Make It Bigger

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101
Make it Bigger
Make It
PR I N C ETO N AR C H ITE CTU R AL PR E SS
N E W YO R K
t Bigger
Paula Scher
3
Published by
Princeton Architectural Press
37 East Seventh Street
New York, New York 10003
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2005 Princeton Architectural Press
All rights reserved
Printed in China
08 07 06 05 4 3 2 1 First paperback edition
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context
of reviews.
Every reasonable attempt has been made to
identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.
Editor: Mark Lamster
Editor Paperback Edition: Lauren Nelson
Copyeditor: Lauren Neefe
Proofreader: Cathryn Drake
Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Ann Alter,
Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning, Megan Carey,
Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Jan Cigliano, Clare
Jacobson, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee, Evan
Schoninger, Jane Sheinman, Lottchen Shivers,
Katherine Smalley Myers, Scott Tennant,
Jennifer Thompson, and Deb Wood of Princeton
Architectural Press
Kevin C. Lippert, publisher
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scher, Paula.
Make it bigger / Paula Scher.1st paperback
ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-56898-548-7
1. Graphic artsUnited StatesHistory20th
century. 2. DesignUnited StatesHistory20th
century. 3. Scher, Paula. I. Title.
NC998.5.A1 S34 2005
741.6'023'73dc22
2005009938
This book is dedicated to the profession of graphic design and to all the
talented wits, intellects, and humanists who are its best practitioners.
Any jackass can kick down a barn door. It takes a carpenter to build one.
OVER
the past thirty years the design field has not changed all that much. The basic
motivating factors that fire up designers and push them to produce their best
work remain the same. Designers want to make things, or make things up, and have those
things that theyve made or made up seen, used, and appreciated by lots of people.
The things designers make may help someone decide to read a book or a magazine, buy
some recorded music or candy, see a play or a ballet. They may help someone navigate a building
or a Web site, understand technology, or vote in an election. The things designers design may be
powerful, provocative, funny, obsessive, or elegant. But they are all created with the express
purpose that other people will use them in some way.
For designers to have the things they make, or make up, get made (and seen, used, and
appreciated by lots of people), they must necessarily collaborate with editors, publishers,
retailers, and businessmenthe people who have some stake, and therefore an important
say, in the very things that are being made by designers. This book is about that collaboration.
In rereading this text I realize that in only a few instances do I make reference to the massive
technological changes that occurred in the graphic design profession during the last three
decades. While I acknowledge that technological changes have influenced design style and
methodologies, have created new disciplines, and have certainly affected design production,
they have had little to do with the way I approach design. Its not that Im a LudditeI dont have
anything personal against the computer. I feel about computers the way I feel about cars: I need
them, I drive them, Im fond of them, but I dont want to hang around and talk about them.
Ive never been interested in technology. Im interested in people. If technology has changed
during the past thirty years, people have not.
Corporate
Politics
101
7
( 1 972 )
A P P R O VA L P R O C E S S : C B S R E C O R D S A D V E R T I S I N G D E PA R T M E N T
CBS RECORDS PRESIDENT
I N T E R N AT I O N A L
RECORD CLUB
SALES
COLUMBIA VP
EPIC VP
CENTRAL
CORE MARKETING
VP MARKETING
A&R
LEGAL & FIN.
LEGAL & FIN.
A&R
MERCHANDISING
PR ODUCT MANAG E RS
PR ODUCT MANAG E RS
ADVE RTIS I N G
C OVE R S
V P / C R E AT I V E D I R E C T O R
4
C O P Y D I R E C TO R
A R T D I R E C TO R
A S S T. A R T D I R E C T O R
1
COPY WRITERS
DESIGNERS
DESIGNERS
Me
M E C H A N I C A L S D E P T.
VP MARKETING
C O R P O R AT E P O L I T I C S 1 0 1
MY FIRST
staff design job out of art school was in the advertising and promotion department of CBS Records. I held the lowest possible
position: I reported to the assistant art director, who reported to
the art director, who reported to the creative director, who reported
to the vice president of merchandising, who reported to the vice
president of sales, who reported to the president of CBS Records.
I was teamed with a copywriter, and we created ads that promoted
albums in trade publications like Cashbox and Billboard. We
would be given a work order, which contained a job number and
stated the name of the album and the band to be promoted, the
publication in which the ad would appear, the size of the ad, and
some other basic content requirements. This information came
from the product manager of the band, who was typically the author of the marketing plan for a given album.
The copywriter and I would collaborate on a concept and
headline. Then the copywriter would craft the body copy while I
designed the ad. The finished layout would be attached to a routing slip, and a traffic manager would carry the ad from office to
office to obtain the necessary approvals from various people

within the corporation. The necessary signatures were as follows:
the assistant art director of the advertising department, the art director of the advertising department, the creative director of the
advertising department, the product manager of the band, the director of product management, the vice president of A&R (artist
and repertoire), the vice president of the record label (Columbia
or Epic), and in the case of important recording artists, the president of CBS Records, who at that time was Clive Davis.
The average amount of time allowed for a given ad to be
conceived, written, designed, approved, typeset, and mechanicalized (this was before the computer) was about three days.
Trade ads (Cashbox, Billboard, et al.) were printed on Wednesdays, which often meant that ads for those magazines had to be
completed and approved in less than a day to make the publications closings.
The first ad I laid out was a trade ad. It was routed to the
assistant art director and promptly came back to me for all kinds
of revisions. I responded to the comments, and the ad was
rerouted to the assistant art director. Again it returned. In both
instances, I was instructed to make the headline and the
name of the album bigger. On the third submission, the headline
and album title were huge. The ad was returned with a memo
to make on Columbia Records and Tapes larger. The fourth
submission came back with the notation that there was not sufficient room for the body copy.
I decided to talk to the assistant art director because I had
only half a day left to produce the ad. I waited outside his office
for twenty minutes while he finished a phone call. He held one
finger in the air to signal me to wait. When he finished the phone

call, he rifled through a pile of papers on his desk. After a few
more minutes, he waved to me to come in. I was standing in front
of his desk with the ad when he picked up another pile of papers.
He flipped through them for another minute, then looked up at
me and said, Whats the problem? I told him that I wasnt getting anywhere with the ad layout and asked him for advice. He
picked up a tracing pad and said, You need to do it like this, and
created a thumbnail that in scale and proportion was nearly identical to my first layout. I thanked him and redesigned the ad. He
signed off on it, and so did everyone else because it was late
Wednesday night and there were no other options.
As far as I can remember, the assistant art director never
approved an ad I designed on the first try. A month later I learned
how to avoid obtaining his approval, and about six months after
that he was fired in a corporate-wide layoff. I found out afterward
that he had never been consulted about hiring me. The art director who hired me (his boss) hadnt invited him to my interviews,
never showed him my portfolio, and informed him that I was hired
just one day before I started working there.
This experience has repeated itself in a variety of scenarios throughout my professional life. Someone who was entitled to approve my designs but who hadnt been properly consulted about hiring me or hadnt been consulted by me with
respect to a design would resort to any means possible to
block, alter, or destroy my work. I quickly learned that the
judgments made about graphic design in corporations, institutions, and organizations composed of more than one decision maker often have little to do with the effectiveness of a
given design in the marketplace and more to do with how
human beings naturally behave in complicated hierarchical

social situations.
Records product managers were
the closest thing we had to clients.
The product managers acceptance and support of a concept
and design were crucial. A strong product manager participated
in the creative process by providing the information that was essential to the design and encouraged an innovative result. When
a strong product manager was pleased with a design, he or she
would walk it through the approval process personally and act
as a guardian of the work.
Weaker product managers supplied the relevant information,
and responded positively to innovative design, but would not ultimately defend anything. A superior was then far more likely to criticize and compromise the work, largely because he or she sensed
the product managers weakness. It was an unbreakable cycle in
which the weak product manager became even weaker, often became paranoid, and was eventually transferred out of the department or fired. The weakest product managers were frequently quite
shrewd. They avoided the aforementioned trap by never responding or committing to anything so that they couldnt be criticized by
a superior. They kept their jobs longer than even the strongest
product managers, and working with them was usually fruitless.
These three types of product manager are the archetypes
that describe every corporate or institutional client Ive ever had.
Ive become adept at identifying them and try to limit client relationships to the strong managers. It might seem like an arrogant
statement, but the fact is that a designer cannot accomplish
anything of import by working for a weak client. The relationship
AT CBS
10
is pointless, even if it exists purely to obtain the design fee. The

fee will probably be cut, or the amount of time expended on the
job will wipe out the fee. The relationship is pointless because the
weak client is eternally fearful. If a design succeeds through a weak
client, it is only because someone stronger and more powerful has
interceded on behalf of the design.
At CBS Records in the seventies, the record-cover department was much more powerful and respected than the advertising department. Covers werent routed through the company by
a traffic manager. Product managers and label heads actually
came to the designers offices to meet, discuss, and approve
art. It is true that the packaging of music has always been perceived as more important to its sale than advertising, yet the two
divisions different art-approval processes were created by the
heads of the respective departments. The two creative directors
had absolutely opposing philosophies about the goals of design
within the corporation.
The creative director of advertising saw himself as the
leader of an organization in service to corporate management.
He wanted to build personal relationships with label heads,
sought them out socially, and didnt want to provoke, challenge,
or offend them. He protected the status quo.
The creative director of the cover division saw himself as
an art director and designer. He wanted to be well respected in
the design community, win design awards, and make his service
to the company a by-product of the excellence of the department. The cover departments creative director gained more immediate respect from the organization. In the late seventies and
early eighties, however, when the record industry went into a financial slump, both creative directors were expendable.
11
the ads I produced for my

first design job at CBS were
formulaic. They consisted of a headline, some body copy, a
picture of the recording artist that was an out-take of the
album-cover photo session, and a picture of the cover. The
only way to produce an interesting ad was to break the formula completely, which was an impossible task. Even if a
strong product manager supported it, it would generally be rejected by Clive Davis; and if the ad was for a smaller recording
artist, the creative director would reject it.
After two years in the advertising department at CBS
Records, I realized that it would be impossible to produce any
notable work for the following reasons:
MOST OF
To produce notable work I would have to break recordadvertising conventions.

The president of the company was conventional.
The creative director was conventional and afraid of the
president.
In the fall of 1973 I was offered a job at Atlantic Records, which
had a smaller art department. The art director at Atlantic hired
me to design ads and covers. The pay was the same as my next
scheduled raise at CBS Records, so there was no question in
my mind about taking the job. Atlantic offered an opportunity to
produce interesting work; the advertising department of CBS
Records did not. Money was irrelevant. It was more important to
make uncompromised work.
I have never made a pivotal career decision based on money.
Money has always been a by-product of design. When I have
taken on projects that I am indifferent to but for which I have negotiated a high fee, I have found that the fee is never high enough.
Records my clients
were the director of
marketing, recording artists or their management, or Nesuhi Ertegun,
one of Atlantic Records founders. If Ertegun was interested in an
album-cover design, then no other opinion mattered. Ertegun had
good taste and was easy to talk to. I began to seek his approval
first. Once he said he liked something, then everyone else liked it.
I call this selling down. It is the simple process of obtaining approval from the most powerful people first. I was capable
of selling down at Atlantic because at the time I worked there it
was a relatively small organization and because Ertegun made
himself accessible to the design department.
In most corporations or institutions, the designer faces the
ultimately compromising task of selling up. Selling up only works
when the designer has a strong client who is well respected within
the organization, who can set the stage for a positive presentation,
and who can provide the necessary backup before criticism.
In the process of selling up, most objections to a design are
expressed as marketing concerns. Marketing concerns are usually design-punishing reactions such as not liking a particular
color or type choice, or thinking an image is too something (you
fill in the blank). Designs that are too something are usually
strongmaybe even edgyand tend to be scary to people on first
viewing. What most scares people in a corporation is a design
that looks too far afield from other things like it in the marketplace
(which is ironic, because the point of design in the marketplace is
to identify and differentiate).
( 1 9 74 )
A P P R O V A L P R O C E S S : AT L A N T I C R E C O R D S C O V E R D E P A R T M E N T
AT L A N T I C R E C O R D S P R E S I D E N T
AT ATLANTIC
2
EXECUTIVE VP
1
LEGAL & FINANCE
VP MARKETING
A&R
D I R E CTO R MAR K E TI N G
ARTIST MANAG E R
C R E AT I V E D I R E C T O R
C O P Y D I R E C TO R
R OUT A
R OUT B
Me
RECORDING ARTIST
RECORDING ARTIST
SIG N IFICANT OTH E R
12
PEON OFFICE
POWER OFFICE
E XT R A C HA I R
DESIGNER
TA B LE
COUCH
V I S I TO R S
VI S I TO R S
C O U NTE RTO P
DOOR
DOOR
13
If, however, the most powerful person in the organization has

blessed a design that seems different from other things like it in
the marketplace, then marketing concerns usually vanish. The
most powerful person can also often prevail over the results of
market research and focus groups. Such corporate leaders are
rare gems. They are visionaries and should ultimately be credited
for all important design achieved by corporations and institutions.
At Atlantic Records I had a galleylike office with a long countertop that stretched the length of the space. My boss, the art director, had a big square office with a large table way back in the
space, behind which he sat. It was an imposing position; my office was completely unimposing. There were books, color pencils,
comps, and all sorts of arty things around. I found out that this
worked to my advantage or disadvantage depending on the visitor. Recording artists who had cover approval, particularly the
less powerful ones, enjoyed my office because it didnt seem corporate. They thought of me as an artist and enjoyed meeting with
me. If they had healthy egos, there was positive collaboration.
Powerful managers of important recording artists didnt like
my office because they thought they were talking to the art departments peon. I never held a successful meeting with an important artists manager in that office. After some very frustrating
experiences, I started borrowing my bosss office for power meetings. Even then, the meetings were not particularly fruitful if the
manager thought that I wasnt the most important person in the
art department. I realized then that if I wanted to be able to persuade people to a particular design, I would have to be perceived
as first, an absolute authority and second, the most powerful person to approach about design.
This perception was nearly impossible to achieve at age

twenty-five. The only way to have power at twenty-five, particularly in the music business, was to appear to be hip and
groovy; then it would be assumed that you were a young visionary leading the way to the future. I could not achieve that
persona. Being neither powerful nor particularly hip, I relied on
my personal strengths. I was articulate, and I had a good
sense of humor. I therefore styled myself as what can best be
described as a young smart-ass. It served me reasonably well
for a number of years.
worked for Atlantic Records for a year
when I was offered a position as an art director in the CBS Records cover department. In that year at
Atlantic I produced twenty-five album covers. As an art director
at CBS Records I would oversee or produce 150 albums a
year. I took the job because there was more to design. I always
look for more to design: the more you design the more you learn.
You learn the most from your mistakes. You dont learn anything
from success.
In the CBS Records cover department more people were
involved in everything because it was a much bigger company.
It took longer to make things than it had at Atlantic. I later came
to appreciate working for smaller companies, simply because
the politics are easier to manage. A middle-size corporation, if it
has an active and intelligent president, turns out to be the best
client. It is small enough to enable the designer to build a relationship with the appropriate power figure and big enough to
realize design on a relatively large scale.
I HAD
that were typographic were comparatively easy to sell to product

managers, producers, and musicians. Most of the typographic
covers that I designed in the seventies were for classical and jazz
albums or for reissues for pop recording artists who were either
dead or dropped from the label. The corporation found these typographic covers particularly appealing because they were cheap
to produce. The covers were often formalistic compositions of information, the objections voiced were usually about color.
My classical album covers generally employed historical
typefaces that reflected the period in which the music was written. Because I had the opportunity to design so many covers, I
became familiar with virtually every period of typographic design.
These early typographic covers at Atlantic and CBS Records
became the basis for the design vocabulary on which I would
continue to build for another twenty years.
I noticed that in the eighties clients were far more sensitive to typographic styles than they were in the seventies. In
the seventies product managers, bands, editors, and other
nondesigners were far more interested in imagery. They
viewed typography as lettering only. Only rarely would they differentiate between the type that had the little feet (serifs)
and the type that didnt.
In the seventies rock bands wanted logos, and a logo meant
highly styled typography that integrated letterforms in a complicated way, like the Chicago album covers designed by John
Berg and Nick Fasciano. The Chicago design was based on the
Coca-Cola logo. When it proved successful, it became the expectation of every band requesting a logo, and it took many
years before this ceased to be the case. I have foundand still
COVERS
14
(1975)
A P P R O VA L P R O C E S S : C B S R E C O R D S C O V E R D E PA R T M E N T
CBS RECORDS PRESIDENT
I N T E R N AT I O N A L
RECORD CLUB
SALES
COLUMBIA VP
EPIC VP
CENTRAL
CORE MARKETING
VP MARKETING
A&R
LEGAL & FIN.
LEGAL & FIN.
A&R
MERCHANDISING
PR ODUCT MANAG E RS
VP MARKETING
PR ODUCT MANAG E RS
C OVE R S
ARTIST MANAG E R
ARTIST MANAG E R
RECORDING ARTIST
RECORDING ARTIST
Me
RECORDING ARTIST
RECORDING ARTIST
DESIGNERS
15
findthat I am always battling yesterdays success in the stylistic expectations of my clients.

My best work at CBS Records (and elsewhere) often
came out of rush projects. The corporation would want to
hurry something into the marketplace so quickly that it didnt
care what it looked like. Ive always found the rush a tremendous opportunity to employ some energetic design experimentation. The speed at which you are forced to work inspires
a madcap kind of spontaneity, and thats good for design.
Even the mistakes work for you.
The best thing about rush projects is the absence of the
approval process and therefore the absence of fear and indecision, which are the impetus of most corporate design. In
fact, one tends to receive far more gratitude for merely accomplishing a project on time for clients who are on an accelerated timeline than for satisfying the requirements in a scenario of careful group deliberation.
have often been called the
golden days of illustration. The work of Pushpin Studios (Milton Glaser, Seymour
Chwast, James McMullan, Paul Davis, et al.) was prevalent and
highly influential. At that time I was very much an illustrators art
director. Most of the illustrations I commissioned in the seventies were based on concepts that resulted from an initial meeting I had with a recording artist, the manager, and the internal
product manager. I would relay the concept to an illustrator, who
would embellish the idea and provide a sketch for presentation
purposes. The presentation of the sketch to the recording artist
and various other players might be a complete success, wherein
THE 1970s
a finished piece of art was commissioned or some minor revisions were requested. Sometimes the whole sketch was rejected, and the cover was rethought. I very rarely requested that
an illustrator produce more than one sketch. I usually found that
if there were severe problems with the first sketch, there were
likely to be more with a second or third one. When you revise an
idea several times, you tend to lose the confidence of the group,
which creates a spiral of negativity that leads to further criticism,
skepticism, and indecision.
The most successful illustrations I commissioned were for
jazz albums. Jazz musicians often responded positively to illustration because they were not particularly enthusiastic about having
their pictures taken for the covers. As musicians, they felt at ease
with wit, abstraction, fantasy, and surrealism, which are all working components of good illustration. It was more difficult to commission illustration for rock bands because there were usually
too many people involved in the approval process to achieve
agreement on a specific image. In addition, the bands were obsessed with stardom and how to dress and look cool on the
album cover. More jazz covers than rock covers had illustrations;
so if you commissioned an illustration for a rock cover, the company would complain that it looked like a jazz album.
Rock (particularly heavy-metal bands) liked specific types of
pulp illustration, by artists like Frank Frazetta, and favored logo
designs that looked like they came from violent superhero comic
books. They read significant meanings into the illustrations and
were looking to create a special visual myth.
I began to notice that nonvisual people tended to read
illustrations literally. They would complain that a color in a
painting wasnt accurate, or would dislike a feature of a face or
16
the way an object was stylistically represented. It is always difficult to explain to a layperson that elements in a painting are interrelated and that what may seem like a small color change can
destroy an entire work, or at least make it banal. Usually any defense of quality elicits one of two responses: Well, I may not
know whats good, but I know what I like, or We dont want to
win any art awards.
I was able to maintain the integrity of the illustrations I purchased while at CBS Records by gaining an understanding of
the personalities involved in the approval process. That way I
could control the situation in which the illustration was commissioned. When I perceived the political situation to be unfavorable
to illustration, I relied on typography and photography.
In the early eighties I found it increasingly difficult to commission illustration. There was a recession in the music industry,
so the company was releasing fewer jazz albums. And in bad
economic climates regressive caution usually enters the graphic
marketplace. It is not accidental that in the early eighties largely
stylistic typographic designs were less risky than specific imagery, which could invite controversy. The early nineties (another recession) was another anti-image period.
I left CBS Records in 1982 and started my own design firm,
with magazines and publishing companies as clients. I found it
nearly impossible to commission memorable illustration. Magazine
and book editors were among the most literal interpreters of illustration. Many of them showed absolute contempt for the profession. They employed weak art directors who functioned as
messengers and would not defend work.
The exalted profession of Art Director seemed to disappear.
Editorial art directors, with a few notable exceptions, became
17
powerless to determine imagery and were instead relied upon to

relate editors comments to illustrators, to design layouts, and to
facilitate copy revisions. Illustrators were therefore forced to
work with weak clients. It was no accident that illustration fell out
of fashion by the late eighties and that its marketplace value has
remained flat for twenty years.
The fate of illustration will not change unless well-trained
art directors regain power or illustrators learn to function as ad
hoc art directors, to attend meetings, and to work directly with the
most powerful people in organizations.
I LLU STRATION S
My favorite album-cover illustrator in the seventies was
David Wilcox, the best of the magical realists. His work
would be nearly impossible to produce within a large
corporate structure today. The approval process involves
too many people, all of whom are too nervous to allow an
illustration to be commissioned without seeing something similar already in existence. Most committees cant
accurately interpret a sketch. Instead the art director has
to find the similar thing that exists, scan it into the computer, show it to the committee, persuade the committee
of its appropriateness, make recommended changes, represent it to the committee, assign the project to an illustrator, present the commissioned sketch to the committee, respond to the fact that the sketch doesnt look like
the original presentation piece, have the illustrator rework
the sketch perhaps three more times, and await the finished painting, which at this point is devoid of any spontaneity, emotion, surprise, or edge.
Ginseng Woman is the best of the Wilcox covers. Eric
Gale, a jazz guitarist, was married to an Asian woman,
and the album was dedicated to her. Gale wanted an
image that would symbolize their connection. I persuaded Gale to accept a mysterious cover image: a
Japanese room, tatami mats, a kimono, a sandal, and a
womans outstretched legs entwined with an electric
cord from Gales guitar. Wilcoxs color choices and particular use of scale gave the room an eerie glow. He signed
his name as a Japanese stamp, and I designed the
album title in the spirit of Asian scrolls and stamps.
1976
18
1977
The cover was nominated for a Grammy Award in

1978. Shortly thereafter, CBS Records received a letter
from the National Organization for Women protesting violence to women in album-cover art and citing Ginseng
Woman as an example. Corporate management (all male
and very sexist) was absolutely delighted that a woman
had designed the album cover and gleefully dumped the
protest letter on me for a response.
I wrote a relatively serious treatise about the difference between illustration and photography, about how
one interprets images, and about the difference between the real and the surreal. In the Ginseng Woman
image, violence could be construed, but it would be in
the mind of the beholder. Because the image is an illustration, it is even further removed from reality. At the end
of the treatise, I told NOW that I was earning significantly less money than male art directors with the same
responsibilities and asked for their help. I received no
reply. Ginseng Woman was my first experience with politically correct interpretations of graphic design. In the
eighties and nineties the fear of offending anyone became so great that it was nearly impossible to commission specific imagery at all.
Multiplication was the album that followed Ginseng
Woman. Gale said he wanted bunnies on the album
cover. I supplied the title to the album, and Wilcox sup19
plied the rows of bunnies. In the top row of bunnies, in the

background, there is actually a fornicating bunny couple. I
cant imagine any corporation allowing this to be produced today. At CBS Records at that time, though, Eric
Gales approval was all that mattered. I dont think anyone
else looked at it that closely. As a jazz musician, Gale didnt sell enough records to warrant the kind of scrutiny
given to best-selling recording artists. On the other hand,
his albums were sold all over the world. Album covers,
particularly jazz albums, were my first global work, and I
still see them in music stores when I travel abroad.
1977
20
1979
1980
The Yardbirds Favorites, Shine the Light of Love and

