TYPOGRAPHY USA
Call for Entries to the Type Directors Club 5th Annual
Awards Exhibit of Typographic Excellence
Ray Komai [Designer]
[Type Directors Club of New York] Ray Komai [Designer]: TYPOGRAPHY USA [Call for Entries to the Type Directors Club 5th Annual Awards Exhibit of Typographic Excellence]. New York: The Type Directors Club of New York, 1959. Original edition. Poster machine folded in sixths for mailing [as issued]. Printed in color on recto and black to verso on a Mohawk Superfine Text Smooth sheet. Expected wear to the heavily inked folds, pinholes to corners, and a short, closed tear to one fold edge. Minor handling wear, but a very good example of this rare poster.
15 x 24-inch (38 x 61 cm) poster designed by Ray Komai as a “Call for Entries to the Type Directors Club 5th Annual Awards Exhibit of Typographic Excellence” and to serve as notice of the forum “What is New in American Typography” on Saturday, April 18, 1959. Forum panels included Saul Bass, Herbert Bayer, Lester Beall, Will Burtin, Louis Dorfsman, Alvin Eisenman, Gene Federico, William Golden, Morton Goldsholl, Allen Hurlburt, Robert M. Jones, George Krikorian, Matthew Leibowitz, Leo Lionni, Herbert Lubalin, Paul Rand, Herbert Roan, Ladislav Sutnar and Bradbury Thompson.
Ray Komai (American, 1918 – 2010) was born in Los Angeles and unwillingly relocated to Manzanar, one of ten American concentration camps where over 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from December 1942 to 1945. But hey—shit happens—right? Anyway, Komai used his “radiant talent, determined industry, and a cheerful disposition” to find work as a Designer in New York City after the war. He designed furniture, textiles, and magazines in the organic style of the era and was his work was rewarded with inclusion in the “Good Design” exhibitions sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Komai is remembered for his fabrics for Laverne Originals and his whimsical covers for the Architectural Record. In an interesting twist of fate, Komai left New York to design exhibitions and publications for the United States Information Service, promoting the country that had once put him behind barbed wire. Author Doug Clouse said “Komai left behind beautiful work that provides insight into the relationship between design and nationalism.” That’s the truth.
A single generation divided two of the graphic designers who spoke at the Type Directors Clubs' 1959 conference “What is New in American Typography" Herb Lubalin (American, 1918 – 1981) and Ladislav Sutnar (Czechoslavakian, 1897 – 1976). Sparks must have flown between them when Lubalin flatly stated that modern American typography may be ugly, but “there can be warmth and charm in deliberate ugliness.”
Sutnar countered with a program manifesto called “The New Typography's Expanding Future.” Sutnar looked to the future, his arguments and principles logically link together while his language was exacting and terse, much like his functional design.
Sutnar was 62 in 1959 with an incredibly productive and successful life behind him. His archive of work contains more than 23,000 items of realized and unrealized graphic design projects. His work has been printed in thousands of publications, but remained anonymous, concealed -- circulating in the everyday life of American society. As an American designer, Ladislav Sutnar was active in marketing and advertising, where leaflets, direct mai, advertisements and promotional catalogs were published in tens of thousands of copies.
When writing his paper in 1959, Sutnar fearfully observed the crisis of values and ideals, which had been the foundation of great invention in modern American graphic design of the 1940s and 1950s. The roots of this energy stemmed from the European “new typography” of the 1920s and 1930s which, in the title of his paper, he prophesized as being the “expanding future” and regarded it as the starting point for its further development. However,the younger generation did not really know how to comprehend the legacy of “new typography.“ They either imitated it formally without knowing the original sources (a translation of Tschichold into English did not appear in the USA until 1995) or yearned for change.
Lubalin’s “deliberation of ugliness“ proved to Sutnar he needed to bluntly warn against typographic formalism in his paper: “Smart gimmicks, the short-lived effects of contradictory modes, the emotional style revivals,the speculative new false styles, the novelties of typeface preference . . . all will be quickly forgotten.“
What really irritated Sutnar (more than new design decoration) were the conditions in modern American advertising: “Advertising has ridiculed the moral values which stood at its origin.“ Sutnar was one of the prime movers in modern American advertising and corporate identity design and considered advertising to be an art for masses . . . a form of quality promotion of quality goods, which fulfills the highest artistic criteria because it influences general taste, life and environment. His well-known Addo-X (a Swedish firm selling calculators) corporate identity, the Vera fashion company, and Carr's department store in New Jersey were among the first complex corporate identity programs. They stressed creativity and inventiveness of a company's image and carried through its advertising. It was therefore not very surprising that the 62 -year-old Sutnar was disturbed by what was happening and, gifted with foresight, he sensed what was to come.
Sutnar belonged to a futuristically-thinking generation of designers. A meeting with one of the greatest of them, Buckminster Fuller, resulted in the brilliant and visionary publication entitled Transport: Next Half Century (1950). “With the world becoming even smaller,a new sense of world inter-dependence comes sharply into focus. And with it,a new need for visual information capable of worldwide comprehension becomes evident. This will require many new types of visual information,simplified information systems, and improved forms and techniques. It will also make urgent the development of mechanical devices for information processing,integration and transmission.These advances will also influence the design of visual information for domestic consumption.“
No one in the Type Directors Club lecture room in 1959 imagined what a personal computer would look like one day. Most in the audience were more concerned with the question of whether typography is a craft or an art. There was no response to the prophetic forecasts of the information age,which sounded demanding, strict and categorical.
Sutnar, who was more than thirty years ahead in his intellectual visions, must have realized the exceptional nature of his paper. Being in his heart a teacher, he tried to logically convince and prepare for the forthcoming information and computer reality. Just as Tschichold did in the 1920s, Sutnar formulated the principles. He compared the situation in design to natural sciences,where the discoveries of preceding generations are not forgotten but developed in future generations. He continued the legacy of "new typography" and stated: “The characteristics of our environment are the increasing speed of communication and mass consumption. Everybody needs quickly perceptible typography today; not just the architect or teacher,but even the jet plane pilot who cannot read his instrument panel fast enough to survive without efficient typography.“