WATCHING WORDS MOVE
[Robert Brownjohn] Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006. First edition thus. Slim square quarto. Printed paper covered boards. [64] pp. 48 pages of typographic experiments set exclusively in Helvetica, followed by 16 pages of contemporary essays. Yellow spine faintly sunned and gently handled, but a narly fine copy.
6.25 x 6.25-inch hardcover book with 64 pages: 48 pages of typographic experiments set exclusively in Helvetica, followed by 16 pages of charming tributes by by Michael Carabetta, Steven Heller, Kit Hinrichs, George Lois and April Greiman. Originally published in Typographica 6 [New Series], 1962.
Watching Words Move was a work of experimental typography that used letters in a single typeface, Helvetica, to achieve surprising results — motion and narrative, emotion and humor. First published in 1962 it 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.
From the Publisher: “Words have the power to move. In 1962 a modest design studio created its own riff on that statement in the form of a small booklet of typographic brilliance, and changed forever how designers thought about the graphic potential of words. Decades later, the impact of watching words move is still felt. Never before had the idea been so lucidly and playfully expressed that type itself could speak, that word-forms carried their own implied visual meanings; that the placement of letters on the page could suggest motion, narrative, emotionjust about anything. Now widely available for the first time, this reproduction of the original includes thoughts by influential designers George Lois, April Greiman, Kit Hinrichs, Michael Carabetta, and Steven Heller on the lasting impact of this lively type primer, and presents its still-fresh innovation to new generations of designers.”
Lois writes, Watching Words Move is “a publication of typographic sleight-of-hand and conceptual thinking unequaled in the ensuing forty-six years.”
Early in 1959 Robert Brownjohn took part in a discussion organized by the Advertising Typographers Association of America. Sitting around a table with five other typographers he repeatedly emphasized a single proposition:
“I think the revolution in typography has been in terms of image. The picture and the word have become one thing. The only real advance in advertising typography has been in the use of type not as an adjunct to an illustration of the image but in its use as the image itself.You have found that the old image, the old word, doesn’t mean enough any more to say what you want it to say. It’s too familiar . . . I think perhaps our modern poets have created the modern typography.”
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.”
“. . . To most Americans, the idea that images can be words with meanings is new and unfamiliar. But in the Orient where words are pictures—pictograms and ideograms—it does not come as a surprise. There, scrolls of calligraphy have been hung on walls like pictures for centuries. Chermayeff and Geismar's pictures are similarly artful words in a Western language.