Universal Rhythm are good examples of the spirit of my
collaboration with Wilcox. I supplied a ridiculous premise, and he supplied an obsessive response.
The Yardbirds album was a repackage, which meant
that the company had extra tapes lying around and the
contractual right to release them, but the recording artist
21
wasnt in any way involved in the process. Repackages

were generally nonpolitical album covers. Jim Charney, the
project manager for Boston, Ted Nugent, and Cheap Trick,
used to reward me with repackages as an antidote to the
arduous political machinations that accompanied the production of cover designs for most best-selling albums.
1976
22
Sidewalks of New York and Too Hot to Handle, both illustrated by Robert Grossman, couldnt have been more different albums. Sidewalks of New York was a release by
the classical division and featured popular tunes from
the turn of the twentieth century played by the worlds
largest calliope. It was released by the Masterworks division, and a small audience was anticipated. There was
no particular corporate interference in the art direction.
Heat Wave was an R&B band that Epic Records (a
CBS subsidiary) had picked up. The album had an accidental hit single called Boogie Nights, and the company
wanted to rush the album into the marketplace to take
advantage of the extra sales. Grossman produced the illustration in a week; I found the crazy wavy typography in
the old Morgan Foundry collection. Epic Records was
happy just that the album came out on time. It sold two
million records. If it had not been a rush, the illustration
would never have been accepted by management because
it doesnt look like the artwork for any other R&B album.
1976
1977
23
1980
Lake was a German rock band that had had some success in Hamburg and was exporting its sound to the
United States. I met with the bands manager, and we
decided that their first album cover should illustrate
some sort of flood. I thought the flood should be an
everyday incident, like a sink overflowing, and the manager agreed. We told the producer of the album, who
happened to be the head of the Columbia Records A&R
department, and he liked the concept also.
I hired James McMullan to illustrate the album because he worked in watercolors. When I told him the
idea, he said it sounded frigid, that there needed to be

some observer of the action. He sent me a painting in
which a cat was witness to the flood. After Jims painting
arrived, I found out that the manager of the band was
being replaced, and that the albums producer wanted a
viewing of the painting. When he saw it, he was horrified.
He said wed never discussed a cat, that the cat wasnt
part of the original deal, that pussycats were not rock &
roll animals. I asked him what were rock & roll animals,
and he told me that lions and tigers were rock & roll animals. When I pointed out that they were all cats, he told
24
me I was being smug. He then showed the cover to a

Columbia vice president, who said that blue wasnt a
rock & roll color.
The Lake painting languished on the floor of my office
for a couple of weeks. James William Guercio, who also
managed Chicago, was hired to be the new band manager. He had good taste and liked things in series. I
showed him the McMullan painting, and he liked it. He said,
Make em all like this.
1978
1977
25
1979
BOSTON
A friend at CBS Records in the seventies predicted that

when I die, my epitaph will read, Art director of the original Boston album. The thought has always horrified me.
Boston was the first album by the group of the same
name. It was released in 1976 and sold six million copies
in less than a year. The album had one hit single, More
Than a Feeling. Epic Records had high hopes for the
album release, but no one predicted its massive success.
The product manager, Jim Charney, was really responsible for the graphic direction of the Boston cover. A
number of cover comps had already been created by various designers in the CBS Records cover department
and rejected by the bands management. The designs
were all puns on the album title: a photograph of a head
of lettuce or a cream pie with the word Boston attached
to it. Charney told me that the band wanted a guitar on
the front cover. My sarcastic response was, How novel.
I remember being shown a sketch done by the bands
manager that showed a beauty pageant of guitar-shaped
women, all with banners across their chests, and the
winner was Boston.
Charney knew that the lead guitarist, Tom Scholz,
was an engineer who worked at Polaroid, and thought
the cover should be scientific or technological in spirit.
He suggested a guitar-shaped spaceship. I never liked
the idea. I thought it was idiotic. The album was simply
called Boston. A guitar-shaped spaceship with the album
title made no sense and wasnt mysterious enough to
overcome the stupidity, so we created some comic-book
action for the spaceship. The ship had a floating city atop
it, and the word Boston was illuminated on the front of
the ship. The spaceship had run amok, and a mass of people was running for their lives. Roger Huyssen, an airbrush
illustrator, was commissioned to create the sketch, and
Gerard Huerta, a popular logo designer, was hired to design Bostons logo.
26
The bands manager liked the spaceship but thought

it should be saving the crowd, not attacking it. That
seemed ridiculous, so we made up another allegory: The
Earth had blown up, and all the cities of the world were escaping in guitar-shaped spaceships with glass bubble
domes. The big spaceship in the foreground was Boston,
and the little spaceships in the background were Paris,
London, and Rome. Roger Huyssen repainted the cover,
and I remember lots of back and forth with the bands
manager about that illustrationthe color wasnt bright
enough, Boston wasnt big enough, and so on. At the very
end of the process, the band got cold feet about the allegory and made me tone down the lettering of London,
Paris, and Rome. They thought the audience would read
the album title as Boston, London, Paris, Rome, so I kept
scaling back the lettering until it was finally invisible.
I have never understood the strange chemistry and
karma of hit music. Hits dont really have anything to do
with qualitative decision making or careful planning.
Genius and originality dont guarantee hits; you cannot
even rely on predictable, salable mediocrity. Hits are
happenings in a particular period of time that manage to
capture the imagination of a large but specific audience
in a specific and personal way that defies all logical explanation. Corporations and institutions would love to be
able to come up with a mathematical formula to create
hits, but they never will. Market research can provide fodder for audience preferences but cannot quantify what
makes people respond to something with sudden, unexpected passion and loyalty.
Musically Boston is not a great album. More Than a
Feeling is decidedly mediocre, and so is everything about
the album package, but it struck a chord with sixteenyear-old boys and their girlfriends in 1976. It was that
music and that graphic at that time. There was something technological about it: a harbinger of things to
1976
27
28
1987
1994
come. Timing is everything. Hits have their own life. I

dont think a corporation or an individual can plan or direct hits, but I do think one can create the climate in
which they happen. That climate accepts luck and intuition as part of the operating procedure and supports the
exact moment that the hit seems possible. CBS Records
in the seventies created the climate for hits better than
any corporation I have witnessed since.
The Boston album is an iconic image that has
eclipsed the identities of those who invented it. Boston
never had another album as successful as the first. The
guitar-shaped spaceship was technically rendered better on the second and third album covers, but the first
album bears the real spaceship.
The scientific aspect of the cover struck a chord with

all those boys who grew up to be techies. I have noticed
that a lot of technology packagingfirst video games,
then computer games, software, and hardware packagingutilizes stylistic elements and color palettes that
look like the 1970s illustrations typified by the Boston
cover. Ive often thought that the entire point of computer
programs like Illustrator and Photoshop, based on the
way they are advertised, is to enable anyone to create
their own Boston cover.
Recently I was being considered for the design of a
large packaging program for a major technology company. When I was interviewed about my branding expertise, I was asked what previous experience I had with
29
technology companies. I had no experience whatsoever

with technology brands, so I mentioned that I was the art
director of the first Boston cover. I felt a hush of reverence permeate the room. I was given the assignment.
Now the Boston spaceship is commemorated on anniversary CDs. My Pentagram partner, J. Abbott Miller, recently came across a painter, Steve Keene, who was
recreating album covers of the seventies. He had painted
a row of Boston covers, one slightly different from the
next. Two of the paintings are shown here in repetition. I
like them better than the original.
BLU E SKY RECORDS

Blue Sky Records was a custom label distributed by CBS
and was the invention of Steve Paul, who managed
Johnny and Edgar Winter, Muddy Waters, Rick Derringer,
and David Johansen, who later became Buster Poindexter.
Paul was more a patron than a client. He was less
concerned about what things looked like or what the
subject matter was than about who did them and whether
or not they were considered quality. Paul liked to work
with the stars of the profession. He wanted to be convinced that every person handling any aspect of his project was simply the best in the business. He usually requested that Richard Avedon photograph his recording
artists. If not Avedon, then how about Bert Stern? I didnt
mind this at all: Its actually a good way of ensuring that
the end product will be of the highest quality.
When Avedon photographed the Winter brothers, I
persuaded Paul to run the image without any typography.
The Winter brothers were popular at the time and the only
albinos in the record business. They would be instantly
recognizable. The album title was Johnny and Edgar Winter
Together, and the cover certainly made that clear. The
company demanded that a sticker be placed on the shrinkwrap, but Paul defended the position of no typography on
the outside package. Once he was persuaded that it was
an elegant thing to do, there was no stopping him.
1976
30
31
32
When Avedon shot Muddy Waters for Hard Again (1977),

Waters had just walked in the door and hadnt yet taken
off his hat and coat. Avedon moved him to a white wall,
took four pictures, and said it was a wrap. It was. Paul
had the confidence to accept two pictures from the four
for the cover images.
It was harder to persuade Paul to purchase illustration because he didnt know enough about the genre to
identify famous illustrators by name. When I wanted to
hire Phil Hays to paint a portrait of Waters, Paul wanted
to be assured that Hays was simply the best portraitist
there was. He couldnt make a judgment by looking at
Hayss work, but he was impressed by the fact that
other illustrators thought Hays was the best illustrator.
Paul wanted what was acknowledged as best and got it.
1978
33
1979
TAPPAN Z E E RECORDS
Bob James was my first ideal client. He had his own small
label called Tappan Zee Records, which CBS distributed.
He planned to release records of his own music plus
those of other jazz musicians. He wanted his album covers to have a series look but not a specific format. James
was entrepreneurial. He knew how to construct interesting deals with record labels that allowed him to have in-
dependence and control. His was the only approval necessary in the creation of these album covers.
The Tappan Zee covers were all composed of smallish objectssimple American icons blown up so they
were out of scale. The approach was successful on the
12-by-12-inch format, particularly because the albums
opened up and the whole 25-inch surface could be used.
Jamess covers were all numbered. He had had a
previous label deal with CTI Records, and photographer
34
Pete Turner had produced his first four albums. Heads (a

nickel) was his fifth album, Touchdown (six points) his
sixth. The objects and names were selected with respect
to the number or, in the case of the other jazz musicians,
the title of the album. Most of the covers were photographed by John Paul Endress. The most successful
Tappan Zee cover was One on One (1979), for which the
matchbook became the entire package.
1979
1980
1978
1979
1978
1978
A L B U M C O V E R - 1 2 1/4"
C D - 7 7/8"
Most of the Tappan Zee albums have been reduced to

CD scale and still exist in record stores. The images are
uninteresting on the smaller scale, which is one reason I
have never had a particular interest in designing CDs. I
prefer to work bigger.
1977
OBJ ECTS
Barrabass Heart of the City was achieved by photographing a manhole cover in New York and retouching it
into the shape of a heart. When the cover first appeared
in 1975, the heart shape seemed miraculous. The
mayors office in Miami, Florida, sent a letter to Atlantic
Records asking where they could purchase the manhole covers for their city. No such navet would exist
today. The computer has made us believe that every
image is manipulated.
The Leonard Bernstein cover Poulenc/Stravinsky
was an actual piece of stained glass, 15-by-15 inches,
built and painted by Nick Fasciano from a sketch I provided. The stained glass was backlit and photographed.
1975
38
1976
1976
1987
TYPOGRAPHY
50 Years of Jazz Guitar is a piece of inlaid wood, also
built by Fasciano. The crude lettering is mine. Fasciano
worked right off of my tracing-paper drawing.
Urgents Thinking Out Loud was designed in the
eighties for Manhattan Records but is similar in approach
to the other covers that involved built or retouched objects. The lead singer of Urgent laid the screen over his
face to create the impression, which was then photographed by Endress. The album was originally titled
Push Comes to Shove, but after the image was produced
the band changed the title to Thinking Out Loud. The visual makes no sense with the title, but it didnt matter at
the time, because the pin screen was such an au courant
object that the image defied explanation. We had also entered the age of ambiguity, so making sense was considered an impediment to an interesting image.
As a young art director in the seventies, I was in awe of

illustrators and photographers. I felt that art direction
was a second-class profession and that the illustrators
and photographers were the real artists. I was merely an
intermediary, a businessperson.
I liked making typographic covers because I made
them myself. In the seventiesimage was king, so a
cover that was typographic was perceived as something
cheap used on a budget package. Most typographic
album covers were made for one of three reasons: (1)
the album was a repackage, and the company didnt
want to spend any money; (2) the album was a classical
or jazz album with a low sales expectation, and the company didnt want to spend any money; or (3) there was
no time to do anything else.
By the end of the seventies my typography started
to overwhelm the illustrations I purchased. I had always
40
liked to integrate typography into the image, because I

felt it made the covers more posterlike, and type that
was paneled apart from the illustration made the album
cover look smaller. Two of the most successful integrations of type and illustration are these two covers by
John OLeary. For Blast, he painted the typography as
part of the image. In Dance, the typography was applied
to the painting.
1980
1980
1979
1974
1974
These two covers for Charles Mingus, designed in 1974

for Atlantic Records, are now released as CDs, with the
full-size typographic cover folded into the smaller CD case
to maintain the integrity of the design. Atlantic was
pleased that they were designed on my desk and that no
extra money had to be expended. The albums themselves
have come to be considered jazz classics, and now these
budget covers are part of the albums classic form.
42
John Prines Common Sense was typical of my art-direction style in the early seventies, and, to some degree,
still is today. The title was taken from the American
Revolutionary tract written by Thomas Paine, which informed the design style and the choice of illustration. The
farmer is about to step on a rakea take on the album
title. I hired illustrator Charles Slackman to do the drawing because he made line drawings similar to those done
on early American almanacs, and the typeface, Caslon
540, is similar to those selected for pamphlet design in
that period. But the layout, drop-cap initials, heavy bars,
and other elements are decidedly seventies.
I remember showing the Common Sense cover to
Prine on the floor of my office at Atlantic. He had a painting that he wanted to combine with the cover, so I neutralized the request by inserting the painting into the type
design on the back cover. I would often protect the integrity of a front cover by giving away something on the
back. I became more and more adept at such negotiations as I came to understand power and human nature.
1975
43
This Jean-Pierre Rampal cover from 1978 is composed

of a variety of woodblock prints I purchased in Japan in
the early seventies. The type design started out as vertical Asian-influenced typographic scrolls or stamps on
the front cover, and it became more obsessive on the
back. The back cover was radical for its time because
the typography is detailed, without an underlying or accompanying image. I have always liked the back cover
better than the front.
1978
45
1977
This Yardbirds cover, designed in 1977, was the first of

my editorial-design approaches. The front cover contains
a list of important events of 1968, and the song titles are
inserted into the list. The back has text columns with the
history of the Yardbirds running diagonally over a history
of 1968. This cover was designed at the same time David
Wilcox illustrated Yardbirds Favorites.
The Best of Phoebe Snow was designed in 1981. The typography and layout were influenced by some 1930
copies of Novum Gebrauchsgraphik that Id purchased in
an antique store. The influence is definitely there, but it
really doesnt look like anything designed in the thirties.
Its pure eighties.
46
1981
47
1977
1978
1981
48
Peter and the Wolf (1977) employed a comic-book format to tell a story. I simply ran the narrative over the
front and back covers. Stan Mack provided the illustrations, and I did the hand lettering of the title. The Bartk
cover, designed in 1978, is an early example of what
was later referred to as my retro work. It was typical of
many book covers designed in the eighties, but the lack
of image made it an anomaly in the seventies. Busch
Serkin Busch is similar to the Bartk cover, but features
a different period style.
The lettering on this jazz album of Al Di Meola, John
McLaughlin, and Paco de Luca was inspired by a Victorian
Buckingham pipe-tobacco can. The type and colors
evoke the spirit of San Francisco. I had completely forgotten that I designed it until I ran into it in the nineties in a
European music store that specialized in old jazz albums.
I purchased this copy. It still exists on CD. There are many
similar album covers that I designed in the late seventies
that I never bothered to save.
1978
49
1979
50
TH E BE ST OF JAZ Z
In the early eighties it was clear to me that album covers
were going to get smaller. Compact disc technology had
been introduced, and the CBS Records art department
was beginning to experiment with ways to package CDs.
The plastic jewel box container quickly became the industry favorite because the technophiles who bought the
first CDs perceived the sophisticated digital technology
as highly sensitive, demanding more serious protection
than the cardboard packaging used on LP records. In reality CDs are far more durable than LPs, but the perception of the consumer was impossible to change. Foldedboard packaging later reemerged as a popular system
but was more expensive because the major printers of
CD packaging (there are only four in the United States)
had been tooled to produce jewel boxes.
At about this time I became interested in doing work
for the CBS merchandising department, which had hired a
savvy young director named Giselle Minoli. She was responsible for producing the merchandising materials for
record stores. Minoli liked making posters, which has always been my favorite graphic form. (I considered albumcover design to be the act of making small posters and
later felt the same way about book-jacket design. I did
not enjoy designing the new smaller CD packages.) For a
short period Minoli wielded tremendous power at CBS
Records, and changed the whole output and structure of
the merchandising department, which until she arrived
produced blown-up ads and oversize album covers and
shipped them to stores for display. Under Minoli the promotional poster became an entity unto itself rather than the
stepchild of the record packaging.
In 1979 I worked on a series of covers for CBS
Records called The Best of Jazz. A compilation of works
by about thirty jazz artists, it was designed in a deliberately inexpensive-looking format. The albums were all
printed on Kraft paper (paper-bag stock) in flat colors
(red, black, and yellow). The photographs of the recording

artists appeared as grainy, high-contrast reproductions,
and the American wood type was boldly displayed at an
angle. The covers had a vaguely constructivist look (not
wholly accidental, because I was rediscovering El Lissitsky
and Aleksander Rodchenko at that time).
Minoli asked that I design two posters to accompany
the albums in store displays. She gave no design criteria
except that the names of the artists be large and that
they be done quickly. I laid out a big sheet of Kraft paper
from an industrial roll and filled it with the names of the
recording artists, cut out from the album covers that
were already produced. The collage of names resulted in
two posters with type at tangents in a decidedly constructivist style. At the time they looked radical. Recordstore owners used them in interesting ways; they wrapped
the cash desks with them or pasted them around columns.
The posters would never have been made if Minoli hadnt
been the director of merchandising. They simply didnt fit
into any expected commercial-graphic category. The year
the posters were designed, I entered them in several design competitions, and they were uniformly rejected.
Then, in the early eighties, they began to receive acclaim. They were first dubbed new wave design by critics, then postmodern. The design had far more to do
with the necessity of fitting names into a given space (the
economy was bad and the budget was thin) than with any
desire to return to the principles of the Russian avantgarde. I had always used style pragmatically. I found that
in the eighties, among both clients and practitioners, circumstance was forgotten and style was an end in itself.
51
1979
52
1981
TRU ST E LV I S
A year later Minoli needed a promotional poster for the
new Elvis Costello album, Trust. Costello was on Stiff
Records, which was distributed by CBS. Minoli hadnt received any of the new album covers and only had a
black-and-white photostat of Costello from the proposed
back cover of the new album. She needed the poster to
ship to the stores, with the album, in two weeks. The
photostat was grim, except that Costellos eyes, peeking
over his glasses, made an interesting shadow across his
face. I hand-colored the photostat and for some reason
painted one eyeglass red and the other blue; then I put
the words TRUST across the top and ELVIS across the
bottom so it read like a political-campaign poster. I positioned the words Costello on Columbia so that they were
coming out of Costellos ear, and I hired a retoucher to
airbrush the photostat carefully to match the handmade
comp. The job was returned the next day reproduced at
four times the original size, which made the color richer
and better in the reproduction.
In the meantime I had been trying to persuade
Minoli to make the posters in general, and the Costello
poster in particular, bigger. Most record stores requested
a 20-by-30-inch scale because they had limited space
for hanging posters, but I believed that bigger posters
were more dramatic. If a poster was dynamic, and particularly if a popular recording artist was featured, I believed that the record stores would find the space. The
theory had worked previously for two oversize posters I
designed for Billy Joel. Minoli decided to produce the
posters in both large-scale and 20-by-30-inch sizes.
When the large posters came off press, they were instantly stolen. I saw them emerge around the CBS building in the offices of people Id never met; then they were
stolen off the walls of record stores. They simply disappeared. I soon found that collectors were trading them
for $1,200 a piece.
The poster had taken on a life of its own. A couple of

weeks after the poster was released, I met Costellos
manager, who was furious. He said that the red-and
blue-glasses made Costello look like a clown, and he
didnt like the word TRUST hovering over Costellos
head. My worst offense was printing Costello on
Columbia, when Costello was on Stiff Records, and his
manager was the Stiff president.
In 1984, after I left CBS Records to found my own
firm, one of the designers who worked for me showed
me Bret Easton Elliss popular novel, Less Than Zero. I
read this passage from the book:
I look up with caution at the poster encased in glass
that hangs on the wall above my bed....Its the promotional poster for an old Elvis Costello record.
Elvis looks past me, with this wry, ironic smile on his
lips, staring out the window. The word Trust hovering over his head, and his sunglasses, one lens red,
the other blue, pushed down past the ridge of his
nose so that you can see his eyes, which are slightly
off center. The eyes dont look at me, though. They
only look at whoevers standing by the window.
I dont know what Ellisor his hero, Claysaw in the
poster. For me, it was a rush job that the artists manager
hated. The cover of the book, published by Simon &
Schuster, had a rendition of the red-and-blue glasses. I
still have no idea why I put them there (my father, who
was a mapmaker, told me they are cartography glasses).
Later, the Trust Elvis poster was used in the movie Fast
Times at Ridgemont High as a symbol of eighties youth.
Unlike the Boston cover, I am proud of Trust Elvis.
Its well designed. But the poster has now acquired a
meaning divorced from my authorship. It lives in its own
place and time in American culture.
53
Bookjacket by George Casillo

1985 Simon and Schuster
Style Wars
STYLE WARS
AFTER
I left CBS Records, in 1982, Michael Vanderbyl invited me to

lecture with some other designers at the California Institute of
Arts and Crafts. One of the speakers was Kathy McCoy, who
was then running the graphic-design program at Cranbrook.
McCoy showed work she had designed at Unimark in the sixties. The work was in the classic Swiss international style that
was popular at that time (and is now popular again). She
recounted how the greatest compliment one could pay any
work was to say that it was really clean. Then she discussed
Robert Venturi and companys 1972 treatise Learning from Las
Vegas. McCoy emphasized the breakthrough in this architects
thinking and how it had affected graphic design in the subsequent decade. Clean was no longer good enough; as a result,
we were all becoming postmodernists. Postmodern in this
context meant employing some decorative graphic devices
that may have come from classical architecture or geometry,
or the act of deconstructing typography to alter meaning and
create a more expressionistic layout.
In the late sixties, when I was in art school, I had not yet heard
of Venturi. I had rebelled against the Swiss international style because the act of organizing the Helvetica typeface on a grid reminded me of cleaning up my room. Also I viewed Helvetica, the
visual language of corporations, as the establishment typeface and
therefore somehow responsible for the Vietnam War.
My major influences in the sixties were Zigzag rolling papers
and album covers, particularly the Beatles covers. Revolver is art
nouveauinfluenced; the illustrative hair on the cover is drawn in
the style of Aubrey Beardsley. I emulated the Revolver cover for all
of my Tyler School of Art illustration assignments. Sgt. Pepper, my
all-time favorite, inspired me because I kept finding more famous
people and hidden meanings in the imagery. Stylistically it fuses
Victoriana and pop, but what I liked most about it was the humor.
The White Album is the ultimate in high conceptonly the
Beatles could be that expressly arrogant. Everything anyone ever
needed to learn about graphic design was in those three album
covers. My other inspirations were Pushpin Studios, Victor
Moscoso, and California psychedelia. All of this influenced my
work in the seventies, when my passion for eclectic typography
moved from Roman classicism through Victoriana, art nouveau,
and art decoand finally to early modernism, constructivism, and
all concoctions thereof.
I mostly employed historic typography to make some kind
of point or to convey a mood based on the subject matter of the
records or books I was designing. This was consistent with
Pushpins approach to design. Pushpin Studios brilliantly married conceptual imagery (both illustration and photography) with
eclectic, often decorative typography. They did so to make a
specific point or to tell a joke. It seemed to me to be the most
56
STYLE WARS
generous form of design. It told you what you needed to know

and entertained you at the same time. Seymour Chwast was my
hero. I met him when I was twenty-two and married him twice
(the second marriage worked).
The McCoy lecture stunned me because it seemed to deny
the existence of the Pushpin form of eclecticism pre-Venturi. It
ignored fifteen years of graphic-design culture. Graphic designers were the first postmodernists, not architects; but when a famous architectin this case Venturiwas quoted, the design
approach gained a credibility that could not be attained by the
work of graphic designers alone.
McCoys was the first of many lectures I attended in the
eighties in which there was an apparent disconnect between
theory and practice. Academic symposiums about design in the
eighties addressed such themes as semiotics, deconstruction,
and the vernacular as if designers worked in an ivory tower without the complex interaction between client and designer. It led
to the impression that design styles and methodologies were
hatched in art schools and then exported to the marketplace,
where they were purchased for mass production. Many academic symposiums were theoretically all about process but
never actually about the imperfect people who are the clients.
On the other hand, practitioner symposiums in the eighties
were related to business. They discussed proposal writing, promotion, appropriate business attire, office design, and other peripheral matters that were oriented toward appearance while they
ignored the true designerclient relationship, which is all about
power, personality, and human nature. It is the human factorcombustible clientdesigner relationships coupled with marketplace
accidentsthat inevitably lead to the visual gestalt of an era.
57
During this period a growing number of university design

programs and an expanding academic design communitytogether with a plethora of graphic-design publications, annuals,
conferences, and historic compendiumsmade design style, in
and of itself, highly visible and important. Mainstream journalists,
sophisticated laypeople, and corporate marketers began using
terms like postmodern, new wave, retro, and punk to describe
design styles. Marketing departments made demographic associations based on these looks and styles, and through increased
focus testing, began to determine what specific products should
look like in order to appeal to specific audiences. Clients had become more style savvyand the style wars had begun.
my job as senior art director of CBS
Records in 1982. I began freelancing
and was retained to design two developmental publications for
Time Inc. One was a lifestyle magazine called Quality, the other a
human-relations publication called Together.
These new magazines were typical of publications produced then and now. Most publications fall into two basic categories: coping and craving. Coping publications tell you how to
do something: make money, run your business, lower your cholesterol, save your marriage, clean out your closet, lose weight,
use a computer, or hire a nanny. Craving publications tell you what
you should want: what to buy, where to travel, what to wear, what
to look like, and what sort of lifestyle to have.
I QUIT
STYLE WARS
ST Y L I ST I C A FFE CTAT I O N S O F CO P I N G A N D C R AV I N G P U B L I C AT I O N S
Coping magazines tend to have lots of instructional information.

