INDUSTRIAL DESIGN 4
August 1954
Jane Fisk Mitarachi [Editor]
Jane Fisk Mitarachi [Editor]: INDUSTRIAL DESIGN. New York: Whitney Publications, Inc., Volume 1, Number 4, August 1954. Original Edition. Side-stitched perfect bound wrappers. 140 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Multiple paper stocks. Elaborate graphic design throughout. Wrappers lightly worn and rubbed, faint tape shadows to spine, waviness from improper dry storage, but a very good copy.
9 x 12 magazine with 140 pages and illustrated throughout and printed on different stocks, including an amazing variety of editorial content. Here is what the publishers wanted this magazine to accomplish: "A bi-monthly review of form and technique in designing for industry. Published for active industrial designers and the design executives throughout industry who are concerned with product design, development and marketing."
This issue of INDUSTRIAL DESIGN celebrated all the best of modern American industrial design. Includes many examples of furniture, ceramics, housewares, appliances, automobiles, buildings, radios, projectors, televisions, and many other objects designed for the burgeoning postwar middle class.
- Five Years of Good Design: Edgar Kaufmann analyses the first five years of the landmark collaboration between Chicago’s Merchandise Mart and the Museum of Modern Art.
- Stainless Comes to Dinner by Ada Louise Huxtable. Gio Ponti vs. Don Wallance.
- Two Views of Design Progress at Bell and Howell by Malcolm Townsley and Peter Muller-Munk
- REdesign: Unitrace Pipe
- Ampex Tape Recorder
- The Chambered Nautilus
- A Big Year for Japan
- Dayliner by John Pile
- Case Study MCMLIV
- Is the Kitchen Disintegrating? Two full-page illustrations by Saul Steinberg
- From Linotype to Linofilm
- What’s Selling American Cars
- Do-It and You
- Why are They Buying Foreign Cars?
- Photographs by Aaron Siskind
- The Fee Question by Harold Van Doren
- Fourth Design Conference at Aspen by George Oeri: Alvin Lustig, Herbert Bayer, Saul Bass, Richard neutra and many more. Renderings by Richard Neutra.
- Impact Extrusions by William Renwick
- A Flatter Ellipse
- Design Review: furniture, ceramics, housewares, appliances, automobiles, radios, projectors, televisions, and many other objects by Charles Eames, George Nelson, Bill Lam, Russel Wright, etc.
- Regular features include Contributors’ Profiles, Letters, News, Editorial, Technics, Design Review, and Manufacturers Literature.
Here is former ID editor Ralph Caplan's recounting the magazines birth: "Fifty years ago, the publisher Charlie Whitney ran into Henry Dreyfuss. 'Henry,' he said, 'I'm about to publish a magazine for industrial designers.' 'Wonderful,' Henry replied. 'There are 14 of us.' Caplan remembered, "I.D. was not begun as a magazine for industrial designers, but as a magazine for anyone who had a stake in design and cared about it. This allowed a great deal of editorial latitude."
In DESIGN LITERACY (Second Edition, Allworth Press), Steven Heller wrote an essay describing the historical significance of Alvin Lustig's short tenure as Industrial Design's Art Director: "A design icon doesn't come along every day. To be so considered it must not only transcend its function and stand the test of time, but also must represent the time in which it was produced. The cover of Industrial Design, Vol. 1 No.1, February 1954, was not just the emblem of a new publishing venture, but a testament to one man's modernism; one of the last works created by Alvin Lustig (1915-1955), who suffered an untimely death from diabetes in 1955 at the age of forty-five."
"On the editorial side, however, Whitney decided to take a calculated risk by promoting two young Interiors associate editors to co-editors of Industrial Design. Jane Fisk (now Jane Thompson of the architectural firm Thompson & Wood in Cambridge) and Deborah Allen may have been inexperienced in the field of industrial design but nevertheless had a clear plan to introduce a distinctly journalistic sensibility into professional publishing that emphasized criticism and analysis rather than the puff pieces common to the genre. As it turned out, this became a point of philosophical contention between the designer and editors."
"If they had a choice the editors would have preferred an art director who, as Thompson explained, "would have been in the trenches with us," a team player with journalistic instincts rather than a distant presence with a formalist sensibility. Because Lustig designed the initial dummy and subsequent two issues in his own studio and returned with the completed layouts to the editorial offices he had made certain assumptions about the presentation of content that were often inconsistent with the editors' vision. "We did not want the words to be gray space, we wanted them to have meaning," recalled Thompson about wanting more spontaneous design responses to the material. But instead of being journalistically intuitive, Lustig imposed his formal preconceptions, and designed the magazine as he would a book."
"Blocks of text type were indeed used as gray matter to frame an abundance of precisely silhouetted photographs. But if there was a problem it was more in the editors' minds than Lustig's design. While it was not as journalistically paced as say, a Life magazine, it was respectfully, indeed elegantly neutral allowing, for a wide range of material to be presented without interference. Moreover, it was what Whitney wanted, so the editors reconciled themselves to building the magazine's editorial reputation through informative features written by authors not previously associated with trade publishing."
"Thompson nevertheless hated the first cover with its tight grid and silhouetted photographs. Instead she wanted to disrupt the design purity with a few well composed coverlines. She further favored a conceptual method of intersecting photography, resulting in an editorial idea, not a pure design. Lustig thought coverlines would sully the design and intersecting ideas would be too contrived. Years later, Thompson grudgingly admitted that maybe Lustig's judgment was wiser: "He wanted to make a strong simple statement, which he believed (perhaps erroneously since Industrial Design did not have to compete on the newsstand) had to stand up against the covers of the elegant fashion magazines." Lustig's design set the standard for future covers, and his successor, Martin Rosensweig, continued to produce covers for a few years afterward that more rigidly adhered to the same formal practices."
"Despite these creative tensions, the early issues of Industrial Design reveal a shift in the nature of professional publishing from a trade to cultural orientation that was in no small way underscored by Lustig's classically modern design."