companion, who as a former art director turned business wiz had done quite well with his own agency. Wanting to take on a new challenge, he joined the fledgling firm. Soon the name of copywriter, Arthur Einstein, was added to the shingle. With two writers and two art people as principals, Lord Geller Federico Einstein was built on a solid creative foundation. At first business was slow, but in time the firm acquired some fashion, beauty and “nuts and bolt” accounts. One of Federico's most pleasing assignments is for Napier Jewelry, which for eighteen years he has done single-handedly, and whose basic format has not changed since the first ad. Of the format, a close-up photograph of the product on a model with the simple line, “Napier is? (with a descriptive word),” Federico says, “It's still fresh! And that to me, is the best advertising.” In the early days of LGFE, he and Lord collaborated on a delightful campaign of full-page newspaper ads advertising The New Yorker using selected editorial contents from the product, with only one small advertising line at the bottom, “Yes, The New Yorker.” Its message is as naturally timely and its design as fittingly timeless as the magazine itself. [xlist_2018]