It is often completely useless, but it looks didactic all the same.
Graphic devices used in coping publications are:
CO P I N G ST Y L E, OT H E R W I S E K N OW N A S " T E N P O U N D S O F S H IT I N A F IV E - P O U N D B AG "
CO PI N G ST Y L E 19 8 5
side bars
decorative headings (early 1980s: in boxes with
or without drop shadows; late 1980s: no boxes,
but perhaps underscores, overscores, sometimes
with teeny halftone photos; 1990s: lozenges)
dingbats
icons
elaborately illustrated charts and graphs with inset
photos that are silhouetted and have drop shadows
or spot illustration
Craving magazines tend toward big, splashy, dramatic layouts of
photographs filled with people, places, and stuff. At the time I
took on Quality they needed:
widely spaced type (later the opposite: big type in
capitals with little spacing)
layering
out-of-focus photos, photos of people or places
that look wet
big drop caps or big words (later no drop caps
or big words)
textured backgrounds (later white space)
rough devices, like photographic contact sheets or
grease-pencil marks
THIS IS A TYPICAL
sidebar. It contains extra
information that is designed to
look somewhat instructional in
nature. Sometimes it's the only
thing that is actually read in a
lengthy article.
LOTS OF PEOPLE SCAN
the page instead of reading
the text. You might be doing
this right now.
BELOW IS A
demonstration of a little
silhouetted photograph with a
drop shadow. In the 1980s this
device was especially popular
in annual-report design.
CO PI N G ST Y L E 2 00 1
C R AV I N G ST Y L E, OT H E R W I S E K N OW N A S: " S H I N I N G S H I T"
C R AV I N G ST Y L E 19 8 5
BE SEXY
This is a demonstration of a layout for a lifestyle
(craving) publication. Very often the copy in
these kinds of articles was particularly inane.
A form of expressive typography began to
AND
emerge throughout the 80's and into the 90's
that facilitated layout of these types of articles.
Typography became progressively illegible as the
decade wore on. Illegible typography goes hand
in hand with copy that is not worth reading.
By the late 80's expressive typography was
POPULAR
replaced by a resurgence of Helvetica. Illegibility
continued, by the designer insuring that the copy
was too small to read.
COPING
THIS IS
a demonstration of layouts for a

lifestyle (craving) publication. Very
often the copy in these types of articles are particularly
inane. A form of expressive typography began to emerge
through-out the 1980s and into the 1990s that facilitated the
layout of these types of magazines. Typography became
progressively illegible as the decade wore on. Illegible typography goes hand in hand with copy that is not worth reading.
By the late 1990s expressive typography was replaced by
Helvetica. The illegibility continued, however, with designers
making the copy too small to read.
STYLE WARS
The mannerisms of these types of publication informed all other

forms of graphic design in the eighties and nineties, and are now
the visual language of annual reports, brochures, books, packaging, and fashion advertising. Coping devices leaped right off
magazine pages and became the language of computer screens.
Most Web sites today owe their styling and organization to the
coping magazines of the eighties and early nineties.
magazine has always been
the Esquire of the sixties,
when George Lois produced his powerful big idea covers, and
the seventies, when Jean-Paul Goude art-directed and contributed brilliant illustrations. By the eighties no mainstream magazine resembled the Esquire of the sixties and seventies. New
York magazine, which successfully combined a highly packaged
design format with conceptual or journalistic illustration and photography, assumed the Esquire mantle and became a role model
first for all city magazines and then for weekly news publications.
(The New York format was the mother of all coping publications.)
When Milton Glaser created the format for New York with
Walter Bernard, he took on the masthead title design director
because he had had a hand in shaping the editorial content of the
publication along with Clay Felker, the magazines editor in chief.
Previously the highest art title on the typical magazine masthead
was art director, followed by assistant art director, designer, design assistant. In the twenties and thirties, art directors were
called art editors. The art editor was responsible for the look and
visual content of a magazine and had true editorial status.
Glasers design director title was misconstrued in the
eighties. Rather than understanding it to mean a leading posi-
MY IDEAL
tion in the editorial process, magazine editors determined that

the most important contributions to be obtained from the senior
art employee or consultant were simply oversight of the format,
packaging, and style of a publication. This consisted of little more
than the choice of appropriate design devices and a methodology for purchasing and displaying necessary artwork. Most
editors were comfortable with formats that were similar to other
publications that existed in the same genre. This remains true
even today. If I receive a call from the editor of, say, a travel magazine, he or she will ask to see all the other travel magazines I
have designed. So coping magazines look like coping magazines, and craving magazines look like craving magazines. And
coping magazines about money look like other coping magazines about money, and craving magazines about home decorating look like other craving magazines about home decorating.
Once every five years a brave editor and publisher break the
paradigm, and if they prove successful, shortly thereafter other
publications follow suit.
Once an editor is comfortable with a designed format,
which is very often purchased from an outside consultant, the
editor feels confident that he or she can hire an inexpensive
art director (sometimes an assistant to the consultant) to execute the magazine. The art director purchases the necessary
photography and illustration that fit into the spaces allotted
by the format and shows the layouts to the editor for comment and revision. He or she then obtains the necessary
changes from the illustrator, shows it to the editor again, and
fills in the format. This creates an insipid climate for magazine
design. Magazine editors (word people) assume that designers (art people) dont read and are only concerned with
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STYLE WARS
stupid things like drop caps and hairline rulesthe very things
the editors are so anxious to purchase.
In the eighties, the age of Ronald Reagan, style triumphed
over substance. I was often retained as a publication cover consultant to help design directors who did not have enough
power to persuade their editors that a given solution was appropriate. The entwined priorities of telling an entire story on the
cover yet not offending some faction of the magazines readership
made it almost impossible to commission intelligent illustration or
conceptual photography. Editors read all kinds of mysterious
things into imagery that were never intended. The big-image, bigidea album covers I designed and art-directed in the seventies
were impossible to achieve in the eighties. The images that would
be accepted with relative ease tended to be nonspecific, impressionistic, blurry, or moody. Ambiguity, a postmodern approach,
worked stylistically because it is apolitical and noncommittal. It
became incredibly fashionable.
I began to discover that it was easier and less compromising
to persuade editors to rely on type treatments for subject matter
that was cerebral in nature. Editors were naturally more comfortable with words than with images and liked to be involved in fairly
arbitrary decisions like color choice. Most strong type treatments
(if they work in black-and-white) work in a plethora of color combinations, so when an editor would indicate that he or she didnt like
blue, green was possible. It allowed for a controlled area of harmless input. I employed this practice in all forms of design: poster
design, book design, packaging, and sometimes advertising.
Illustrative typography became my trademark out of necessity.
Design is an art of planning. A problem is presented, a conceptual blueprint is formed in response, a solution is achieved.
61
Style is a matter of appearancethe way something looks or

feels. In the eighties design and style were confused and
conflated by the people who purchased design, by the design
press, and finally by designers and design educators. When I recall all the hot-button topics of the eighties, I see that they are all
about style: the personal typographic approaches of Neville
Brody and later David Carson; the deconstructed typography
produced at Cranbrook; the postmodern catalog of substyles:
new wave, high-tech, retro, and punk. They were commodities in
competition with one another. They were purchased and dealt
out to demonstrate all things coping or craving. The planning aspect, the conceptual aspectthe very thing Milton Glaser meant
when he introduced the term design directorwas commandeered by product managers, marketing departments, sales divisions, and editorial departmentsby vast committees of
people who assumed that when they hired a designer they were
purchasing style.
favorite clients in the eighties were advertising agencies. Mediocre advertising agencies often wanted to be persuaded that they had the right look for an ad campaign that had
been preconceived by an art director. Sometimes the agency
wanted me to contribute logo designs for a pitch to a prospective
client. I found that working for agencies usually meant breaking
every important rule I learned at CBS Records. The art director
who hired me was rarely a strong patron, and there was never direct access to a key decision maker, because the agencies simply
would not allow it. My work had to pass through several layers of
creative directors before it would finally be presented on the client
MY LEAST
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side. It rarely made it there. The structure of advertising agencies

creates a system of continually selling up.
I also have a profound difficulty with how advertising agencies make money. Profit is made by retaining a percentage
(17.65 percent is the standard industry rate) of the money allotted by the client for purchasing advertising space. That means
that if the client purchases, say, a full-page, full-color ad in the
New York Times, the client will advance the roughly $100,000,
for the purchase and the agency will make $17,650 on the buy.
If the client is purchasing lots of print ads and television advertising, the amount of money becomes enormous. Copy and design are thrown in for free. And if theyre free, theyre worthless.
There is nothing to defend or protect, no standard to bear, no
paradigm to change, nothing to elevate. There is no extra value
in something intelligent or well crafted. If the creative is thrown
in for free, then all that has value is the media space itself. If you
take that thought to its logical conclusion, what fills the media
space is essentially irrelevant, as long as the client feels satisfied enough to continue purchasing it. That creates a completely
amoral design climate.
clients, other
than designrelated businesses, have always been entrepreneurs. I like working with entrepreneurs because they create products, take
risks, and are prepared to make decisions. One or two entrepreneurs are better than three. Three entrepreneurs are a committee, and all committees have power struggles. I have never
made a design presentation to three or more people of equal
decision-making power and had all three like the design equally.
MY FAVORITE
Usually there is one strong opinion leader who rules and persuades the others. If two people have equally strong opinions,
there will be a power play for the third. The following dynamic is
illustrated by the diagram at right:
At the beginning of the meeting, expectations are high.
The presentation is well received; it reaches the moment of highest appreciation.
One person in the group raises a few concerns not
addressed in the presentation; another adds a few
qualms and so on until the level of appreciation dips
below the initial starting point.
The designer reiterates the initial presentation, addressing points in the expressed concerns by proposing
certain revisions. The sponsoring client reinforces
this, and the level of appreciation rises to a point
lower than the initial high but respectably above
starting expectations.
It is then time to end the meeting. If the meeting does
not end, a counterrebuttal may ensue, which will bring
the appreciation level down to a new low point, and
the design will gradually become unsalvageable.
Heres another design-committee axiom: If the design presented
is simple and contains a limited amount of information and imagery, there are likely to be far more amendments and revisions
than if the presentation has a great deal of copy and conveys lots
of complicated information. This is because approval committees dont have the discipline, patience, or fastidiousness to
concentrate on the details of complicated information. They can
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STYLE WARS
DIAGRAM OF A MEETING
OPTIMISM
REBUTTAL
6 SECOND
REBUTTAL
4
READDRESS
EXPLANATION
7
READDRESS
1. Start of designer
presentation
2. Point of highest
appreciation
3. Client rebuttal
4. Designer spin
5. Point at which the

meeting must end
TIME
6. Client Rebuttal
7. Weaker Spin
Death
I am indebted to Lou Klein for this diagram.
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STYLE WARS
focus on anything reasonably simple, and will amend it until all

the interest and joy are removed or until they are out of time.
A correlative to this rule is that apparently simple jobs are
rarely that. When a client once tried to persuade me to cut my
fee on a simple job, I told him that I needed the money to pay
for all the changes he was going to make. He insisted that the
project was uncomplicated and that there would be few revisions. I offered him a deal: the design would be free, but every
revision madeno matter how minorwould cost a thousand
dollars. He refused the deal.
George Lois had this to say about the personality types
of collaborators, and I have found it to be invariably true:
There are smart people and dumb people. There are
people who have energy and people who are lazy.
They exist in combinations. If you work with a smart
person with energy, thats your best collaborator.
If you work with a smart person whos lazy, well, thats a
bit of a waste, but it does no harm. If you work with a
dumb person whos lazy, thats sad but not problematic,
because they will simply be ineffectual. But if you work
with a dumb person with energy, therein lies the
seed of disaster.
late eighties I had begun to understand that the fact that something was
well designed, or even just well styled, was irrelevant if it was
being presented to a group that did not understand what they
were looking at or were embroiled in their own power struggles. I
had begun to find it increasingly difficult to control the quality of
BY THE
P E RS ON ALITIE S S TE RE OTYP E S IN C OM BIN ATIONS
SMART
DUMB
E N E R G ET I C
LA Z Y
my work and to develop as a designer unless I was working on a

pro bono basis or for a minimal fee for a design organization or
design-industry client. This was depressing, because I believed
that the whole point of graphic design was to bring intelligence,
wit, and a higher level of aesthetics to everyday products, the articles of mass culture. I did not want to be an ivory tower designer;
I had little interest in theoretical exploration. My goals were to design things that would get made, to elevate popular taste through
practice, and to make graphic breakthroughs on real projects.
I realized that my position in relationship to corporate committees with approval power was essentially weak. I was not famous or considered a guru. My entire reputation was within the
design community, not in any specific business except possibly
in the entertainment industryand my reputation there was getting weaker as time went on.
64
STYLE WARS
I was hired on most projects for nominal fees. Very often I

would be hired by a low-level marketing person who had to
sell up. When my design failed to make it through the bureaucratic gauntlet, I found that the project would be reassigned to
a large, powerful design firm for a large, powerful fee. I discovered that clients tended to respect an opinion in direct proportion to what they paid for it. The quality of the design was
often irrelevant.
Most clients hired me based on previous work. That meant
that if I tried to design something in a new way, they were uncomfortable with it and generally forced me to retreat to a previous solution. This made personal growth almost impossible. The
type of work I had gotten would be the type of work I would get,
in subject matter as well as in style; and as more design publications, books, and conferences made styles readily available
for adaptation, there were more designers to compete with.
Design and respect for design were devalued.
growth of the design industry and the introduction of desktop publishing in the eighties precipitated an equally
rapid lifecycle for design styles. Designs appeared dated in astonishingly short order. It was easy for a designer to be considered good by his peers for five years, harder for ten, nearly
impossible for fifteen. To maintain any creative longevity a designer today must reinvent his or her work every five years. This
does not mean simply changing style. It means reassessing
ones approachagain, design is an art of planningand finding
a way that is new yet still reflects on ones core ethic and aesthetic. This entails a reevaluation of ones visual vocabulary, new
THE RAPID
65
technologies, the cultural zeitgeist, and the scale on which one

works. Reinvention is personal growth.
More history, criticism, and professional writing about design
occurred in the eighties than in any previous decade. Ironically
that writing also breaks down into those two basic categories,
coping and craving. Coping design writing was about professional style: dress, office design, and proposal crafting. Craving
writing was about design style: the myriad visual affectations that
became popular through postmodernism. Neither addressed the
complicated symbiotic relationship between designer and client.
The designer was portrayed as either businessman or artist, the
latter made personal work, with the client as patron; the former
solved the clients problems and made money. It seemed to me
that there had to be another alternative.
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G R E AT B E G I N N I N G S
Terry Koppel and I had known each other in college (the

Tyler School of Art), and began working together at
Time Inc. While I was at CBS, Terry had worked as an art
director at the Boston Globe and had redesigned Inside
Sports. We reasoned that we could start a design studio
that would marry our editorial and entertainment backgrounds, and it would broaden to include promotional
and packaging projects.
66
Terry and I believed that our strong suitthe reason

clients would hire uswould be our flexible, expressive
typographic style. We promoted ourselves by mailing out
a small book called Great Beginnings, which featured
the first two paragraphs of famous novels designed in
the period style in which the novels had been written. We
printed and mailed six thousand copies of the book to
potential clients, and the promotion proved remarkably
successfulwe received calls for new business almost
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immediately. Some of the business came because we

were the first new design studio (we didnt use the term
firm yet) in New York in some time. Some of it came because Great Beginnings looked fresh in early 1984. The
book was entirely typographic. Potential clients, art directors, and design critics had not yet labeled us as
postmodernists or historicists, but they recognized that
we had developed some form of look.
The book was small, 5 by 7 inches, and was inexpensively
printed in two colors with a glued (perfect) binding. In my
years as art director at CBS Records, I had received thousands of promotion pieces. I remembered that I couldnt
bring myself to throw out a booklet that had perfect binding.
68
The pages from Great Beginnings were later reproduced

in design textbooks as examples of how to work with period typography. The flaw of the booklet was that it inadvertently served as a catalog of style. Potential clients
assumed that whatever we designed would either be
constructivist or art nouveau or some other period style,
not realizing that Great Beginnings was a gag advertising
our new business and that its point, if anything, was that
typographic treatments were not necessarily transferable
to any given project. All through the eighties clients
seemed to believe they were buying style, not thinking.
STYLE WARS
69
M A N H AT TA N R E C O R D S
Mondrians Broadway BoogieWoogie, 1942-43
I designed the identity for Manhattan Records, Capitol

Records new East Coast label, in 1984. The president of
the company was Bruce Lundvall, who was president of
CBS when I had worked there. I had sent him a copy of
Great Beginnings when Terry and I opened our studio,
and the timing was fortunate. When Lundvall called me, he
was just beginning to set up his new office. There were
no employees yet, except for one trusted aide.
Lundvall had purchased a copy of the compendium
The Art of New York, and thought he would like a painting or a photo of a skyscraper as the predominant image
for his record label. I think he assumed that the building
would exist as a trademark coupled with a logo design.
70
But I was never good at designing logotypes in the manner typical of the seventies, which relied on complicated
lettering with ligatures, in-lines, and drop shadows. I appreciated clever marks that had strong, simple, positiveand-negative shapes (my Pentagram partner Woody
Pirtle is a genius at this), but never was capable of designing them. I was always much more comfortable with
selecting a typeface that had a strong character, that
somehow related to the situation at hand, and then modifying it to create a specific thought or spirit.
STYLE WARS
Most large-scale corporate identity programs from the

fifties, sixties, and seventies seemed depressing (even
some of those designed by the legendary Paul Rand).
They looked as if all attention went into the form of the logotype or the mark (probably the point where the inhouse designer came on board to execute the identity).
These were then jammed into an upper-left or upperright corner of whatever they needed to be stuck on,
often with two lines of badly positioned Helvetica, that
contained the company name and address. It appeared
as though the logotype and mark alone was there to
identify the corporation. The design of all the rest of the
stuff that it was attached toa carton, a package, an ad,
a posterbe damned. The logo as identification didnt
really identify anything, because if the corner of the object was obscured in any way, so was the entire identity.
Corporations looked like large corporations by virtue
of the similarity of the mark or logotype position. I became interested in what communication material looked
like in its totality, not the small corner that housed the logotype. I leafed through The Art of New York trying to figure out how a painting of a building could be manipulated
to conform to all the various needs demanded by an
identity for a record label, without becoming another
trademark jammed into a corner. Then I came across the
Mondrian painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie, which is an
abstracted map of Manhattan. The logic for using this
painting as an identity for Manhattan Records was obvious: it ostensibly represented Manhattan and was inspired by music. But its strongest attribute was that the
paintings color blocks could easily be reconfigured for a
multitude of uses.
1984
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STYLE WARS
I began considering the logotype as something that came

out of the red, blue, and yellow boxes of the painting. A
logo in a grid, like the city. The character count of the
word Manhattan was perfect, allowing for three stacks of
three-letter units: MAN, HAT, TAN. It was my first and only
idea for the logo. The problem was how to present this
to Lundvall without another alternative. Presenting just
the one solution would make it look as if I hadnt done
enough work. This frequently happens to me. My first
idea is often my best, and the rest are fillers. Most clients
are uncomfortable with this. They assume that a lot of
exploration ensures better design or that theyre not getting their moneys worth.
Lundvall was expecting to see buildings. I went back to
The Art of New York and selected a few buildings to work
with, some photographic, some rendered. I blew them up
as record labels and attached the gridded typography or a
variation of it. After I designed the first alternative to the
initial scheme, I became worried because it actually was
quite handsome and potentially selectable. So I made a
few more choices. They were also handsome. I realized
that the best way to pursue the Mondrian option was to
create about nine or ten versions of the building identities
using representational paintings, photos, and illustrations.
That way the Mondrian solution would stand out simply by
being the only abstraction. The endless renditions of different buildings all neutralized themselves.
72
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I had difficulty obtaining an approval from the Museum of

Modern Art to use the painting. They would not allow me
to use a section of it. They insisted I use the whole painting in every application. I asked what would happen if I just
used a section on a few applications; they said theyd sue
me and advised me simply to reconstruct the painting but
not to duplicate it. That meant we had to have a lawyer
check every application of the identity to ensure that no
two color squares lined up in the exact same configuration as the original.
Shortly after the Manhattan identity was launched,
LOreal came out with a shampoo product line called
LOreal Studio that also used a Mondrian motif. I often
wondered if they called the same lawyer to review the
squares. There were many Mondrian adaptations and
knockoffs in the eighties, along with a renewed interest
in the Dutch de Stijl movement in general.
In the late eighties Manhattan Records merged with
EMI, and the Mondrian colors were reduced to black and
yellow (a taxicab reference). Then Manhattan Records
disappeared altogetherit was folded into EMIand the
gridlike blocks were shoved together. In the mid nineties
Capitol Records relaunched Manhattan Records and
Capitols art director brought back the design. In the eighties the design was characterized as postmodern. In the
nineties it appeared to be more conceptual.
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STYLE WARS
BOOKS
I began designing book jackets by moonlighting when I

was still at CBS Records. It was the easiest type of work
for me to get based on my previous experience. At Koppel
& Scher it comprised about a quarter of my business. In
the eighties I designed jackets for most major publishing
companies, including Simon & Schuster and its divisions;
Random House; and Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Most of the jackets I designed were typographic,
largely a result of my emerging reputation. Publishing art
directors had discovered that I was good at designing covers for books that had to look somewhat important but
cerebral in nature. Like album covers, book jackets in the
eighties (and today) looked a specific way for different
genres of book. Nonfiction had large type, usually elongated or condensed, with a photograph (for a biography)
or a small icon or illustration (for an expos). The bigger
the book (in terms of sales expectations), the more likely
its typography would be embossed or foil stamped.
Self-help (coping) books were also largely typographic,
and generally had long subtitles, often a listing of the contents. Sometimes they had spot illustrations, especially
warm-and-fuzzy books about homeopathic medicines and
exercise regimes. Novels tended to be more romantic,
mysterious, or witty and were more likely to employ illustration and conceptual or blurry photography. Type on novels could be smaller and more eccentric unless the novels
were mystery blockbusters like those by John Grisham or
romantic bestsellers la Jackie Collins. Every so often,
these boundaries are deliberately crossed for special impact. Robert James Wallers The Bridges of Madison
County was designed to look like a literary novel, and Toni
Morrisons Beloved was designed to look like a blockbuster. These conventions have changed little during the
past twenty years.
1990
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The procedure for designing book jackets outside of a

publishing art department has also changed little over
the years. First, the designer would be contracted by an
art director at the publishing company, and sent a manuscript or synopsis of the book, some marketing points
about its intended audience, and comparable books in
the marketplace. The designer would also be given some
vague directionthat the jacket should look important
or be sent another jacket that an editor or the author liked.
Sometimes, usually for a novel, they would be sent an
actual manuscript.
The designer would then proceed to design the cover
and send a comprehensive sketch (or comp) to the art
director, who would then show it to the editors, the marketers, the publisher, and the author for approval and
comment. These comments would be relayed back to the
designer by the art directors, and the designer would
make the necessary revisions and copy changes to complete the project.
As the decade wore on, an increasing number of
younger art directors replaced older, more powerful art
heads at publishing companies. Like some art directors at
magazines, they were forced to function as messengers
between the companies various divisions. As a result,
there might be five or six rounds of revisions before a
given design would receive approval from the editor
only then to be rejected by the publisher or author. The
number of changes, revisions, and redesigns were greater
on book jackets than magazines or album covers. This
was because there was more time to make them. I always
had my greatest successes with covers for which someone else had already designed three or four unsatisfactory comps, and when I was hired the company was
simply out of time.
I asked a number of in-house art directors I worked
with if they had ever tabulated the cost of producing book1987
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1988
1987
1988
1988
1989
1989
79
1990
1989
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This book of James Dean photographs (1990) documented

every picture he made in his short movie career.
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STYLE WARS
jacket comps for a year against what it would cost if the

publishing company accepted the first design submitted
by the designer with no revisions. I calculate the difference
at four to seven times the initial cost. Ive always wondered if these endlessly revised covers made up for this
differential in costs. I doubt it.
In the nineties the computer made matters worse for
book-jacket designers. Comps produced by a computer
are almost instantaneous. Now there was no controlling financial force or time impediment to the making of revisions. An editor had an opportunity to view twenty pointless incremental changes per jacket design, which could
only foster confusion and greater indecision in any person
not really qualified to make an untutored visual judgment.
The matter became more complicated when editors were
given comments from major bookstore chains like Barnes
& Noble or Borders about what sells. The contents of a
book and the graphic elements were not separated or analyzed in any responsible way. What sells was prescribed
as a formula for design elements and resulted in strange
pronouncements about color and typography. Ive never
been able to learn anything of use from these pronouncements, because they always seem to describe the last
thing in a particular category that was a bestseller. Since
we already know what the last thing was, we dont learn
anything at all about the next thing.
Editorial anguish about color always reminded me of
my mother agonizing over the incremental differences of
ten soft-green rug swatches for her living room wall-towall carpet. Was it better with a little more yellow?
Should she pick the grayish one? Would it be too dull?
She was so relieved when I released her from the responsibility by grabbing one and saying: Here. Pick this,
its the best one. I dont understand why editors dont relieve themselves of this form of decision making and let
their art directors pick the green. Its their job.
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Those Lips, Those Eyes (1992) was a compilation of classic movie-star

photos that I edited. The title was taken literally.
I found that in designing book jackets I had to relearn the

lessons I learned in the music business. If there is not a
strong client or patron (in the case of publishing companies, this means art director) to defend the work, then
the work will be compromised. If there is no one to defend the work, you have to do it yourself (which means
attend all necessary meetings, an impossibility if you are
not a full-time employee of the publishing company or at
least in their building daily). If someone is allowed to approve work and was not involved or consulted in the
early developmental process of it, then that person will
inevitably alter or destroy it. The only approval that matters is the approval of the person in the organization who
wields the most power. It may be the editor, it may be the
author, or it may be the publisher, but generally one approval matters and the rest are irrelevant. Most things
that are rejected are rejected for marketing reasons,
which means the jacket looks too something or not
enough something else, which translates into not looking significantly enough like other things in the marketplace that are like the thing in question and have had
some modicum of success.
82
The best book jackets in the publishing business come

out of a powerful in-house art department of a company
whose editor-in-chief values design and allows a powerful department to be created. That is why the book jackets currently produced by Knopf are consistently better
than those of most other publishing companies. Knopfs
corporate management has a history of valuing design
and fosters a condition that has allowed talented people
to produce their best work.
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Occasionally I managed to design jackets where the initial idea was left intact, but they were more the exception
than the rule. I used the many redos as an opportunity
simply to design more. It was a useful exercise, a sort of
design calisthenics. How many times can you solve the
same problems? How many visual iterations are there in
the same basic idea, and in how many color combinations? The trick was never to become attached to any
given design. I also enjoyed designing full books, particularly picture books. Book design was satisfying because
once a format was approved, you simply executed it and
made copy revisionsdraft work not fraught with the political implications attached to jackets.
A Room of Ones Own (1993) was published as a limited-edition book

from Heritage Press, a printing company. The photographs were by
Duane Michals.
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Grimm (1997) was another limited edition published by Heritage Press.

This book was illustrated by Seymour Chwast.
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Suffragettes to She Devils (1997) documented womens protest art.
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OLA
In 1986 two young Swedish entrepreneurs came to meet
with me about designing an identity and some packaging
for a chain of candy stores that they were planning to open
in shopping malls on the East Coast. They already owned
a chain of stores in Sweden and the UK. The name of the
chain in Europe was Sweetwave, and their main attractions were large glass cylinders that displayed brightly
colored candy. The stores attracted young adults with little
children and teenagers. Candy was dispensed by pulling
a lever, which dropped the candy into a trough where it
could be raked into a bag. The Swedes called this system
pick and mix. The weight of the bag determined the cost
of the candy. In Europe their major competitor was Sweet
Factory, which also dispensed candy in cylinders and was
opening stores in shopping malls in the United States.
The Swedes told me that the candy Sweetwave sold
was not substantially different from the candy sold by
Sweet Factory, and that there was essentially one great
big candy wholesaler from which most retailers purchased hard candy and another wholesale manufacturer
that produced chocolate. This was a disappointing revelation to me. In 1986 I still assumed that if there was a
candy company that had a brand name, it was because
they actually made the candy. At the time the biggest
candy chain on the East Coast in shopping malls was
Fanny Farmer. I always assumed that Fanny and her disciples were back in the kitchen somewhere stirring the
pots of chocolate. I had accepted the notion that a chain
like Fanny Farmer could be bought by a company like,
say, Beatrice, and that the candy kitchen might be a huge
factory somewhere in the Midwest, but the idea that the
goodies were purchased through some anonymous
wholesaler and repackaged to create a brand seemed
particularly cynical. I asked the Swedes what was the
point of their business if they didnt make the candy.
They said they were selling an environment and an expe-
rience. They wanted to package the candy in such a way

that a consumer who wanted to buy a treat would enjoy
the act of purchase as much as the candy.
I went to visit the Galleria shopping mall in White
Plains, where the first store would open. I dont particularly like shopping-mall environments, but the Galleria
was especially depressing. The only candy store in the
mall, Fanny Farmer, was a dreary, dingy place. The color
palette was brown and tan with gold accents. The gold
was selected to make the consumer believe that Fanny
Farmer made elegant; expensive chocolate, but the feeling of the store was exactly the opposite: tacky, with low
ceilings and faux fixtures.
I became intrigued by the idea of creating a terrific environment through packaging. Shopping malls are basically phony environments. They are temporarybuilt for
change. Stores come and go. It would be easy enough to
create a spirited modern environment. The design of the
storeits shelvingneeded only to be neutral. The
Swedes didnt have a lot of money. They had a very precise budget that was supposed to enable them to open
fifteen stores over the course of two years. They expected all of the packages to be customized with the
identity. The plan was to purchase generic boxes, cans,
or clear plastic packaging and cover them with the new
Sweetwave identity. The Swedes never used the word
branding. If they had I would not have known what they
meant. I viewed the project as a form of visual environmentalism, a way of being kind to the consumer by making their experience more enjoyable, even theatrical. I
was designing entertainment.
90
I thought Sweetwave was a terrible name. It was too close

to Sweet Factory. Also, there was nothing unusual in it. It
had no specific personality and would not attract any
special interest in an American shopping mall. It would
seem simply a knockoff of Sweet Factory. I persuaded the
owners to change the name of the store. We considered
the words for candy, sweets, and cookies in Swedish, but
the translations were unfortunatecandy is konfekt,
cake is kaka. In retrospect, I dont know if it mattered all
that much since we were competing with Fanny herself.
I decided to make up a word. I had heard that
Hagen-Dazs was an invention. It also dawned on me
that the umlaut was distinctly European. Sometimes they
seemed Swedish, sometimes Danish, sometimes Dutch
or German, but definitely Northern European, perhaps
Scandinavian. I began to make up words that sounded
like a womans name. Oona and Oola were the favorites,
with the umlaut stuck over the first o, ola. A year after Id
designed the graphics for ola, a group of Swedish designers came to visit Koppel & Scher. I showed them ola
and they roared with laughter, because they had spent
their entire typographic careers trying to get rid of umlauts.
I presented two logo designs for ola. One involved geometric letterforms with the round Os filled in with bright
yellow. The color system was decidedly de Stijl. I assumed that the American shopping-mall consumer would
recognize it as vaguely Northern European, modern, and
progressive, especially against the dismal beiges of the
competition. The second logo was a face made out of the
letters. The Swedes liked both logos and couldnt decide
between them. We decided to use both. The geometric
letterforms would be used on signage and some labeling.
It was ultimately redrawn as a complete typeface. The lettering that created a face was used for holiday promotions, bags, and other candy labeling. Both logos had the
same color system, so the designs worked well together.
Packaging for ola was produced inexpensively. The
Swedes found preexisting plastic boxes, cans, and tins,
and I created labels for them. Sometimes we selected
specific candies as part of the design. For example,
chunky tubular licorice in red and black was selected because it worked well with the package shape and logo
design. The package and the candy became one entity.
My Swedish clients had purchased most of the fixtures for the first store. They involved me in the choosing of the stores color palette and asked me to create
exterior and interior signage. I became somewhat more
involved in subsequent stores, where the identity was
used more liberally in the architecture. Some stores featured round windows that displayed the candy and were
lit up by the umlaut.
The first store, which opened in White Plains in 1988, was
instantaneously crowded with teenagers and young
mothers with little children. Within five months ola had
pushed Fanny Farmer out of business in the White Plains
shopping mall. This was an absolute revelation for me. I
previously had no sense of the power of my work, be91
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cause it had always been dependent on the quality of the

product. Good covers couldnt sell bad music or boring
books. Mediocre graphics never seemed to hurt products
that were in demand. But here the product was somewhat
generic, ordered from a giant wholesaler. Every candy store
had access to the same product. Packaging spirit and store
environment increased sales.
For fifteen years I had worked through approval processes in marketing departments, responding to comments about color, style, content. Marketing directors and
their underlings were my clients. Here, with ola, my
clients owned the company. I was a design consultant who
named, defined, and designed the spirit and personality of
the product and store. I was the brand manager. I was the
marketing director. I was all-powerful. I decided then and
there that from that time on marketing departments should
work for me, not the other way around.
ola opened five more stores between 1988 and 1990,
hit a huge recession, and found itself undercapitalized. The
Swedes had a silent American partner who had bankrolled
a large percentage of the company, and they were forced
out of the operation. The American partner closed down
the retail stores and began to turn the brand into a concession product for movie theaters. Gradually the packaging
was modified in size, material, and color until it bore little
resemblance to its original design. The company ran out of
money, so I was never fully paid for my work (though my
design fee was embarrassingly low).
But I had begun to understand the power of graphic
design in the retail marketplace. At that time, I was unaware of how large design firms structured proposals and
designated appropriate fees. The scope of work I had
produced for ola would be described on a typical brand
identity proposal today as follows:
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I. Research and Naming; II. Brand Attribute and

Personality Development; III. Identity Development:
a. Initial Concepts, Logo Color System, Materials,
Typography; b. Corporate Materials, Stationery
System, etc.; IV. Sub-brands, Naming Philosophy;
V. Packaging System; VI. Signage; VII. Interior Store
Design; VIII. Advertising, Point of Sale.
I gave most of this to my clients for free. I didnt yet understand how to deconstruct the design process. I delivered
everything at once because I thought that way and naturally worked that way. Had ola been a large corporation,
they never would have produced any of my designs because they would not have trusted the process. It would
have appeared too easy and inexpensive to warrant the
risk of investment. A long, complicated process involving
focus testing and other consumer research would have
been employed to make the larger client feel comfortable.
Also ola would not have looked enough like other products in the same category to satisfy a focus group. The
test would probably have shown a polarized audience,
some who felt strongly that the design was exciting, and
others who would state that it didnt look enough like traditional candy packaging or that they didnt believe the
candy would taste good. Obviously this is all supposition,
but my later experiences with focus testing on products
that I designed with a similar methodology or aesthetic
have always resulted in these types of reactions. The design was always too something, because it didnt look
enough like something that already existed in the marketplace. The hypothetical large corporation would not be
anxious to take any risk. There would have been revisions,
more testing, and more revisions until the joy and spontaneity would have been squeezed from the design:
blanding as opposed to branding.
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Its a shame that ola faced a massive retail recession in

1989 and 1990, because its financial failure made the
design appear unsuccessful. It should have become a serious case history for how the design process can work.
ola was the best purely commercial project, in quality of
work and process, that I have ever had. It was an ideal
situation. There were only two decision makers. They had
a clear understanding of their business goals. They were
willing to trust a designer as a valued consultant who
would make all important visual recommendations based
on the information they provided and with their committed
involvement. Our conversations were completely functional, collaborative, and often theoreticalnot political.
We accomplished much with little time and few resources.
The relationship was mutually beneficial. And most importantly, they were prepared to take risks and to value
intuition as an important part of analysis and decisionmaking. They were model clients in every way except that
they simply didnt have enough operating capital.
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SWATC H WATC H USA

In 1984 the new marketing director of Swatch Watch
USA called Koppel & Scher after seeing a copy of Great
Beginnings. He had heard that I had worked in the music
business and thought my background would be appropriate for an ad campaign for a new youth-oriented product that was being introduced in the United States.
The product was a series of brightly colored plastic
watches that had groovy postmodern graphics. The watches
were waterproof, sold for $35, and were being marketed as
trendy fashion items so cheap that you would wear three at
once. The ad campaign to introduce them would run in
Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and other music-business
rags and youth publications. The marketing director asked
if I would design something fifties.
In the eighties revisiting the fifties was very popular.
Karrie Jacobs once wrote something to the effect that
each generation recreates the graphics of its childhood
so it can correct all the mistakes. In the eighties the
baby-boom generation had come of age and was ready
to relive their youth. I hated the idea of designing
something that was fifties. That direction usually implied that the designer would apply the product (a photograph of a watch) to a background pattern that was
vaguely periodlike linoleum or tacky Holiday Inn-type
wallpaperand then couple it with some retro script or
jumpy typography.
I began rifling through some old Life magazines from
the fifties that I had purchased and saved; at first I was
simply studying graphic and photographic style. But the
ads were simply hilarious. They often seemed to be concerned with the notion that a product could change your
life in some overt way. Pepsi could make you popular;
Maxwell House could improve your marriage. Its not that
the messages of advertising are all that different today,
its just that there was absolutely no subtlety in the
fifties. This goofy naivet is completely familiar now,
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seen everyday on Nick-at-Nite and at Old Navy. In 1984 it

was slightly more surprising.
I decided there should be a Swatch family with a mom,
a dad, a son, a daughter, and even a grandmother, and that
the mom should always make a claim about how the
Swatch Watch had changed the lives of the family for the
better. For the first ad I wrote, Since we got Swatch, my
kids are never late for school, and their grades are better
too! Then we added the tag line, The family that ticks together sticks together, which came from the old religious
slogan, The family that prays together stays together.
I hired Gary Heery, who I had worked with at CBS, to
photograph the ads. We cast the family and wrote and
produced one ad per month. I remember that the first
four or five ads went relatively smoothly. We had developed a nice formula for them. The headlines all had the
same rhythm: Since we got Swatch, blah blah blah,
and blah blah blah too! I collaborated with the marketing director by first setting up the scenario for the
photo session based on possible fifties activitiesa
slumber party, a Thanksgiving dinner, bowlingand
then we would create the headlines. My personal favorite was Since we got Swatch, Debbie made honors,
and the football team too.
By the middle of the campaign, the ads began to attract attention from both the design and advertising
press. Swatch Watch had refused to hire an advertising
agency and had purchased their own media space. Hiring
a design firm to write and art-direct the ads was unconventional. It was after the press acclaim that my relationship with the client began to deteriorate. We began arguing
over scenarios, headlines, the size of the watches on the
bottom of the page. Terry Koppel converted the ad campaign into a calendar that was sold with the watches. The
campaign had been a success, but my relationship with
my client had become tense.
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When we began the second campaign for Swatch, the

marketing director and I were in agreement that it would
be another spoof. I was visiting him in his office, which
was located in the Swiss International Business Building
on Fifth Avenue. Swatch was still a fledgling company
and shared office space with other Swiss businesses. On
the walls of the offices hung the classic Herbert Matter
posters for Swiss travel. I had long admired them and decided they were all simply crying out for a Swatch Watch.
Better still, there were roughly the same number of letters in the word Schweiz as in Swatch. It was a natural
match. The second parody campaign (now infamous) for
Swatch was born.
I called the AIGA to find out about obtaining the right
to use Matters work, and sent permission forms to Mr.
Matter. I found in laying out the first ad that it was impossible to strip in an arm holding a watch without
changing the direction of the face. We reshot the lady
skier in the hat using Heerys wife as a model. I selected

and positioned the typography exactly as it was positioned on the original poster. The marketing director said,
Make it bigger. I said I cant make it bigger, its a parody, its supposed to look exactly the same. The marketing director insisted again that I make it bigger. So I
made it somewhat bigger, and at his behest, somewhat
bigger again. We finished the campaign, which was credited Design: Koppel & Scher with Herbert Matter. The ad
with the lady skier in a hat became a poster; the others
existed only as ads.
In 1985 I was invited to speak at the first conference
of the American Institute of Graphic Arts in Boston. The
keynote speaker was Tom Wolfe. In his speech he discussed the state of contemporary graphic design and referred to the big closet, the storehouse of the past
where designers go to recycle ideas. He cited the Herbert
Matter ad campaign as an example of design from the
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big closet. At that time the campaign was running in

Mademoiselle and a few other fashion publications. I was
amazed and flattered that anyone noticed it, as there was
a very limited media buy. I showed a slide of the poster
during my fifteen-minute presentation at the conference.
It got a big laugh. Afterward the Swiss-American graphic
designer Steph Geissbhler, a Matter devotee, told me he
didnt know if hed been kissed or kicked.
Most Americans dont know who Matter is. The Swatch/
Schweiz joke was really for a very select audience:
media types, poster aficionados, graphic designers,
and people who worked at Swatch. I saw the poster
used in retail situations, where Swatch watches were
displayed. The graphics looked cool and young in 1985.
By the end of 1985 the poster had disappeared from
the marketplace but had its second life in design-competition award annuals, and book and magazine articles.
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Shortly after the poster appeared in Graphis, the Zurich

Poster Museum requested a copy.
In 1990 graphic designer Tibor Kalman ridiculed the
poster in a talk he gave at a symposium at the School of
Visual Arts. He started the talk by playing a sour version
of the Lennon-McCartney song Yesterday (the recording was probably more damning than anything actually
said). He referred to the Swatch poster and others as
pieces of jive modernism, which implied that the use of
the poster was nostalgic, deliberately violating its intended modern target by quoting it out of context. But
the public ridicule of one well-known designer by another was a cause celeb.
Shortly after the symposium and the publication of
Kalmans article Good History, Bad History, I began receiving theses from graphic-design students and professors that dealt with the Swatch poster and whether
or not it was plagiarism, or if not plagiarism, some
other nefarious act, and what was the appropriate role
of history in design.
I had always viewed the Swatch poster as somewhat
unexceptional. It was a joke, a poster about a poster, a
parody. The period style in which the poster was made
was irrelevant. It could just as easily have been Victorian
or early American or art nouveau or completely contemporary. It was the fame of the poster that mattered, no
pun intended. Thats how parodies function. One is supposed to remember the original and get the joke.
Parodies are an acceptable expressive form; they exist in
literature, music, theater, and design. But the Swatch
poster, a parody of a revered graphic icon, seemed to
rankle a certain percentage of the design community
that believes in the sacredness of midcentury modernism. There has probably been more discourse, more
writing about my Swatch poster, pro and con, than any
other piece of my work. I was told after being proposed
as a member to the Alliance Graphique Internationale (an

elitist international graphic-design organization) that there
was a Swiss designer who rejected me because he was
so offended by the Swatch poster. Over my dead body,
he said. (Then he died.)
For a period of time I stopped showing the poster in
design lectures because I didnt want to be forced to defend it. But the audience would always ask about it anyway. They still do.
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B E AU T I F U L FAC E S / D I N G B AT S
Champion Papers approached me in 1986 about the possibility of promoting their Carnival Paper line. They said
they spent a lot of money creating promotion pieces for
designers (the Imagination Series they produced was legendary). But often, after the paper promotions were distributed to designers, the paper representatives would make
sales calls and discover that the designers had thrown
out the promotion pieces. They asked if I had an idea for a
promotion that a designer would not throw away.
The logical answer seemed to be some sort of tool,
something useful for the designer. It had to be something where the design of the container was irrelevant.
While a design audience provides opportunity for design experimentation, most designers love to complain
about design for designers, and to an extent, their complaints are warranted. This type of design is usually excessive, and if the content isnt witty or interesting, it
seems especially banal.
I was often on the design-industry panels, and the
question I was most asked was, Where do you purchase
your typography? My typography came from lots of
sources. There was a type house in New York City called
Haber Typographers that had a wonderful collection of
American wood types from the Morgan Foundry. I had
collected prints of entire alphabets of the wood faces and
photostated them repeatedly. The Xerox machine was the
ruling graphic design-technology in the early eighties, and
I often had designs reproduced from photocopies of wood
typography. I collected other alphabets from old type
books and type specimen sheets purchased at flea markets and in antique stores. The typefaces were Victorian,
art nouveau, art deco, streamlineyou name it. The dogs
dinner of eclectic style was my response to the regimentation of Helvetica and the international style, and later to
the tyranny of the type company ITC, which distributed a
plethora of popular new and classic fonts. I have always
1987
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1988
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Agency Gothic
Carin Condensed
Triple Condensed
Gothic
Wood Block
Condensed
Carin Condensed
Hessbold
Herold Condensed
Comstock
Binner Gothic
Comstock
Epitaph Open
Hessbold
Herold Condensed
Triple Condensed
Gothic
Long Tall Good Wood
Morgan Gothic
Grocers Condensed
Long Tall Good Wood
Agency Gothic
Long Tall Good Wood
Epitaph Open
Binner Gothic
Triple Condensed
Gothic
Carin Condensed
Grocers Condensed
Comstock
Triple Condensed
Gothic
Long Tall Good Wood
Agency Gothic
Carin Condensed
Binner Gothic
Carin Condensed
Morgan Gothic
Herold Condensed
Grocers Condensed
Hessbold
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Binner Gothic
Comstock
Agency Gothic
Agency Gothic
Binner Gothic
Herold Condensed
Wood Block
Condensed
Carin Condensed
Grocers Condensed
Comstock
Carin Condensed
Hessbold
Long Tall Good Wood
Morgan Gothic
Agency Gothic
Epitaph Open
Binner Gothic
Herold Condensed
Binner Gothic
Grocers Condensed
Triple Condensed
Gothic
Carin Condensed
Triple Condensed
Gothic
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Triple Condensed
Gothic
Long Tall Good Wood
Comstock
Binner Gothic
Hessbold
Epitaph Open
Hessbold
Comstock
Grocers Condensed
Epitaph Open
Triple Condensed
Gothic
Herold Condensed
Agency Gothic
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been wary of popular type companies that have a strong

aesthetic (though I admire Emigre, for example, I dont
often use their more eccentric fonts), because the ensuing typography somehow looks like it comes from the
type house and is not a natural product of the design
process. When a new typeface becomes a trend, Im embarrassed by it.
Beautiful Faces was a simple idea. I selected twentyodd fonts and laid their alphabets out on a grid that
could fit comfortably on an 11-by-17 inch photocopier.
The typefaces were then printed on Champion Carnival
papers, inserted into a portfolio, and distributed to forty
thousand graphic designers. I picked dark-colored papers, which would not copy well, for typographic demonstrations. These were period designs and not dissimilar
to those in Great Beginnings.
I couldnt find the names of some of the typefaces I
had collected so I made them up. One of the fonts in the
Beautiful Faces portfolio was used by my friend Carin
Goldberg on a jacket for a book titled Trio, so I named the
typeface Trio after that. Years later I saw the face turn up in
a collection of digital fonts with that name attached to it.
Beautiful Faces became the most requested promotion piece in Champions history. It gave the design community access to a reproducible type portfolio for free and
had the greatest individual impact I would make on the
design gestalt of the times. There were three portfolios in
all, two that contained typography and one that contained
printer flourishes and decorative marks, called Dingbats.
The success of the project cemented my relationship with
Champion, which has since allowed me to produce some
of my more inventive work.
1989
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Geegaws
Hands
Leaves, Trees, and Birds
Geegaws
Geegaws
Geegaws
Geegaws
Miscellaneous
Animals
Hands
Romance
Romance
Swashes
People
Geometry
Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous
Geometry
People
Swashes
People
Geegaws
People
People
Flowers
Geegaws
Romance
Geegaws
Hands
Miscellaneous
Hands
Animals
Animals
Swashes
Geegaws
Geegaws
Leaves, Trees
Animals
Geometry
Romance
Miscellaneous
Hands
Swashes
Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous
People
Romance
Geometry
Hands
Flowers
Flowers
Hands
Geegaws
Animals
Animals
Geegaws
Flowers
Animals
Geometry
Geegaws
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Swashes
Geegaws
Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous
People
Geegaws
Swashes
Hands
People
Geegaws
People
Romance
Geegaws
Geometry
Miscellaneous
Geegaws
Geegaws
Geegaws
Geegaws
Hands
Geegaws
Swashes
Hands
Geegaws
Romance
Animals
Leaves
Romance
Hands
Geegaws
Geometry
Flowers
Flowers
People
Animals
Birds
Geometry
People
Flowers
Swashes
Animals
Swashes
Flowers
Flowers
Leaves
Animals
People
Geometry
Flowers
Romance
Miscellaneous
Geometry
Geegaws
Geegaws
Geegaws
Swashes
Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous
Swashes
Hands
Romance
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P R I N T M AG A Z I N E
In 1985 Marty Fox, the editor of Print, invited Steve Heller
and me to co edit a special parody issue of the magazine.
We decided on the topics to lampoon and wrote the articles. We parodied design styles, design-industry ads, and
design-industry writing. I invited Tibor Kalman to contribute, and he parodied famous designers (including me)
in an article about a corporate identity program for Canada.
I wrote an article about an anal-retentive Swiss designer
who designed a famous campaign for a plumbing company called Borinkmeister, and another article called
Lubevitch & Moscowitz: Forgotten Doyens of Deli Design,
in which generic coffee-shop graphics were used to send
up overdesigned restaurants.
The cover of the parody was a complicated genealogical chart in which famous people slept with typefaces
and gave birth to other famous people and typefaces:
Julius Cesar slept with Helvetica and gave birth to
Corvinus, and so forth. The whole insane chart moved
through history until it ultimately arrived at Milton Glaser.
This act of concocting complicated systems of useless
information became an important and personal part of
my design vocabulary.
1985
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SVA
I began teaching design at New Yorks School of Visual
Arts in 1982, and have taught there ever since. Silas
Rhodes, SVAs founder, has over the years invited me to
design three posters for its acclaimed subway advertising campaign. The posters usually employ a thematic advertising headline. The first poster I was asked to design,
in 1987, had the tag To Be Good Is Not Enough When You
Dream Of Being Great. Silas explicitly asked me to create
a typographic poster. I produced a machinelike face derivative of thirties painting. It was typical of my work in the
mid-eighties, which historian Phil Meggs dubbed retro.
The second poster, in 1992, carried the headline
Great Ideas Never Happen Without Imagination. I combined three unrelated imagesa winding road, Winston
Churchills V for victory, and the bottom of an unfinished Eiffel Towerthat, combined, spelled out SVA.
When the poster was displayed in the subway, the forefinger of Winston Churchills hand was artfully blacked
out with Magic Marker on every subway stop on the
Queens-Astoria line.
I was so thrilled by this spontaneous street activity
that when it came time to design my third SVA poster I
decided to make it deliberately interactive. The poster
headline was Art Is... I created the words out of words
by writing the names of all my favorite artists, musicians,
and writers in alphabetical order. I created two posters,
one for bus shelters and one for subways. The subway
poster had a white background and came with instructions for the passersby to add their names. No one followed my instructions.
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1992
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1996
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A M B A S S A D O R A RT S
Ambassador Arts, a silkscreen printing company, was another design-industry company that afforded me an opportunity to design relatively unrestricted work. In the late
eighties they asked me to design a poster they could distribute to their clients and friends as an elegant Christmas
gift. The poster was lavishly silkscreened on heavy Arches
paper. Silent Night, which came out in 1988, was one of
the last pieces I designed in my retro period. I have a
hard time with the poster now. It is cloyingly sweet, and I
think I knew that the moment I designed it.
The Big A poster was my homage to fractured technology and inexpensive production values. The poster
was silkscreened on newsprint. Though it was designed
only a year and a half after Silent Night, the two posters
could not have been more different in spirit and aesthetics. When I designed the Big A, I knew the eightiesand
an erawere over. In the subsequent year and a half the
stock market crashed, my business partner left, the United
States bombed Iraq, the economy slid into a severe recession, the design industry went digital, and I was invited
to join Pentagram. My work became less ornate, more
pointed, and perhaps, meaner.
Ambassador Arts adopted the Big A as its identity
(and reproduced it as a ridiculously small a) and suggested the creation of an entire alphabet. I arranged a
cross-promotion with Champion Papers. Woody Pirtle and
I selected twelve designers to produce the alphabet, and
they were given the size of the poster, a red-and-black
color palette, and assigned letters. Every designer asked
if they had to use red and black.
1988
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1991
STYLE WARS
Michael Bierut
Peter Saville
Seymour Chwast
Paul Davis
Heinz Edelmann
Tom Geismar
Paula Scher
Yarom Vardimon
STYLE WARS
Paula Scher
Paul Davis
Pierre Mendell
Rosmarie Tissi
Michael Bierut
Shigeo Fukuda
Seymour Chwast
Paula Scher
Heinz Edelman
Rosmarie Tissi
Shigeo Fukuda
Woody Pirtle
Yarom Vardim
Peter Saville
Pierre Mendell
Woody Pirtle
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F R E E P O ST E R S
Woody Pirtle
Tom Geismar
119
In the eighties I learned that if I wanted to make any kind

of graphic discovery or control content, the best clients
would be within the design industry and the best audience would be other designers or design students.
Design-industry clients have always afforded me the
greatest opportunity for personal expression and growth.
By the mid-to late eighties, I was feeling trapped in my own
reputation. Commercial clients had an expectation that my
work would have a period-oriented postmodern bent. They
hired or didnt hire me because of it. Had I not been able to
publicly change my design vocabulary, my ability to attract
interesting projects would have been severely impaired.
Work breeds work.
I love making posters. I love the form and the scale,
and I will make them for free if someone will pay for the
printing. (Sometimes Ill pay for it myself.) Its considered
a dying or irrelevant form of communication, but I believe
the opposite to be true. There are so many diverse forms
of mediahundreds of cable TV stations, the Internet,
thousands of publicationsbut the only promotion an
urban population will see collectively is outdoor media:
bus-shelter posters, subway posters, posters pasted on
barricades, even billboards. The form has been abducted
by advertising agencies that produce big ads that dominate city spaces. The territory rightfully belongs to the
public. Graphic designers need to reclaim it for them.
At the time I designed this poster I smoked two and half packs of
Parliments a day. I quit smoking in 1996.
For my show in Osaka, Japan, 1999
The Chrysler Building composed of a list of the entire membership of the

AIGA New York Chapter, 1999
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For the ICOGRADA Design Renaissance Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, 1993
Blah Blah Blah: Worth Magazine asked a variety of designers to make a visual comment on the
future of the technology. This was my comment. I thought it would look better bigger so I made
large-scale silkscreen posters, which were sold by Jean-Yves Noblet, the silkscreen company
that printed the posters.
STYLE WARS
A poster advocating literacy, designed for the Denver Chapter of the

AIGA, 1997
Poster honoring the centenary of Toulouse-Lautrecs death, 2001
STYLE WARS
TO M ATO D A M ATO
Im often asked to design posters promoting worthy political causes. Unfortunately the posters are usually for
design organizations. They hang in a gallery and no one
ever sees them. Posters belong outside, on the street.
When Alphonse DAmato was running against Chuck
Schumer in the 1998 New York senatorial election, I
designed the Tomato-DAmato poster. My New York
Pentagram partners agreed to jointly pay for the printing
and sniping (the act of plastering the poster on New York
City construction barricades). The poster credit reads,
Designed and paid for by Pentagram. Shortly after the
poster went up someone from Ed Kochs office called (he
was supporting DAmato), and asked the Pentagram receptionist to describe the poster. The next day the poster
disappeared from the streets. It was covered over by other
posters or simply ripped off the barricades. We called the
sniping service and they told us that a police car had
been following them around. Sniping in New York City is
technically illegal, though off-Broadway productions,
movies, and clothing stores use it as a medium. I found
out that sniping is selectively illegal.
You/Me: This poster was never produced. It was part of an Israeli invitational competition to create a message about peaceful coexistence within borders, for the Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem. I may print it myself.
Following pages: Promotional posters for Metropolis magazines branding
conferences. 1999-2000
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STYLE WARS
AIGA
In 1990 Caroline Hightower, then director of the American
Institute of Graphic Arts, asked me to design the cover
for the coming annual, Graphic Design USA II, which was
a compendium of all the exhibits and competitions the
AIGA had held in 1989. She told me there was no design
fee, but that the AIGA would contribute $1000 for design expenses. I asked what design expenses were, and
Hightower replied that they could be the purchase of
photography, retouching, necessary typography. I asked
what would happen if I didn't have any expenses, and she
told me I'd get to keep the money anyway. I vowed then
and there not to incur any expenses.
The 1990 AIGA cover was a spoof on graphic design
in America, not dissimilar to the Print parody cover. I
painted the information instead of typesetting it. It was
writing as design. The cover simply took the words
Graphic Design USA literally and then dished out some
completely useless, nonsensical information. The front
cover featured an eye whose lashes listed all the emotions and desires that might be attributed to ambitious
designers: fame, power, money, ego, and ennui. The eyeball carried an absurd dissertation about whether or not
less is more. The background of the painting had a listing of every state in the United States, and the percentage of people in each state who used Helvetica. I made
up the statistics, but I decided to base them loosely on
the 1986 Reagan-Mondale presidential election. I reasoned that if Reagan carried a state the local designers
were probably inclined to use a lot of Helvetica. The back
cover had a map of the United Stated that I had painted
from memory (I inadvertently left out Utah). I painted all
the flap-copy information simply to ensure that I could
keep the entire thousand dollars.
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By 1990, when the annual appeared, most of the design

industry had converted to digital production. The cover
was anticomputer, making its primitive idiocy even more
laughable and poignant. The combination of personalized
writing and painting was a creative breakthrough for me.
Thereafter I became increasingly obsessed with painting
useless information.
The self-portrait for AIGA (opposite) was painted in 1992. This dissertation on antifeminist language was for a 1993 MTV Awards program, 1993
130
1992
This hand-drawn cover for a Japanese design publication dealt with left/right reading legibility, 1999.
I created this February calendar page for the Cooper-Hewitt, National

Design Museum. It is now in the collection of the Museum of Menstruation,
1997.
STYLE WARS
An opinionated map, 1993
I began painting small opinionated maps in the early

nineties. Over time they grew larger and more obsessive.
In the late nineties and now the map paintings serve as
an antidote to laborious corporate design projects frustrated by indecisive committees.
The World 5 X 8, 1998
STYLE WARS
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The United States painted in 1999 (detail)
136
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137
STYLE WARS
Manhattan 11x 5 2002
138
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139
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U S E L E S S I N F O R M AT I O N
In the early 1990s Champion International paired William
Drenttell and me as editors of a series of pamphlets titled
Subjective Reasoning. The pamphlets were produced
on a variety of topicssome political, some personal
for the edification of the design community, to help
Champion promote Kromekote papers, and for the personal amusement of Bill and me.
I authored and designed my own pamphlet, entitled
Useless Information. It was a diatribe on the information
age, decrying news formatting, political blather, the hype of
consumer electronics, the tyranny of economics, double
talk, and the terror imposed on our daily lives by conflicting information about the health and safety of food. The
last page of the pamphlet is a listing of all the numbers
(drivers license, passport, credit cards, etc.) that are
somehow connected to me. There is an astounding number of numbers. What do they mean? I recreated the portrait in a more literal way for the New York Times Op-Ed
page in 1998.
1992
140
141
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sketches
142
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143
STYLE WARS
144
Op-Ed page, New York Times, 1998
STYLE WARS
YO U R N A M E H E R E
Mohawk Papers created another opportunity for me to
author an opinionated combination of writing and design. Your Name Here may be my most cynical piece of
professional work. It is a manual of design styles attached to generic design problems. The designs are
then described in detail, enabling any designer to lift
them and apply them to an appropriate situation. The
book contained identity designs for an elegant bank, an
overpriced restaurant, a start-up technology company, a
pretty housewares store, a format for a biotechnology
company's annual report, and a catalog for an uppermiddle-class child's toy. The last page of the manual described the typography used in it, which was described
in another typeface, which was described again in another typeface, and another, and then on into infinity.
Your Name Here is my final comment on style wars. By
the end of the nineties designers had become so adept
at manipulating style that the minute you described a
business, you already knew what it looked like.
1998
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147
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148
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149
STYLE WARS
I began contributing to the Op-Ed page of the New York

Times in the midnineties. Most of my work was graphic
illustration for specific pieces of writing. Every so often I
would contribute something that was independent of
someone elses writing. This analysis of the Florida ballot was my best response to the disastrous 2000 presidential election.
Although I have enjoyed satirizing design style, this
piece was no joke. The Times later reported that this confusing ballot design caused more than 30,000 voter errors (double votes and mistaken votes), many times
more than in any other county of Florida. The ballot was
designed by a local Democratic official who thought she
was helping older voters by creating two columns of
type, so that it would be bigger and therefore easier to
read. The official was not a graphic designer and did not
know that she needed to hire one. I would contend that Al
Gore won not only the popular vote in the rest of the
United States but also in Florida. Incompetent graphic
design threw a national election.
I received a tremendous amount of mail, pro and
con, from this Op-Ed piece. Someone marked up the
ballot to make it functional and sent it to me anonymously. It works.
150
I N TH E COM PANY OF M E N
In the
Company
of Men
T h e E a r l y Ye a r s
P E N TA G R A M 1 9 7 8 - 8 7
P E N TA G R A M 1 9 7 3 - 7 8
Fletcher Forbes Gill 1962-66

LON DON
LON DON
Al an F l e t ch e r
B ob Gill
John McConnell
J ohn McConnell
1974
C olin Forb es
T h e o C r o s by
N E W YO R K
Kenneth G r a ng e
The o Crosby
C r o s b y F l e t c h e r F o r b e s 1 9 67- 7 1
Colin F or b es
Kenneth G r a ng e
T he o Cr os by
1982
Howa r d Br own
Da v id Pelha m
1987
E t an M an as s e
P e t e r H ar r i s o n
The o Crosby
Mervyn Kurlansky
Mervyn Kurlansky
Alan Fletcher
C o l i n Fo r b e s
Ron H er r on
B ob Gill
Da v id Pelha m
1977
1987
1978
Da v id Hillma n
1978
C olin Forb es
Mer v y n Kur la ns k y
Ala n F letcher
1986
1986
P E N TA G R A M F O U N D E D 1 9 7 2
Ron Her r on
1981
SAN FRANCISCO
1978
LON DON
N E W YO R K
Kenneth Grange
Th e o C r o s by
Neil Sha ker y
L i n da H i n r i ch s
Colin F or b es
Mervyn Kurlansky
Kit H i n r i ch s
Colin Forbes
P E N TA G R A M 1 9 8 8 - 9 1
LON DON
LON DON
J o h n M c Connell
J ohn McConnell
Kenneth Grange
T h e o C r o s by
A l an Fl e t ch e r
1989
N E W YO R K
Da niel Weil
Colin F or b es
Peter Harrison
P e t e r S aville
J ohn Rus hwor th
Da v id Hillma n
N E W YO R K
Mer v yn Kurlansky
C o l i n Fo r b e s
Kenneth G r a ng e
T he o Cr os by
John Rushwor th
D av i d H i l l m a n
D avi d P o ck n e l l
1991
P E N TA G R A M 1 9 9 2 - 9 3
Wo o dy Pir tle
Peter Sa v ille
Da v id Po ck nell
1993
M i ch ae l G e r i cke
Pe t e r H ar r i s o n
Wo o d y P ir tle
1992
1991
1992
1988
1990
Mer v y n Kur la ns k y
H ow ar d Br own
Micha el Bier ut
James Bib e r
1988
1993
SAN FRANCISCO
J am e s B i b e r
M i ch ae l B i e r u t
1990
1991
SAN FRANCISCO
Paula Scher
P au l a S ch e r
1991
Et a n Ma na s s e
N e i l S h a ke r y
Lowell Williams
Me
K i t Hinrichs
Neil Sha ker y
Lowell Willia ms
1991
Kit Hinr ichs
1990
Died
Linda Hinrichs
Key t o D i agram :
1990
N ew Par tn e r
Par t n e r l e av e s
N ew O ffice o pens
Frictio n B etwe e n P ar tners
1993
I N T H E C O M PA N Y O F M E N
I JOINED
Pentagram in the spring of 1991, with the economy in the doldrums and my design business faltering. Koppel & Scher had
suffered in the recession of 1990, and Terry Koppel had taken a
staff position at Esquire. I was running the business on my own.
It was time for a change.
Shortly after I joined Pentagram I saw a presentation by my
partner Michael Bierut that explained the typographic system for a
corporate packaging project for a large technology firm. Bierut
had pasted a black-and-white printout of the typeface Times
Roman to a piece of foamcore, and over the alphabet slugged the
headline: This is Times Roman. It is a serif typeface. It has little
feet. I picked up the board and laughed. Then I realized it wasnt
funny. In that instant I understood what I had been doing wrong in
client situations for more than twenty years. I had assumed that
clients had come to me having the background to make value
judgments about what they were looking at. When they picked inferior design, I assumed it was because they were philistines bent
on keeping down the American taste level. From Bierut I learned
that clients were just normal people, and that normal people
155
have a reasonable understanding of things based on their cultural

environmentand are often directly influenced by some very specific milieu in which they operate. I was the one who was not normal. I had a graphic designers understanding of things. Most
people dont understand what a graphic designer does, let alone
what they see, Bierut explained. I had to learn to explain design in
lay terms, in human terms. Little feet demystifies serif type. It explains a visual difference.
The ability to explain graphic design is fundamentally different from the ability to create graphic design, and it relies on different faculties. In the explanation process, the designer must
deconstruct his or her work and place it in a logical sequence
so one can understand its components and see how they collectively create an entity that has a specific idea, spirit, and look.
The act of designing is more ephemeral; it is an intuitive process
informed by external forces that direct the intuition. Whereas a
solution can be explained, the process that created it can never
adequately be understood. Thats why the process is so mistrusted, misunderstood, even resented. It is not scientific or
democratic, cannot be learned by following an appropriate
course of study, and cannot even be equally understood or appreciated by people of similar intellects and levels of education.
Whereas the act of explaining design requires specific
order and logic, the act of creating design involves a form of disorder, with outer stimuli thrown together into the mixer of the
human brain. The result is something that is various parts intellect, inspiration, and obsession. Too much intellect smothers obsession, too much obsession smothers intellect, and too much of
either smothers inspiration.
P E N TA G R A M 1 9 9 7 - 9 9
P E N TA G R A M 1 9 9 4 - 9 6
1994
LON DON
HONG KONG
LON DON
J o h n Mc Connell
David Hillma n
J ohn McConnell
HONG KONG
1997
1998
Colin F or b es
David Hillman
Ken n e t h G r a n g e
Da v id Hillma n
Ke nneth G r a ng e
N E W YO R K
1991
D avi d Po ck n e l l
N E W YO R K
1998
Ang us Hy la nd
Lor enz o Ap icella
1998
John Rushwor th
Daniel Weil
Michael G er icke
J u s t u s Oehler
Peter Harrison
Th e o Cr o s by
1995
J ohn Rus hwor th
Da niel Weil
J us tus O ehler
Wo o dy Pir tle
J am e s B i b e r
Wo o dy P i r t l e
P au l a S ch e r
1994
Died 1994
Micha el Bier ut
James Bib er
Paula Scher
SAN FRANCISCO
J . A bb o t t M i l l e r
SAN FRANCISCO
1994
1999
K i t H i nrichs
N e i l S h a ke r y
Kit Hinr ichs

AUSTIN
AUSTIN
1994
B o b B runner
B ob Br unner
Lowell Williams
Low e l l W i l l i am s
1996
P E N TA G R A M 2 0 0 0
P E N TA G R A M 2 0 0 1 - 0 2
LON DON
N E W YO R K
LON DON
N E W YO R K
J o h n Mc C o nnell
Michael Ge r icke
J ohn McConnell
Justus Oehler
David Hillman
An g u s H y l a n d
Lorenzo Apicella
J oh n R u s h w o r t h
James Bib er
J us tus O ehler
Da v id Hillma n
Lor enz o Ap icella

Paula Scher
Daniel Weil
Wo o dy Pir tle
Micha el Bier ut
J. Abb ott M iller
F e r n a n d o G utirrez
James Biber
Ang us Hy la nd
J ohn Rus hwor t h
Da niel Weil
Wo o d y P i r t l e
2002
L i s a S t r au s f e l d
Pa u l a S ch e r
J . A bb o t t M i l l e r
F er na nd o G utir r ez
2000
AUSTIN
AUSTIN
SAN FRANCISCO
SAN FRANCISCO
Lowell Williams
Los Angeles
Kit Hinr ichs

DJ Stou t
DJ Stout
Bob Brunner
2000
2001
2000
Los Angeles
K i t H i n r i ch s
Lowell Will i am s
Ap r il G r eima n
A pr i l G r e i m an
B ob Br unner
Key t o D i agram :
N ew Par t n e r
Par t n e r l e av e s
N ew O ffice o pens
Frictio n B etwe en P ar tners
Design-management symposiums tend to spend an enormous

amount of time discussing process and rarely address intuition
as part of that process. Certain professors are tremendously uncomfortable with the notion of intuitive thinking because it
makes design appear magical as opposed to rational. Also it
means that students will not perform equally if they follow an
equivalent course of study and methodology. Thats bad business for design pedagogues.
I cant design anything after a meeting in which Ive explained design, and I cant explain a design immediately after Ive
designed it. I need at least half a day to recover from either act.
The two jobs require different energies. Pentagram partners are
drawn together because we all, to varying degrees, have and
value both talents. We all recognize that graphic design is a social activity. It necessarily involves other people, their opinions,
comments, egos, conceits, jealousies, and fears.
As a design firm Pentagrams structure is unique; it is essentially a group of small businesses linked together financially
through necessary services and through mutual interests. Each
partner maintains a design team, usually consisting of a senior
designer, a couple of junior designers, and a project coordinator.
The partners share accounting services, secretarial and reception services, and maintain a shared archive. Pentagram partners
are responsible for attracting and developing their own business,
but they pool their billings, draw the same salary, and share profit
in the form of an annual bonus. Its a cooperative, and its most
valued form of cooperation is the sharing of knowledge and information. There are presently four offices: London (the firm was
founded there in 1972), New York, San Francisco, and Austin,
Texas. Each office contributes a share of its profits to a central
157
fund that pays for partners meetings, promotion, and publishing.

Annual profit is shared only in local offices, which have their
own personalities.
The financial structure of Pentagram was designed by its
founding partner, Colin Forbes. The system affords the partners
complete equality. One partner may elect to operate a very large
design team while another maintains a small one, but their profitability is what is measured, not their actual billing. A complicated formula determines office hourly rates to ensure complete
fairness in the sharing of overhead. Best explained, Pentagrams
financial structure emulates an affable roommate situation where
there is an appropriate mechanism to compensate one roommate for the extra milk consumed by the other.
Partner equality also exists on an international basis. There
are two international partners meetings per year, at which decisions are made by consensusone partner, one vote. The organization is horizontalone big committeeand is rife with the complications, indecision, and slowness endemic of committees. But
it is worth the hassle, because the collective power of the group
is a compilation of intelligence, experience, and portfolio that can
not be matched by any individual. Pentagram gave me, instantaneously, a power base and by association, credibility.
Pentagrams unique structure enabled me to operate as if I
were a principal at a powerful corporate design firm while maintaining the individuality of a small practitioner. With a large design
firm, a client will meet initially with a principal but find that actual
design is done by a much more junior person working several levels below. At Pentagram the partners are the designers, and the
teams are small. The partner is always involved in the process.
Clients often ask how the partners collaborate on a given project. I usually explain that they are getting one partner as a designer and five kibitzers. Because we sit so close together
Pentagram has an open-plan officeit is impossible not to be involved in or influenced by one anothers work. Most planned collaboration occurs cross-discipline. The graphic designers tend
to collaborate with the product designers or architects. (My architect partner, Jim Biber, would say that the graphic designers
come around when they need something that isnt made of
paper and actually has to stand up in weather.)
The most difficult aspect of the Pentagram partnership is the
eternal struggle between the individual and the collective. The
partners agree that the benefits of the collective wisdom of the
group far outweigh the distinct disadvantage of being by oneself;
however, when Pentagram promotes itself collectively the involuntary eccentricities of individual designs are somewhat neutralized
and subsumed into a form of visual collectivism. It takes a certain
kind of design ego to feel comfortable with this. I had trouble adjusting to it. Pentagram isnt for everybody.
One of the first things I learned at Pentagram was how to
construct a proposal. I hadnt understood how to properly explain the design process and I had a tendency to give away services to my clients, as demonstrated by my arrangement with
ola. At Pentagram I learned to deconstruct the process and
create a description and a line-item expense for each service.
Corporations feel very comfortable with a detailed description of
an orderly process; the more methodical and scientific-sounding
it is the better. They are also more comfortable paying fees according to this model. If the process of a large-scale corporate
identity project looks too simple and too inexpensive, the client
wont trust the process or believe in the ensuing design. I began

to learn that corporate clients tended to respect work in direct
proportion to the complexity of stages and the corresponding
fees. They prefer buying process as opposed to design. In some
instances, Ive noticed a certain psychology existing not dissimilar
to the way I buy clothes. If Im in a clothing boutique in Europe in a
good neighborhood, but Ive never heard of the shop and the
clothing prices are reasonable, I dont trust the clothing. Many
clients who have never bought design before dont trust low prices
in boutique design firms, even when they receive a terrific product.
powerful corporations like large,
powerful design firms. Michael Bierut
has a theory that assumes that big American corporations are
still headed by no-nonsense all-American men who believe that
design is sissy-boy stuff and not part of the serious world of
capitalism. These corporate leaders may have heard that good
design is good business, or they might be impressed with the
global branding strategies of Coca-Cola, Nike, Starbucks, and
McDonalds, but they are comfortable only with the research
parts of the design process. Therefore, in a design proposal the
actual process of creating somethingsay, a logois described
as design exploration. This sounds downright scientific, as if the
designer has put on a lab coat, pulled out the appropriate vial of
design serum, and mixed it with varying proportions of brand
essence until a piece of litmus paper bears a mark in the appropriate color and shape necessary to accurately represent a
brand and make the corporation lots of money. In this scenario
it is also assumed that the more time and exploration allotted,
the more review and commentthe more testingundertaken
LARGE,
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P E N TA G R A M N E W Y O R K P A R T N E R S S E AT I N G
Lis a Stra us feld
J. Abb ott Miller

PAS SAG E WAY
wALL
Paula Scher
To tal A rea 5 00 sq . f t. (71. 3 sq . f t. p er par tner)
Michael Bier ut
by the designers, the more likely it is that the designer will come
to the correct answer.
The term design exploration may seem like a harmless conceit, a description that allows for price comparison between
firms or merely describes the process in which the designer engages. But it diminishes the real value a corporation gets from a
designer. It neutralizes the idea that it takes a specific artistry to
design a logo. It is the rare combination of the designers intelligence, intuition, inspiration, and aesthetic sensedare I say talent?that makes for successful design. The idea of design exploration is difficult for me, because my first ideas are generally
my best. I dont know whyit is the mystery of my creative
process. More time, more experimentation, and more information seem to muddle my thinking, and my solutions are always
somehow less incisive. Often I get my ideas in the middle of the
first client meeting, or in the taxi on the way back, or in a conversation with a partner. Its random, somewhat accidental, incidental, and certainly not scientific.
testing of designlogos,
packaging, whateveris
another scientific charade. The people being tested are invariably selected because they are customers or potential customers and fit into an appropriate consumer profile, or maybe
they are early adopters, those likely to purchase something
new. The problem with such groups is that their reactions are
traditionally reactionary. Focus groups cant be expected to respond positively to something new, because if its something
really new its going to look too something, which means not
sufficiently like other things like it that already exist in the mar-
THE FOCUS
Wo o dy P i r t l e
Michael G er icke
James Bib er
159
ketplace. Focus testing tells you what the consumer already accepts, not what they will accept in the future. Focus groups always remind me of my childhood friends and their shoes. My
friend Carolyn appreciated a shoe style just as it was about to
become pass. She hated it when it was new, always said the
shoes in that style were ugly, and swore shed never wear them.
Then after two years, just as the shoes were about to go out of
style, shed decide they were terrific. My friend Joan always
bought shoes ahead of the curve. Joan was throwing out the
shoes Carolyn was buying. Joan is the right person to bring into
the focus test, a true early adopter. But most focus groups are
formed of a combination of Carolyns and Joans. If your Carolyn
is louder and more assertive than your Joan, your focus group
will be a failure. One loud Carolyn can sway the whole group.
FIVE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT BRANDING
thing about focus

testing is that its impossible to simulate a real-life consumer situation. The people
composing the focus group know that they have been selected
to respond to something, like a new package design. They naturally assume that because their opinion is being asked they
should have one. Some of them take on the role of a self-appointed marketing director and infuse their comments with an
air of expertise. This has nothing in common with a real consumer
accidentally coming upon something new in a store. When one
comes upon something new by accident, one is curious, not
opinionated. One tends to ask questions, not give answers.
When a packaging system I had designed for 3Com, a
technology company, was focus tested in an actual store, the
group made countless critical observations. However, the actual
THE WORST
160
It is not a science.
A smart brand-positioning program and an

environmentally friendly, ergonomically correct
design cannot make a potential consumer
purchase a product they don't need or want.
The best brands of any sort are usually

produced by corporations or institutions
where the president is both a strong
leader and a visionary.
Corporations composed of more than five

people have most of their difficulties creating
brands because of fear and jealousy among
individuals in various departments.
Intuition is crucial. Luck helps.
consumers who were in the store were curious and naturally

drawn to the packaging, and commented without invitation that
they thought it worked and that it was cool. Had they been formally interviewed to any extent, their comments would undoubtedly have been more critical.
The large design firms that offer branding as a service try
to persuade their clients that they are scientific by establishing
an ordered process that appears to quantify intangible things
like brand positioning or brand personality attributes. They
prepare lists, charts, and graphs (usually set in large type, with a
fifty-word paragraph on each page, bound into a wiro-bound
book) that are designed to persuade a corporation that there is
a specific brand positioning naturally appropriate to that corporation, and that this can manifest itself in everything that corporation doesa mantra for how the company should look, feel,
and be perceived. There is nothing inherently wrong with this.
Most large corporations have complicated structures, complicated politics, decentralized divisions, separate profit centers,
and infighting betweenand withintheir divisions. They lose
sight of how they represent themselves and how other people
see them. Branding mantras give disparate political units a common cause and help them speak with the same voice.
Unfortunately the large branding firms that present these
seemingly complicated scientific exercises often fall apart when
they come to the logo exploration part of the design process. I
always get the feeling that the firms effort, money, and talent
have gone into persuasive chart making, not logo aesthetics. Their
wiro-bound presentations show a corporate name set in a score
of possible typefaces. After picking what is ostensibly the most
appropriate from this set, they proceed to show scores of incre-
mental versions to the chosen face, displaying it in different colors

and different weights with subtle modulations. The result appears scientific but leaves the client with nothing remarkable and
nothing memorableand nothing objectionable either.
Ive been hired to design identities for corporations after
theyve gone through the brand-positioning process and logo
exploration by another firm. When theyve completed this exercise, they are often much better behaved clients. They have a
basis for making visual judgments that has been depersonalized
and has become more objective. It is far easier for a committee
to determine whether a logo, packaging program, or advertising
campaign is on brand than it is for the same group to agree
about whether or not they like it. And after having seen fifty or
so incrementally different and therefore confusing logo designs,
the group is often happy to look at two or three diverse designs
from another firm.
Years ago, when I was a student-teacher in an unruly high
school art class in Philadelphia, the master teacher I worked
with would write a seemingly pointless quote about art or creativity on the blackboard every day. The students would noisily
enter the classroom, throw their books around, and the teacher
would admonish them to sit down, open their notebooks, and
copy down the quote of the day. Suddenly the class would become orderly. Once they performed this rote exercise, they were
ready to learn.
The same process is at work when large corporate committees undergo the strategic phase of a brand-positioning program. The exercise leaves them ready to pay attention.
brand positions are

most clear and succinct when they directly reflect the ideals of a strong institutional
president. When brand positions and personality attributes are
organized by an outside management consultancy on behalf of
a large committee, the brand personality is watered down to include all possible attributes, like being both exclusive and inclusive or modern yet traditional. It is almost impossible to design
anything memorable that would be on brand in this situation.
The natural result is blanding, the act of removing any idiosyncrasy from a given design to ensure that it is not too something.
Most of Pentagrams clients (my own included) are midsize
corporations or sizable public institutions. They are small enough
that we get to meet and to know their directors and become
privy to their points of view. The challenge is to develop a dialogue, based on the level of the clients visual sophistication, that
explains just what design can do for them and how it works.
Hence the value of Bieruts explanation of serif typography. If I
can persuade the president and his inner circle to adopt a given
approach, the resulting design emerges with few compromises.
In this role I am not a scientist, a salesman, a magician, or a charlatan. I am a teacher, and my curriculum includes aesthetics,
branding, identity, and the inherently subjectiveand not scientificprocess of design.
The larger the corporation, the more teaching one has to
do, mostly division by division, from marketing and finance to
legal and manufacturing departments. It can be a mind-numbing
exercise. When various subsidiaries are thrown into the mix, a
design is refined, subbrands are created, positions are modified,
and rules are changedhopefully without harming the essential
INVARIABLY
aesthetics of the identityuntil every visual avenue of the corporation or institution has been addressed.
The role as designer/teacher/guru to corporations, although
effective, has been somewhat detrimental to my creative
growth. The process takes time and necessarily demands long,
boring, repetitive, and mostly thankless meetings, often with the
goal of persuading an internal corporate committee not to trash
a pre-approved design. In larger branding firms, this sort of
thing may be handled by an account representative, not by a
designer. But account executives generally are not capable of
explaining why certain modifications ruin the aesthetics of a
given design and others do not. Only a designer can do that.
The presence of a partner in such meetings is crucial. A senior
designer cant do it, mostly because they have not attained the
credibility inherent to the position of partner.
At Pentagram, I have attained the power, status, and
credibility necessary to more easily persuade clients to a
given design. My greatest dilemma has now become how to
balance projects so they keep me interested and allow my
design vocabulary to expand and how not to be bored senseless by interminable corporate meetings. The answer is to
continually change the types of projects I take on, to move
from corporate or institutional identity to magazine design, to
package design, to environmental design, to pro bono work,
to books, to my own artistic ventures as a painter, and back to
corporate identity. One type of design informs the next. When
I balance a mind-numbing corporate project with something
particularly active, like my obsessive map painting, the opposites neutralize each other.
162
My partners in the New York office of Pentagram make this variety

possible. We are perceived as a multidisciplinary firm that relies
on shared experience. I began to work on environmental projects
by collaborating with partner Michael Gericke, who had a broad
background in that area. The learning curve has involved not only
the specific regulatory and production rules of institutional and
office-building signage but a whole new book of political problems
inherent in working with architects and real-estate developers.
I find that when I work in an area in which I have no prior
experiencewhen I am, in fact, unqualified for the jobI do
my most innovative and interesting work. It is useful to be a
neophyte. It is especially useful to be a neophyte in your
fifties, because people may actually listen to you and believe
you even when you arent totally sure what youre talking
about. (I could never get away with that at twenty-four.) After
Ive designed several projects in a new area, and start to understand the inherent limitations in those projects, the creative thinking diminishes. I know too much. The charm of ignorance is that I can devise solutions innocently that, although they may be impractical, may be altered in an innovative way and actually function. With too much knowledge, I
tend to edit the impractical thinking.
working with architects in the midnineties, beginning with the Public
Theater and the American Museum of Natural History and then in
a series of public institutions, museums, theaters, and office
buildings. In each instance I was hired to inform a public space
with a spirit of identity. I found this process especially fascinating. The architects I worked with generally received more confi-
I BEGAN
163
dence and respect from clients and were perceived as important

professionals of stature in comparison to graphic designers.
Architecture is an understood and revered profession. Some of
the respect comes from the quasi-scientific aspect of architecture. If you dont listen to your architect, its possible that your
new building will fall down. People generally dont die from bad
graphic design. I found that both real-estate developers and institutional presidents who commissioned architecture also genuinely enjoyed being patrons to society. The permanence of a
building is an enduring monument to the individual that commissioned and developed it as well as the donors or organizations
that funded it. Graphic design is ephemeralfor instant reward.
Architecture is for posterity.
I enjoy working with architects because they quickly understand an aesthetic point of view based on an idea or spirit
of place. The dialogue is usually intelligent, sometimes inspiring, there is potential for innovation, and there is direct access
to the architect/client. However, even if the architect is an enlightened client, the graphic designer is essentially functioning
as a vendor to a consultant, more on the level of a typesetter.
In architectural magazines credits for graphic design, if they
appear at all, usually fall someplace between lighting, electricity, and plumbing.
Another frustrating aspect of working with architects has to
do with timing and budget. Its important for a graphic designer
to be involved with a building from its initial planning stages, so
that the signage and environmental design become integral
parts of the structure. This often means planning a graphic program years in advance of a buildings completion, which means
years of incremental changes as various budget restrictions
emerge. One often finds that the most innovative, exciting part of
the graphic project is cut out at the very end due to economics.
(If a building is running over budget, the materials in the signage
package are the first to go.) Its depressing to invest four years of
your life in a project and find you have nothing of significance to
capture in a photo. One tends to miss the immediacy of print. I
like to balance long-term signage projects with print projects like
illustrations for the New York Times Op-Ed page. There is nothing like completing a project in one day and seeing it in print the
next. Ironically it is the very immediacy of graphic communicationthe result of fast, intuitive thinkingthat architects most
need to capture and incorporate in public spaces as part of their
architecturenot just as signs stuck onto their buildings.
of the graphicdesign profession is that so many of its most talented practitioners are inarticulate, shy, or otherwise incapable of persuading large groups of
people that there is inherent value in design. The best work from
these designers is always for themselves, for design schools, or
for pro bono clients within the design industry. Their work may be
influential within the design community, but it is generally invisible to the world at large. Or worse, it may be poorly imitated by
large design firms for large clients and then produced on a
grand scale in a watered-down manner that ultimately reduces
the original to a clich.
The current buzz word from design writers and critics is
authorship, which advocates the production of work without
clients, or at least in pure collaboration with them. (The hallmark
of this seems to be Bruce Maus credited collaboration with Rem
THE TRAGEDY
Koolhaas on the architects monograph S,M,L,XL.) Somehow,

according to these critics, this is a far more noble pursuit for
designers than laying out a page or designing a package or logo
for a corporation. This argument misses the larger point. All design is authored. The authorship is a collaboration between the
designer and other people (editors, publishers, marketing executives, corporate presidents, architects, and entrepreneurs) who
necessarily have a stake in the design. The authorship of the designer disappears when the designer has lost his power to influence others who have a stake in the design. Critics should not be
making arguments for designer authorship. They should be arguing for designer power and influence.
The production of work without clients is admittedly more
fun for the designer. The work is less compromised, more personal, and receives more acclaim than nonauthored work. It is
reproduced and written about in design publications, wins awards,
and builds and enhances a designers reputation. But the emphasis on self-published work does not help the design community with its more serious charge, which is how do we as designers, through our joy of making things, improve visual cultureand
even standards of livingin the United States and elsewhere?
How do we make food packaging more intelligent, practical, attractive, and less wasteful? How do we make public documents
like census forms and election ballots more functional? How do
we make magazines and books on important subjects appear
more interesting? How do we make public spaces comfortable
and noble? How do we keep marketing and advertising material
from appearing banal and intellectually insulting? How do we
make what is elite popularand make whats popular meaningful?
How do we make our daily experience more humane?
164
lies in working effectively with other,

often exasperating, people in politically complex situations. This
means understanding human nature and learning to explain to ordinary people how extraordinary design can be. Every design success story makes the process easier. Every piece of writing in a
mainstream magazine or newspaper that explains how design
functions makes the process easier. Every talented designer who
persuades a corporation that an innovative solution works makes
the process easier. Every talented designer who designs a better
package, a better book jacket, or a better magazine makes the
process easier. Every client who supports a designer makes the
process easier. Every client who can accept a design because
they have come to believe in the intelligence and instincts of the
designer makes the process easier. Every client who can accept
the subjectivity in a design decision makes the process easier.
Every committee that looks at a new design and does not ask the
designer to make it bigger makes the process easier. In fact the
process gets a little bit easier all the time.
THE ANSWER
165
T H E P U B L I C T H E AT E R
One of Paul Daviss famous posters for

the New York Shakespeare Festival, 1976.
The New York Shakespeare Festival, which provides free

Shakespeare performances in Central Park during the
summer, is a beloved New York City institution. Founded
by Joseph Papp in 1954, it found its summer home at the
Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1962. Five years
later Papp rescued the Astor Library on Lafayette Street
from destruction, and the Public Theater was born.
Although it had a sterling reputation, attendance and
membership began to decline in the late 1980s, and
Papp became ill with cancer and died in 1991.
In 1994 Wiley Hausam, a producer then working
with the new director George C. Wolfe, asked if I could
design some mailers and marketing materials for the
New York Shakespeare Festival and Joseph Papp Public
Theater. I would be hired as a creative director on a
freelance basis. An interview with Wolfe was scheduled,
and we discussed the image of the theater.
In an effort to rejuvenate the organization, Wolfe
had initiated a market-research campaign to investigate
New Yorkers perceptions of the Public Theater and the
Shakespeare Festival. Most young people confused it
with Masterpiece Theater, shown on PBS; they assumed
that Public Theater productions were educational but
boring. The most loyal audience came from the Upper
West Side of Manhattan: white, liberal, relatively wealthy,
and over fifty years oldnot a good demographic for a
theater whose charge is to be a breeding ground for innovative new plays that can be exported to Broadway.
The Public Theater had never created a formal institutional identity. In the late seventies Papp had commis166
sioned a series of beautiful, highly regarded posters

from the illustrator and designer Paul Davis. The posters
were paintings of the major stars of the productions, featured in appropriate dress and character. Davis created
about two posters a year for nineteen years, and they became emblematic of the Shakespeare Festival. In the
late eighties, Davis also created posters for Masterpiece
Theater, which may have led to some of the confusion reflected in the market research. But the biggest problem
was the mingled identity of the various entities within the
institution. The press called it equally the Joseph Papp
Public Theater, the New York Shakespeare Festival,
Shakespeare in the Park, and the Papp.
My first meeting with Wolfe seemed to go well. I remember talking to him about the lobby of the building,
which had salmon-pink walls paneled with marbleized
mirrors. He thought it looked like a bordello. Jim Biber,
my architect partner, and I went down and made some
quick-fix recommendations, such as painting, covering or
removing the chandeliers, and pulling the mirrors off the
walls. Wolfe and Hausam interviewed three other designers for the creative director position. I didnt hear from the
producers again for weeks. Then they called to arrange
another meeting to discuss how I could help them create
a new spirit for a younger multicultural audience. We
talked for several hours, but the talks were inconclusive.
They said they really didnt know how to proceed. I said,
Well, why dont you just give me the job? They laughed
and left. About three weeks later Hausam called and said
they needed a design for the 1994 summer campaign
for Shakespeare in the Park. They were putting on new
updated versions of the musical Kiss Me, Kate and
Shakespeares The Merry Wives of Windsor. They needed

a mailer in a week and a half. Would I talk to George?
I worked this way with the Public Theater for the
next eight years. In every way it was a great client. There
was absolutely no time for careful and considered but
painfully boring design. The Public demanded fast, instinctual solutionswithout extensive, mind-numbing
revisions. Best of all, I had total access to a brilliant, creative, and powerful decision maker with a strong personal aesthetic and opinion.
The identity for the Public Theater grew out of that
first marketing campaign for the summer 1994 Shakespeare Festival. Kiss Me, Kate and The Merry Wives of
Windsor had nothing in common other than that they
both originally came from Shakespeare and were going
to be performed free and live in Central Park that summer. The marketing campaign was delayed because the
Shakespeare Festival had to wait for approval from the
authors estate to revise the Kiss Me, Kate book. The approval still had not been received at the point that I was
asked to design the visual material. Wolfe had requested
that the posters and billboards be loud and in-yourface. He had shown me one advertising agencys attempt to create the marketing material. There were two
separate poster images attached to each other, each
with a cute sell line. Wolfe hated them.
The work produced by the agency was typical of
most Broadway theatrical advertising at the time. The
point was to change the paradigm. I thought that the
best way to attract attention would be to abbreviate the
names of the plays so they read Kate and Wives. The
language was not dissimilar to that of a porn poster:
Wives and Kate, Free, Live No Waiting. The posters language demanded large bold type, strong colors, a nononsense layout. After the campaign was produced and
massive billboards were hung all over New York City,
Wolfe found out that he was not going to be given approval to produce the updated version of Kiss Me, Kate.
167
The typographic structure of the posters made it easy to

paste over the billboards and include the new replacement play, Two Gentlemen of Verona. Wives and Kate
became Wives and Gents.
The 1994 season for the New York Shakespeare Festival.

Left: The Two Gentleman of Verona (Gents) is pasted over Kiss Me Kate
168
169
The rejected stationery designs from the first Public Theater identity presentation.
After the summer festival hit the streets of New York, I

began working on a new identity for the theater. Wolfe
and I agreed that the whole entitythe spirit of the institutionshould be the Public Theater, because that best
expressed the inclusive aspect of the multicultural plays
that would be performed there, and that the theater
would be popularly referred to as the Public. Under
the umbrella of the Public would be the New York
Shakespeare Festival, an event held at the Delacorte
Theater. The Lafayette Street building would be formally
known as the Joseph Papp Public Theater. It seemed
logical to me that the Publics typography be organized
to emphasize the word public. The other entities and
places within the institution would be represented by a

series of round stampsWolfe called them tokens.
For the initial logo presentation, I made visual reference to the classical spirit of an American public facility
in all but one versionthe boldest and most startling
which used lettering inspired by a demonstration of typographic weights featured in Rob Roy Kellys book
American Wood Type. Wolfe was immediately drawn to
it. At the time, though, the other designs seemed safer
and more public spirited. We were worried that the bold
one was too edgy, had no roots in the history of design
for cultural institutions, and would quickly become
dated. On first viewing, the bold Public Theater logo was
170
definitely too something. Nevertheless, it was chosen.

The scary design had won. And now, in retrospect, the
other designs look ordinary and wimpy.
I had always admired Victorian theater posters from
the Old Haymarket in London, which were simply a listing of plays, who was in them, and when and where they
were being presented. This basic method of posting
notices seemed to fit perfectly with the brash spirit of
the reinvented Public. No fancy advertising lines, slogans, or complicated logos here. Just the facts: Henry V
on March 6 at 8:00 PM. at the Public. The combination of
language and weights of wood typography that made up
the logo created a powerful, recognizable language for
From Rob Roy Kellys American Wood Type, 1968.
the institution on tickets, T-shirts, caps, programs, flyers,

mailers, flags, newspaper ads, its Web site, and everything else in print. Ultimately it was too much for my
team at Pentagram to produce, so I hired a designer to
work full-time at the Public Theater while I continued to
collaborate with Wolfe on individual theater posters.
Wolfe wanted to make posters for each individual
play at the Public (approximately six per season). This
was almost unheard of in the 1990s: a client who wanted
to make posters, a supposedly dying art form that had
been rendered commercially futile by newspaper, radio,
and direct-mail advertising. But the Public Theater
posters completely changed the image and perception
of the theater. The posters themselves had no specific
methodology or ideology, except that initially they
tended to be in bright, flat colors with stylized photography and illustrative wood typography. At the beginning of
the season Id be sent the list of plays with abbreviated
171
The chosen identity from the first presentation
synopses. Sometimes I was sent the whole play to read.

I found that reading the play or the synopsis of the play
was useless because I would then design something
that was my interpretation of the play, and my interpretation of the play didnt matter. What mattered was Wolfes
interpretation of the play. I had to interpret his interpretation.
THE PUBLIC
N Y S H A K E S P E A R E F E S T I VA L
J O S E P H PAP P P U B LI C TH E ATE R
T H E AT E R S
DE LACORTE
S H I VA
LU ESTHER
A N S PA C H E R
NEWMAN
MARTINSON
The tokens that fall under the Public Theater umbrella
The Public Theater lobby
The first mailer
Victorian woodtype poster

for theater
173
Wolfe is a brilliant director; he began his career as a set

designer and collects folk art seriously. He has a sophisticated visual sensibility with a populist edgea taste we
shareand expresses himself in theatrical terms. Among
his greatest skills is his ability to manage the creative
processto intuitively understand what nurtures it, what
kills it, and how to allow someone to do his or her best
work. In our collaboration, Wolfe made the unilateral decision to exclude actors, actresses, directors, and writers
from the approval of poster images. They often saw a
poster for the first time when it was hanging in the Public
Theater lobby at the opening of their show. That Wolfe
had the only approval meant that there was only one
viewpoint, never a compromise. Over the years, the writers and directors not only accepted it, but they also anticipated it, looked forward to it. It was part of the cachet
of having a play produced at the Public Theater, part of
the tradition.
I had the most difficulty designing for the summer
Shakespeare Festival, which was the most visible. The
posters hung in subway stations and phone kiosks all
over New York City and appeared as full-page ads in the
New York Times. They always contained two plays, and
the plays were always unrelated. The posters were necessarily typographic, to avoid the trap of combining two
uncomplementary images. Free Will, for the 1995 summer season, was the most startling on the street, both in
language and design. Eventually this format became
repetitive, so I abandoned the wood type and changed
the typeface for each festival. I always believed that the
summer festival designs were best seen in the Sunday
Times, as full-page four-color ads.
Ads for the Public Theaters first season with the new identity,1994
A stand up monologue performance by Danny Hoch.
1994
A Sam Shepard play and star studded cast
1994
Guess who
1994
Jenifer Lewiss one-woman show
1994
A Latino dance duo in the 1950s
1996
A play about the Venus Hottentot who astonished Europe

with her fabulous derriere.
1996
Two different plays about dysfunctional Asian families in America
1997
1996
182
A one-woman show by Andrea Martin
1996
A play about a Latino boxer in the 1950s
183
1994
Three one-act plays written by Steve Martin
A downtown production of Henry VI
1995
184
1996
A biography of Diane Arbus in the fifties
1994
F. Murray Abraham as the king
185
1995
The 1995 New York Shakespeare Festival poster
187
Left: The 1996 NYSF poster

Right: The 1998 NYSF poster
The Public Theater posters were designed to be sniped

and seen in multiples on the streets of New York.
Unfortunately there was never enough of a budget to accomplish this, and most of the posters were seen only at
the Public Theater, where they were displayed and sold.
The exception to this was the poster for the 1995-96 season and the tap-rap musical Bring in Da Noise, Bring in
Da Funk, which opened at the Public Theater to rave reviews and was later exported to Broadway. The typographic language of the Public Theater was most effective
when applied to the promotional material for Noise/Funk
and particularly to the specially designed program, which
utilized the lyrics from the show to retell the play.
The show was promoted throughout New York City
in a series of billboards, subway posters, and street
paintings. Even a water tower was wrapped with an ad.
The design seemed to weave itself into the fabric of the
city and became, for a time, emblematic of Broadway. I
began to receive requests to have Noise/Funk posters
appear on television shows. American Express used it in
a commercial to promote Broadway. At the same time,
the Publics flags appeared on television in NYPD Blue,
and the Shakespeare in the Park posters began to show
up in commercials and films depicting Central Park. The
Public Theaters identity had become ubiquitous and
synonymous with New York City.
Paul Daviss illustration of George C. Wolfe

for the New Yorker, 1996
1995
190
Peter Harrisons photo of Savion Glover for the first Public Theater production of
Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk
1995
Richard Avedons photo for the first Broadway campaign of Noise/Funk and
the teaser ad campaign that ran progressively in the New York Times
1996
The Broadway program for Bring in Da Noise Bring in Da Funk.
194
195
196
The third and fourth Noise/Funk campaigns, after Savion Glover left the show, 1996. Next page: The last
Noise/Funk campaign before it closed (8th Ave. between 57th and 58th), 1997
199
200
201
Spread from US magazine, 1998
Ad for Mind Games, 1998
New York magazine, 1997
Ad for Chicago in the New York Times, 1996
I soon began to notice the Publics typographic style

everywhere, from magazines like New York and the New
York Times magazine Fashion of the Times to the advertising for other Broadway shows (Mind Games and
Chicago). In fact, the whole style of theater advertising
changed. Previously theatrical advertising had been rife
with fey logos and cute sell lines, but then everything
began to get displayed in blocky wood type in all caps.
One of my stated goals as a designer was to elevate the
level of graphic design in a given area, but here I had
changed a paradigm and it had completely backfired.
New York City had eaten the Public Theaters identity and
spit back a clich. What made matters worse was that the
Broadway show Chicago, whose campaign had a similar
look to the Publics, had a bigger budget than any of the
Public Theaters productions. If one didnt realize that the
Public Theater campaign was designed first, one might
assume that the Publics ads were imitations of the
Chicago promotions.
By summer 1998 I couldnt continue to design the
Shakespeare Festival and season posters in the same
Public Theater style. I either had to resign the account or
change the posters. I made the appeal to Wolfe, who understood the problem. There is simply a finite amount of
time one can do the same thing without both the design
and the designer becoming stale. I was facing my fiftieth
birthday. I had been a professional graphic designer for
twenty-eight years and had been at Pentagram for seven.
I needed to change something, even if it was only the way
I designed Public Theater posters. So I completely flopped
the design. The posters became photographic and antitypographic. The images were dark, romantic, brooding.
Wolfes reaction was succinct. He said, Oh, my God. Paulas
turning fifty. Lets have a year of depressing posters! I
dont know if I was right to recast the Public Theater
posters, but after 1998 I changed the typography every year.
1998
203
1998
1998
1998
204
1999
1999
205
2000
2001
206
2001
2000
In the summer of 1997 Wolfe revised and directed the

Comden and Green musical On the Town in Central Park
and then took it to Broadway. It was probably the most
commercial project produced by the Public Theater. It
was the most difficult project Id undertaken with Wolfe.
Noise/Funk was successful because we had an absolute
conviction about the spirit and direction under which
everything would be done. On the Town was just the opposite. The shows and their graphics were complete reflections of each other.
Two years later Wolfe opened a production of The
Wild Party on Broadway. He had partners in its production, one of whom was the Hollywood producer Scott
Rudin. Wolfe had to persuade Rudin to let me design the
poster; Rudin thought that because I did the Public
Theater posters, I was not commercial enough (meaning too artsy) for this project. The Wild Party was Michael
John LaChiusas musical adaptation of the 1920s poem
by Joseph Moncure March. The dark poem dealt with a
drunken debauchery during which each characters inner
self is gradually revealed. We selected an image by
Covarrubias, the Jazz Age charicaturist, to represent the
dark musical and coupled it with an aggressive 1920sinspired typeface. It was a bit artsy for Broadway, but
appropriate for the show.
My long-term collaboration with Wolfe remains my
best and purest professional relationship. The total design
experiencewhat we were able to produce with limited
time and resources (a trifle of what a large corporation
or institution would spend on similar materials)serves
as an example of seamless client-designer collaboration. It has been the perfect combination of my particular
talents and sensibilities with another artists vision. The
joy of working for the Public is the complete freedom from
institutional committees and politics. The only real limits
are my own. Why arent there more situations like this one?
208
1998
2000 Next page: 2000
210
211
CITI
In 1998 Travelers Group and Citicorp merged, creating
the largest financial-services company known to man.
Actually, it was never really a merger. Travelers had bought
Citicorp; and two disparate, complicated corporate cultures had united.
Michael Bierut received a call shortly after the merger
from Michael Wolff, a British identity strategist, who informed him that the new global brand manager of what
was to become Citigroup would be giving Pentagram a
call about designing a logo for the new company. Bierut
invited me to join him in the meeting. Our assignment
was to develop a logo that would be ready for release to
the press in ten weeks.
Travelers had a red umbrella for a logo, which was

applied to their various businesses and products by coupling it with a broad assortment of disconnected typography. Citigroups logo had italic type with a dingbat at
the end of it called the compass rose (designed by Dan
Friedman in 1975). Another feature of the logo was a
blue bandknown as the blue wavethat used two
shades of blue gradated together. This was inspired by
the companys The City Never Sleeps ad campaign
the gradation was supposed to represent day and night.
Citibank used the bar on bank fascias and on all of its

corporate literature, a method Bierut has dubbed type
and stripe. The designer picks one typeface and a colored bar and gives the corporation a consistent look by
coordinating their positions and repeating them ad nauseum. Its a bore, but it works.
The corporate assumption was that the merger

would be represented by two logos joined together in
some obvious way that would ensure the equity of both
identities. Bierut and I didnt believe that Citigroup, the
worlds largest financial entity, would be capable of accepting any logo in ten weeks. The prevailing press
about the merger alluded to the disharmony that is endemic to the union of disparate corporate cultures. There
was, furthermore, the classic power struggle between
the head of Travelers and the head of Citibank.
The New York Times, 1998
Wolff, who participated as a consultant and strategist in defining the new identity, thought the name should
212
be shortened to Citi. Bierut and I had simultaneously and

coincidentally come to the same conclusion. I noticed
that the lowercase t in the word Citi functioned as the
handle of an umbrella. The t also stood for Travelers. All
one had to do was put an arc on top of it, and the two
companies had merged. The word Citi, shortened, with
the arc, made a logical beginning for a language that
would identify all of the new companys services:
Citifinance, Citiadvisors and so on.
I selected Interstate as the typeface for the logo

about a day after Citi accepted our financial proposal for
phase-one design exploration. The logo I set up was black
and red with an umbrella arc. We thought it would be inappropriate, however, to present only one mark to Citi, because it would look like we hadnt completed a scientific
logo exploration. We produced a large number of incrementally different logos, bound them into a book, and argued for the logo with the arc.
The global brand manager thought the logo with the

arc, which had been reset in Franklin Gothic, was too
thick, so we switched back to Interstate. Bierut and Wolff
made a series of presentations of this mark to the various

vice presidents of Citigroup, and along the way the black
was changed to blue. It made sense: Travelers was red,
and Citi was blue.
To further persuade the client, Wolff described

Citibank as the bank of the future and identified the customer of the bank as an eleven-year-old girl who thinks of
banking services in a whole new way, grows up doing her
banking on-line, and expects everything to be simple. She
certainly wont understand anything about the brand equity of umbrellas, blue waves, and compass roses. She
lives in a land that is filled with behemoth brands like
Nike, Coke, and McDonalds.
created a structure that showed how all of Travelers and

Citicorps services would move to Citi by the year 2012.
The head of Travelers didnt think it looked enough
like an umbrella and didnt want the proposed logo to
represent the whole corporation as Citigroup. He adapted
the Interstate typography, and someone at Citigroup
stuck an umbrella at the end of it. Meanwhile, the head of
Citicorp wanted to use the Citi logo for the bank. The logo
and strategy were well received by various vice presidents but not immediately adopted.
As I began to create the extended visual language
for Citibank, the blue wave was suddenly brought back
as part of the package. I thought we had rid ourselves of
the blue wave with the argument about the eleven-yearold girl, but apparently it hadnt taken hold. I created a
presentation called The Next Wave, that demonstrated
that the blue wave didnt have to be a bar but could be
expanded to a gradation that runs from black to white
with blue as its center.
This is not a wave

Bierut put together a presentation that demonstrated how
naturally the Citi logo fit into such a landscape; he also
This is a bar
213
I included a number of ways to demonstrate the new

blueness. This phase of work demonstrated everything
from credit-card design to signage, and I spent more
than six months making incremental changes to the various Citibank identities. The designs were then passed
on to a design firm that had long worked for Citibank,
and more incremental changes were made until the designs had all the components of my original, but a lot of
the tension was lost.
In the middle of the two-year period that I worked for
Citi, the head of Citibank resigned and the head of
Travelers assumed command and consolidated the bank
under his control.
We had been reasoned and logical in our approach to
the Citi identity, but the process was never reasoned and
logical. It took the judicious support of the banks advertising and brand managers to implement the identity (first
widely seen by the public through a massive and witty advertising campaign produced by Citis newly hired advertising agency, Fallon Worldwide).
After the logo was introduced, I saw a presentation
in which a branding firm that competes with Pentagram
demonstrated to a Brazilian bank how a new logo should
be simple. The designers showed marks by Nike, Coke,
Disney, McDonalds, and Citi, and inserted a logo they
These are all blue waves.
had designed for the Brazilian bank. Their logo had an

arc on the bottom.
The Citi logo will probably be the most reproduced
mark I will ever design. I see it everywhere, every day, on
the street and in my wallet. Nevertheless, it is remote, because the process of creating it was long, exasperating,
and often mind-numbing. On the other hand, when I consider the naming and graphic results of the JP Morgan
Chase and the PriceWaterhouseCoopers mergers, Im glad
we stayed the course.
214
215
B A L L ET T E C H
My work for the Public Theater brought me to the attention of Eliot Feld: dancer, choreographer, iconoclast,
teacher, and director of two ballet troupes. Eliot, like
George Wolfe, is independent and opinionated, and has
a strong visual aesthetic. He is not only director and
choreographer for his ballet companies but is also set
designer, costume designer, lighting designer and in many
ways, graphic designer.
His company, which was originally called the Feld
Ballet, is unusual in that it is comprised of a number of
different organizations. There is the adult ballet company that both tours the United States and has its home
base in New Yorks Joyce Theater; there is a childrens
group composed of public school students, Kids Dance,
which also performs at the Joyce Theater; and there is a
New York City public school that admits elementary and
high school students based on their talent and passion
for dance. The public school is the proving ground for
Kids Dance. The best of the students can eventually become a part of the ballet company.
Brochure and calendar for Kids Dance

Right: Poster for the 1997 season of Ballet Tech
216
In 1997 Feld decided to rename the whole organization Ballet Tech. The new name would express the
modern, often groundbreaking, work performed by the
adult troupeeven when he choreographs a classical
ballet, Feld does it with an edgeand at the same time
would be appropriate for the school. Feld held on to the
name Kids Dance under the Ballet Tech umbrella, and
added a new Christmas production, NotCracker, to his
stable of enterprises.
Feld came to our first meeting with wonderful photographs taken by Lois Greenfield. He carefully explained
his thinking through words and gestures. He didnt want
Ballet Tech to look like a typical, painfully elegant classical ballet troupe, but an active and dynamic group. My
first design proposal featured dancers in paired, three-dimensional images. Feld hated it. He liked it as a poster
but not for his dance company because the design treatment broke the dancers motions, obstructed a leap, and
thwarted a jet. In my effort to make the image bizarre, I
had lost sight of the dance. In my second design I created
217
a gradation within the photograph and overlaid typography in a structure that appeared to be moving. The linear
framework, which contained the typography, could easily
be expanded to contain complicated scheduling information. The identity program in that first year consisted of
a stationery system, an announcement, a program mailer,
invitations, a subway poster, a bus poster, the Joyce
Theater posters, and small ads in the New York Times.
In 1998, a full year later, Feld came back for the new
seasons campaign. He told me he didn't like his identity
and wanted me to redo it. I asked him why, and he told
me that he thought the type treatment, with all those
lines and bars, was too confining and that the dancers
should be free. He described his ideas in such detail that
I began to feel strangled by the design. I was against
changing the design after only one year, because it
meant that we would no longer be reinforcing an identity.
On the other hand, we hadnt actually run enough ads
and posters to make an indelible mark. I agreed to remove the bars and free up the typography, but decided
to stay within the same typographic family (slab serifs).
Feld was presented with two options. One version
had different-size letterforms moving in space. The second was more bizarre: I combined two letters, one thick
and one thin, strung together. My rationale was that this
is how one reads a logo in motion. If you were on a moving train, it would simply read Ballettech. (For some reason this actually works, though I cant quite figure out
why.) Eliot liked both treatments, so we used both of
them. Each subsequent year, he has supplied me with
exciting imagery for his campaigns. One year he came
in with the lighting plans for the Joyce Theater and said,
Isn't this fabulous? It was, and we used it as a background for the poster image.
Left and right: The 1998 season of Ballet Tech
Two years after that Feld decided he was sick of the

jumping logo and wanted to retain the double lettering
logo with an alternate, more legible, version that used only
one letter throughout. We complied again. They all worked.
I am not sure who designed Ballet Tech. Sometimes
I think I did. But last year I asked Feld if I could design one
of his stage sets. Absolutely not, he said.
Promotions for the 1998 and 1999 Ballet Tech season
The 1999 Ballet Tech poster
Above: The 2000 poster

Following Pages: The 2001 and 2002 campaigns
225
3COM
In 2000 the company that launched the Palm Pilot, 3Com,
hired me to redesign their retail packaging for their home
network products, meaning modems, cables, and boxes
that link together computers or give them fast Internet
connections. They had recently purchased a new identity,
complete with typefaces, from another branding firm, but
were left with no system with which to create packaging.
I hated the new identitythe company name plus
three rings that represented who knows what? Worse
yet, the prevailing typeface was Frutiger, which I simply
dont like. My clients were a series of men anywhere
from ten to twenty-five years younger than me who had
all purchased the Boston album in their youth.
I could never quite figure out the hierarchical structure of 3Com. I was hired at first to design consumer
product packaging from an office located in Chicago.
The project was expanded to include business product
packaging, which was based in Salt Lake City, and then
expanded again to include business-to-business packaging, which had its offices in London. The marketing department, which oversaw all product divisions, was located in Santa Clara, California. Throughout the process,
product managers and marketers would appear and disappear. The turnover was constant. The minute I learned
someones last name, they had moved on to another
company or had started their own. I often felt like I was
working in a moving maze. Each time I thought I had
completed a phase of work and had received all the necessary approvals, someone would say, Well, gee, we
should run this by Bob, or, Fred isnt in the loop, lets get
him on a conference call and pull in Phil in London. Bob,
Fred, and Phil always had legitimate concerns that could
easily be answered. They were all very pleasant and
friendly, and would say, Thank you, Paula, at the end of
every conference call. I never felt any sense of corporate
hierarchy, power, or even fearjust an endless array of nice

young men who spoke using computer-product acronyms.
I am an absolute ignoramus when it comes to computers, and probably wasnt qualified for this job. They
had selected me as a designer for precisely that reason.
They understood they were insular and spoke in industry jargon. They knew that their customers tended to be
computer geeks. If they could make their products more
understandable, they could broaden their market.
3Coms packaging was confusing and depressing.
It was branded by a bright red curved strip at the top of
the package, had a number of confusing why-to-buy
statements coupled with heavily rendered diagrams or
pictures of happy families using the computers. Most
of their products could be found at CompUSA or Staples,
where their packaging was negligibly different from their
competitors. There was not much sales help in any of the
stores I visited. If you didnt know exactly what you
needed in that environment, you were lost. I visited the
first CompUSA with my partner John Rushworth, from
Pentagrams London office, and we both immediately
came to the conclusion that the best service we could perform was to first make the product easy to find in a store
and then make the product immediately comprehensible.
We focused on creating loud but simple fluorescent
packages for consumer products and shiny metallic packaging for business products. I then began the long process
of creating an appropriate method for conveying product
information on the consumer package. How much explanation was too much explanation, what words were understandable, and so forth. The business packaging also
contained simple language that existed in bullet points,
not sentences. Also technical terms on the business packages did not require further definitions, because the business customer had greater technical knowledge.
228
Ultimately we arrived at the hierarchy and structure of

language that is shown here. The process took about
eight months. It involved focus testing, first for language
and then for design. The language tests were 90 percent
useful; the design tests were pointless. Audiences were
polarized by the Day-Glo colors, or thought the packaging looked too generic or that the icons should have
more detail. If you followed the comments of focus-group
participants, you would wind up with the same packaging
3Com had started with when they hired us.
The company bravely decided to move ahead with
the new design. We completed the project in March 2001.
The business package designs were launched, but the
consumer package designs never made it to market. The
consumer division in Chicago was completely shut
down, following the industry implosion. Almost everyone I worked with on the project lost their job.
For me it was an important project. Its important for
designers to change paradigms. I think the consumer
packaging for 3Com products would have raised the
standard in that marketplace, would have improved the
environment of the average consumer electronics store,
and would have made the products more understandable to the consumer. The benefit would have been to
the man on the street. Sometimes, the best design is
simply the kindest.
Language, Philosophy, and

Structure
Packages for 3Com home
network and broadband
products are designed to
be clear and understandable, like three-dimensional manuals.
These products are all
called by their industry
names (i.e. wireless gateway, or ADSL modem).
The product is differentiated from other brands by
the strong appearance of
the 3Com logo in conjunction with the name. When
at all possible, the length
of the name should be
simplified to the shortest
understood form. Though
some of the names are
more technical, customers
will be familiar with them
because they have heard
or read about them before
they see the package.
Design Template (Back Panel)

All rules should
be 1pt in weight
All elements should stay
inside a .35 inch
(.88cm) boundary
.35
.35
Home Network
wireless gateway
How does it work?
All symbols should be in

75% process black and
the same size.
INTERNET
DSL or
Cable Modem
Broadband
Service Provider
Built in protects your network

from hackers
Diagram should be in
75% process black refer
to page 8 for specifics on
diagram symbols and
layouts.
Notebook PC
Uses the same
wireless standard
as many businesses
and schools.
Wireless/Wired Bridging
The gateway lets wireless
devices communicate with
wired Ethernet devices.
3Com Home Wireless Gateway
Notebook PC
It's easy to connect wirelessly!
Plug the power supply and your

modem into the gateway; plug the
power cord into an electric outlet.
Using a PC with an Ethernet adapter installed,

type the address of the installation wizard into
your Web browser, then follow the instructions.
There's no software to install!
The gateway now recognizes any device equipped

with a wireless Ethernet adapter within a 300 foot
radius you've created a
wireless home network!
Photography for the

back panel should be in
four-color silhouetted.
(Use of photography is
encouraged where
applicable).
Wireless Network
Ethernet Network
Printer
Share among all
computers on your
network.
.35
What does it do?

The 3Com Home Wireless Gateway works with a
broadband (cable or DSL) modem, to provide high
speed Internet access to any desktop or notebook PC2,
printer, scanner or Internet appliance in or around your
house. You're not tied down to a desk, an Ethernet port
or a phone jack. No holes to drill, no wires to install!
Desktop PC
Put a computer
anywhere in the
house youre not
tied to a phone jack
or Ethernet port.
Notebook PC
Be connected
anywhere up
to 300 feet from
the gateway.
FIREWALL
Logo and product

name should line up
Desktop PC
The gateway works
with Macintosh
computers and PCs.
Internet
Appliance
Add an
Internet radio,
household
organizer or
other new
device to your
network
whenever
youre ready.
2. See bottom panel for details.
.35
M ET R O P O L I S
Departments November 1999

start page 33
35 51 59
80 54
33
126
117
121
This diagram tells the reader

where the departments begin in
relationship to the advertising.
Although I have always regretted that I have never art-directed an ongoing publication for a year or more, I have
enjoyed most of my experiences redesigning publications.
The best scenario is when the publisher and editor are
committed to creating a magazine that has its own style,
character, point of view, and visual approach and is not
trying to imitate another successful publication. Magazine
design demands the collaboration of the publisher, the
editor in chief, deputy editors, and the design staff.
What I find interesting about formatting a magazine
has very little to do with the more flashy aspects of the
feature well (the very thing that would be so much fun to
art-direct) but with how to make a magazines structure
function so that a reader can effectively navigate through
the publication, access all the relevant bits of information
quickly, and feel comfortable with the more leisurely reads.
In that process, the goal would then be to allow the framework to have the flexibility to grow (particularly in feature
wells) and to allow for the splashy changing spreads that
keep the magazine fresh.
Metropolis, a magazine about design (graphics, products, architecture, urbanism), presented some interesting
problems. It was an oversize publication whose scale had
kept it from being displayed on newsstands. The editors
were anxious to reduce the size of the publication, and
used that as an opportunity for the redesign. Metropolis
is unusually rich in advertising. Unfortunately many of the
ads (for contract furniture companies, lighting companies,
and other interior and architectural suppliers) exist as partial space ads, meaning that there may be two or three on
a given page. This leaves the front part of the magazine
(the departments) chopped up with broken spaceshalf
editorial, half ad. Sometimes ads would interrupt a department story for two or three spreads. The advertisers
continually pressed the publication to sell them space on
the more desirable right-hand page.
1999
232
Department pages and the opening

of the feature well
Contents
Feature stories from the first, second, and third issues after the redesign
The feature well didnt begin until more than halfway

through the magazine. If one wanted to skip the departments and jump right into the feature well, the procedure
was nearly impossible to accomplish quickly.
I decided to retain the Metropolis logo at its original
size, but cropped it where the magazine got smaller on
the top and the sides. This didnt work. The logo became
illegible and I had to cheat so it simply looked cropped
down. On the contents page, I created a small diagram of
the magazines contents for both features and stories.
One can read the diagram and estimate at what point the
feature well begins and where the departments are,
which helps the reader avoid advertisements. I made it
up to the advertisers by just giving them the preferred
right-hand page. Always. The Metropolis departments
run exclusively on the left. At first the switch was a little
disconcerting, but it is actually kinder to the reader than
the previous design, because the editorial content

whether it is a full page, a spread, or a broken space always begin on the same side.
The reader was aided again by a change of paper
stock in the feature well. Previously magazines had used
this switch to signal a change from features to departments, usually by using an uncoated stock for the textheavy departments and a glossy one for the glam photography in the feature well. I did just the opposite. I never
liked gorgeous photography on glossy paper. (Shortly
after Metropolis flopped the paper stocks, other magazines followed suit.)
The magazine was designed using only two typefaces: Bodoni Book and News Gothic Condensed and
Italic. The department headings are small but are connected to the Metropolis logo, which progressively
moves from left to right throughout the department sec235
tion. The feature well, while allowing for little type differential, demands no particular grid. The art director is
free to take over.
Since the redesign of Metropolis, five different art
directors have produced issues, but the magazine always looks like itself.
7 7 0 B R O A DWAY
It dawned on me in the nineties that cities are a lot like

magazines. They exist as a combined product of advertising and editorial material. The advertising space is
construction barricades, billboards, bus-shelter posters,
subway posters, and street banners, and the editorial
space is the buildings. A well-designed city allows the
user to navigate both terrains and encourages their
peaceful coexistence.
In 1998 Vornado Realty purchased 770 Broadway
the former Wanamaker Building on Astor Place and
Broadway, a block away from the Public Theaterand
began converting it into a chic downtown office building.
The architectural firm was Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer. The
realtor was looking for a design for exterior signage and
the lobby floor, as well as a way to integrate advertising
signs on the front of the building.
I presented some options that built display signs into
the building structure to house various ads, but thought it
236
would be far more interesting to set a condition whereby

an advertiser would purchase the entire block of ad space
for one image that would be broken up into a cinematic
series. I used the Coca-Cola and Nike logos as demonstrations, because they were horizontal. The buildings
address was designed as an enormous perpendicular
attachment to the building. The shadow of the lettering
was then painted on the sidewalk. The realtor was amused
by the solution, but the City of New York wasnt. I had violated just about every code imaginable. The project was
scaled back, and only the stainless-steel awning and floor
were executed. However, the awnings lopped-off typography is so large in comparison to that on other city addresses that it landmarks the building. At 770 Broadway,
the building is the story, but the awning is the headline.
237
239
N E W 4 2 N D ST R E ET ST U D I O S
The New 42nd Street Studios is located on the revived,

remade Forty-second Street, between Broadway and
Eighth avenues in New York City. The new building
houses a small theater, The Duke, and nine floors of rehearsal space rented to developing Broadway shows and
not-for-profit theaters. One side of the ground floor is
leased to the American Airlines (formerly Roundabout)
Theatre. The building, which opened in 2000, was designed
by architect Charles Platt and is managed by the New
42nd Street, an organization that serves as rental agent
and oversees a number of new Forty-second Street theaters. The project was the brainchild of Cora Cahan, director of the New 42nd Street, a former dancer with great
empathy for the actors and actresses who rehearse in
the new studio.
Platt designed a building that is modern and light,
has expansive studios, and is a handsome piece of architecture (an anomaly on rapidly developing Forty-second
Street). While most architects will insist to their signage
designers that the building is the sign, this building actually is one. The whole front facade is covered with programmed lights that change color and put on a show
240
every evening. The lighting system was designed by Anne

Militello, and its elegance puts it in contrast with everything else in the vicinity.
Cahan asked me to design the identity for the Duke,
and exterior and interior signage for the new building.
She explained that the rehearsal rooms were large, modern, light, and mostly white. She wanted the hallways and
access ways to be kinetic and active. It occurred to me
that Platt's building was a progressive factory for actors
and actresses. Its structure and materials looked Dutch
(latter-day de Stijl). In our first collaborative meeting, I
assembled a board of materials, fonts, and colors that I
thought might complement the architecture. This became
the basis for the signage. It dawned on me that actors
and actresses are accustomed to taking stage positions
on the floor, so I began to use the floor as a basis for directional signage throughout the building. Sometimes a
sign began on the floor and, bending up, completed its
message on a door.
The collaboration between director, architect, and
designer was tremendously satisfying, largely because,
with the exception of costs, there were no preconceived
notions of how the project was to be realized. I was amazed
at how well floor signage functioned, particularly on the
second floor of the Duke, where the four-letter word DUKE
consumed the whole hallway floor and ran up the side of
the wall under stage furniture bumpers. The signage system is particularly attuned to New Yorkers, who typically
look at their feet when theyre walking.
242
243
The fabric of the theater seats in the Duke Theater spell Duke in Morse code.
N J PAC
In 2000 I was invited to lunch in Newark at the New
Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) by Larry Goldman,
the centers president. He showed me a school building
located behind the center, erected sometime in the 1940s.
NJPAC had received funding from Lucent Technologies
to convert this building into a high school for the performing arts. The building functioned as a rectory, and
while a portion of the rectory would be maintained, it
would become a tenant of NJPAC. A local architecture firm,
Kaplan Gaunt DeSantis was hired to remodel the building.
Goldman explained that there was virtually no budget for
a fancy renovation, and given that limitation, asked if
there was some way the exterior of the building could be
recast to look like an inspiring place to study the performing arts.
The building was depressing. There was something
sadly institutional about it, particularly the brown and
beige paint that permeated the hallways and bathrooms. I
took some digital photographs of the front of the building
and began experimenting with a variety of silly ideas. The
building was changed instantaneously by simply painting
it white (there really wasn't a budget for anything other
than painting). In one iteration, the building was covered
with the triangular plastic flags typical of used car lots
(admittedly somewhat impractical). In another version,
the building became a magic castle covered in stars. A
third listed the activities to be found inside.
Goldman felt most comfortable with the typographic treatment (I was pushing hard for the used-carlot version). The problem with the typographic approach
was that the words were out of scale on the building and
appeared unpleasantly urban. I rescaled the typography
and began to use the nooks, crannies, and turrets of the
castlelike structure to display the typography. Once the
246
words were scaled down to complement the structure,

the typography actually accentuated the building's form.
My favorite use of type is on the air-conditioning ducts,
which originally were an eyesore and now are the most
exciting aspect of this crazy building.
Goldman asked me to recast the interior of the
building as well. We worked with typical institutional tile
and commercial paints. A group of patterns was developed for the floors of hallways: stripes, checkerboards,
chevrons. A systematized series of designs were created for painted radiators and fireplaces. We picked
complementary colors for rehearsal-room curtains, and
the NJPAC staffers went to Ikea and bought furniture in
the same color palette.
The work on the interior of the building was completed a few months after we submitted the plans. The
exterior of the building was finished in record time.
The system for the interior of the school is so simple
and obvious it can easily be exported to other public
school buildings.
The NJPAC Lucent Technologies Center for Arts
Education is architecture as graphic design, and it was
designed the way a graphic designer works: immediately, instinctively, inexpensively. It is a marriage of spirit
and form. It is my favorite example of maximum impact
with minimum means, and it was achieved simply because there was a client who was willing and courageous
enough to attempt something outside of the norm for a
dramatic effect.
247
249
316
MEN'S
315
MEN
317
318
314
DRAMA
DRAMA
DIST. LEARNING/
COMPUTER LAB
315A
CLOSET
322A
315B
VESTIBULE
CLOSET
322
CORRIDOR
319
STAIR #3
321A
320
JAN.
324
CLOSET
WOMEN'S
LOCKERS
312
ELEV.
323
DRAMA
STUDIO
313
DANCE
STUDIO
322B
TOILET
310
311
CORRIDOR
STAIR
MECH. CHASE
309
VAULT
308
LUNCH
ROOM
HVAC
306
HVAC
307
OFFICE
CORRIDOR
LOWER ROOF
HVAC
304
305
OFFICE
GENERAL
WORK AREA
EXISTING
HVAC UNIT
303
CORRIDOR
NEW
CONDENSER
NEW
FAN
302
301
LORI'S
OFFICE
EILEEN'S
OFFICE
PROPOSED THIRD FLOOR PLAN

SCALE: 1/16" = 1'-0"
250
Posters for the Lucent Technologies Center for Arts Education, 2001
255
The following articles were authored over the past two decades. Although some of
the details have become irrelevant, the thrust of the articles continues to be germane.
BACK IN THE U.S.S.R.: (OR THAT

UKRAINE TYPE REALLY KNOCKS ME OUT)
Tired: what we have been doing for the past

five years
Originally published in the AIGA Journal of

Graphic Design, Volume 4, Number 1, 1984
Its funny the way something suddenly looks
good. I was recently shocked to find that a couple of terrific El Lissitzky and Rodchenko posters
grace the pages of moldy art history books from
my college days. In fact, there are Russian constructivist posters in all the poster collection
books that I accumulated over thirteen years;
but for some reason, I never really studied them
until 1979.
I flipped by them when I was looking for
Victorian inspiration. I ignored them when I was
ripping off art nouveau and art deco designs.
I discovered El Lissitzky when I was heavily
into my Cassandre phase. I remember flipping
through The Poster in History and finding the
black-and-white poster of a boy and girl whose
heads were merging together. There was a giant
red U.S.S.R. running across their foreheads.
Thats great! I said.
At the moment I said Thats great! I was
back in the U.S.S.R. I knew I would look for more
El Lissitzky posters and that I would incorporate
the style into my own work.
I didnt say Thats great! when I saw the
poster in 1974. In 1974, I looked at the giant
U.S.S.R. foreheads and said, Too weird. If we
want to predict future graphic trends, all we have
to do is pick up poster books and tape-record
our responses to various genres and periods.
Heres what the responses mean:
Too weird: what we will be doing in five years
Thats great: what we are doing now or will be

doing tomorrow, even though every client will
reject it.
Nice: what we have been doing for the past
three years, and what we will resort to when
Thats great! is rejected
Too ugly: what we will be doing in ten years

It is no coincidence that around the time that
I said Thats great! to El Lissitzky, two Rodchenko books were published, followed by a big
new Lissitzky book and The Art of the October
Revolution and Paris-Moscow and The Art of
the Russian Avant-Garde, plus the George
Costinokos exhibition at the Guggenheim with
the accompanying book, the Malevich book, etc.
It was also no coincidence that many of my designer friends had gone Russian crazy at the
same time. When 500 unrelated people say
Thats great! at the same time and incorporate the influence into their work, it constitutes
a movement.
In analyzing our response to Russian constructivism, Im convinced that were responding to our political and economic climate in both
emotional and practical terms. The work of the
Russian constructivists represented the optimism of the Revolution and the Marxist utopian
dream. But the late 1970s and the 1980s have
been politically depressing times, a period of
negativity, conservatism, and a general lowering
of our personal and economic expectations.
Constructivist work could make us feel we were
creating a visual rebellion in inspired times. We
could make a graphic statement that was visually strong although there was no justification
for it. Another triumph of style over substance.
The practical aspect of constructivism is that
it is cheap to do. A vigorous and importantlooking graphic design can be had for the cost
of typesetting and a few photostats.
The drawback to the constructivist design
approach is that it is very difficult to sell. Firstly,
the most logical use for it would be on jackets for
Russian political books of that period.
Unfortunately, publishing editors find type on

an angle very difficult to read. This means that
a good Constructivist design is usually killed in
favor of something less complicated. Another
editorial complaint is that it doesnt look serious enough. I confess that I dont understand
this complaint. They were dead serious in 1917.
In four years and after umpteen attempts,
Ive had only three constructivist designs reach
the printing press. Two were posters for a CBS
Records promotion of The Best of Jazz. The
problem was to get twenty big names on a
poster, not spend any money, and have it look
good enough to motivate record-store owners
to hang it up.
The wonderful thing about being a designer in the music business is that nothing has
to mean anything. That doesnt mean that its
easy being a music business designer. On the
contrary. When I did the Best of Jazz posters in
early 1980, the CBS Records marketing department didnt understand that I was being influenced by El Lissitzky. They were mostly concerned that the names be big and legible and
that the posters be cheap. The marketing department thought the posters were a little weird
stylistically, but that was OK because it made
them new wave.
After the Best of Jazz posters came out, I
began getting calls from the graphics community asking me to submit work to various newwave shows. I would respond that I was not a
new-wave designer, and then I would be asked
specifically for the Best of Jazz poster.
How can something blatantly ripped off from
1917 be considered new wave?
Gene Greif, a designer who often displays
constructivist influences in his work, told me
recently that when he showed his portfolio two
and three years ago, everyone said it was too
new wave. Now, he tells me, everyone says
its too postmodern.
Ive never liked labels. Constructivism has certainly had an enormous impact on the way I design, but so has nearly every other movement
in art history at different times.
Its 1983. I still think El Lissitzky is great,
though sometimes I think hes merely nice. I
think I only have one year left in the U.S.S.R.
BACK TO SHOW AND TELL

A year ago I relived an experience I had in my
ninth grade Algebra II class. The occasion was
a seminar on graphic-design education at the
Maryland Institute of Art in which some practicing designers and design educators shared a
common stage. The premise was sound: to generate debate between these factions. However,
what resulted was disappointing. Instead of
meaningful discussion and clear explanation,
the design educators gave pompous presentations on the structures and curricula of their
schools supported by pedantic visuals and
charts. They spoke in jargon Ive never used professionally and didnt understand. The lectures
were so abstruse that I hadnt a clue as to what
was going on in their schools. I wondered if the
students did either.
The Algebra II syndrome (a compulsion to
hum 1960s rock and roll and make spitballs) is
my reaction whenever theoretics (theoretics as
an end in itself) are applied to design. At
Maryland, my feelings were compounded. The
first was one of shame. Thats what happens
when Im bombarded with incomprehensible
language. Boredom follows shame: I tune out
and squirm in my seat. Then I realize Im really
angry. Boredom is anger. Im angry in this case
because the speaker is supposed to be talking
about graphic design, not quantum physics.
Semiotics was one of the favorite words
bandied about the Maryland session. In fact,
some of the educators took great pride in the

fact that their schools were breaking new
ground in this area. If so, why couldnt any of
them make the idea understandable? At the
risk of losing anyone who has read this far, the
following is the Websters dictionary definition
of semiotics: a general philosophical theory of
signs and symbols that deals especially with
their function in artificially constructed natural
language and comprises syntactics, semantics,
and pragmatics.
How does it really apply to graphic design?
I thought it would be fun to call seven of my favorite award winning designers and ask them
to define semiotics. Four said they didnt know
(one of them didnt want to know); two said that
it may have something to do with symbols; and
one said she knew but didnt want to answer. If
one asks the same designers how a symbol
works, theyll give articulate answers and use
good examples to illustrate their points.
Its not just the exclusionary language that
bothers me, but also the process of making
more complex the difficult act of explaining
graphic-design principles to would-be designers. Obviously, my reaction is based on a personal teaching style that might be termed extended apprenticeship. Call it what you willa
style, method, or philosophyit is a hands-on
process that has produced tangible results.
In 1982, I was asked to teach graphic design to seniors at the School of Visual Arts, in
New York. The media department has a
loosely prescribed curriculum, with an emphasis on doing. There are few, if any, theoretical
courses. The school hires working designers
who represent a broad range of experiences
and approaches. Hence the instructors are
completely responsible for course content and
are encouraged to teach what they know best.
The students have a certain choice in what
they take. After the foundation year, they audit
classes to see whether they feel comfortable

with the approach being taught.
When I first saw the work by the students
entering my class, I thought that they were
unprepared to enter the job market unless
radical improvement occurred over the year. No
amount of theoretical instruction would help.
Therefore I created a series of complex assignments that were extensively critiqued. The challenge was to pinpoint what was wrong and show
how it could be made better. My method was to
use simple language and strong visual examples
to illustrate my points. In effect, I became the
client. But I also became a graphic fascist, disallowing typefaces, reordering elements, dictating
style and content. The students were forced to
design and redesign, yet in the process of following these directives, they made their own discoveries, which had surprising results.
The approach I instinctively used was the
old apprentice method. Do what I do, and watch
it come out your way. This method requires total
commitment. The teacher must give it all away
(style, conceits, tricks), or the premise wont
work. Its sometimes threatening. It can be intimidating to watch as a student easily accomplishes something it took me fifteen years to
master. But in the end and in a relatively short
amount of time, some potentially good professionals emerged.
At the Maryland Institute seminar, one educator presented a chart that showed the spiraling growth of students as they absorbed the
design theories of successive courses culminating in graduationmeaning the students were
qualified to enter the profession. What hogwash!
There was no mention of talent. All the theory in
the world cannot replace talent. Talented students can overcome any form of education
unless theyve been bored out of the profession.
I abhor the charade of the Maryland session.
These academicians, I believe, have created de-
sign speak to give credence to the profession

because theyre embarrassed that it was once
called commercial art. Is it necessary to indoctrinate students with jargon just to compensate
for a sense of professional inferiority?
THE RIGHT FACE

Lets face it: Were living in an era of style over
substance. Every day we are going to be asked
to give something a look.
Ive been asked to give things all different
kinds of looks, but very often Ive had difficulty
figuring out what kind of look the client is describing. The problem is language. In initial meetings, the client would talk about concept development. I naively went off and came up with
concepts, until I found out that concept development meant the look. Another mistake I
made was the use of the word style. I would talk
about employing a style, as in the style of tinmetal signs, or discuss a specific period style,
such as Jugendstil or constructivism. I found
that my clients didnt know what I was talking
about. Firstly, they preferred the word look to the
word style. Secondly, they had to see a picture of
the style so they could grasp it within their own
vernacular (Art deco looks sort of like that postmodern stuff and is a little bit high-tech and
would be good for yuppie audiences).
After seven years of trial and error, I have deciphered a style code. What follows is a guide to
the look and how you make it, plus a list of common complaints and how to improve upon them.
High-tech: matte-black background, white or
primary-colored sans serif type, slightly letterspaced, small geometric shapes incorporated
with graph-paper motif
Postmodern: sans serif or serif type (small);
one box, one triangle, one circle in salmon,

gray-green, or turquoise; cream, white, or light
gray background
High-tech/Postmodern: same as postmodern
except change background to matte black and
change geometric shapes to primary colors
New Wave Generic: sans serif type in different
weights and heights, with italics intermittently
dispersed; minimum of two ripped pieces of
paper, one triangle (right triangle, not isosceles;
long, skinny, right triangle preferred; use hot
pink, lime green, and black; never use beige
New Wave Yale: same as new wave generic
except change ripped paper to vertical parallel
lines (preferably at an angle) and use different
weights of Univers
New Wave West Coast: same as new wave
Yale except add photographic images in boxes
or silhouettes; suggested imagery: one to
three eyes, one television set, one telephone
New Wave/Postmodern: same as postmodern
except change gray-green to bright lime,
change salmon to hot pink, add ripped paper,
and enlarge triangle.
New Wave/Postmodern/High-Tech: same as
new wave/postmodern except make background matte, take out ripped paper, add
graph-paper grid
Classic: serif type (Bodonis, Caslons,
Garamonds), lots of white space, white or
cream background
Funky: same as new wave generic but all elements are bigger
Gritty: any of the above styles without any design sensibility such as color, form, or scale
New York or Downtown New Wave: same as
gritty but use new wave generic elements
Understated: same as classic only use eightpoint Garamond

L.A.: same as new wave West Coast but
use turquoise and flamingo pink as predominant colors
Complaints and Remedies
Too new wave: remove one piece of
ripped paper.
Too funky: make everything smaller.
Too understated: make everything bigger.
Too L.A.: remove turquoise.
Too classic: add one circle and one square.
Too clever: remove inadvertent idea.
Too cute: remove inadvertent idea.
Too smart: remove deliberate idea.
THE DARK IN THE MIDDLE OF

THE STAIRS
Originally published in Graphis, Issue 264,
November/December 1989
One morning, my snotty twenty-two-year-old
assistant danced into the studio and informed
me that he had gone to the opening of some
graphic design competition and that I only had
one piece in the show.
Was it a good show? I asked. Yeah, it
was OK, he said. There was a lot of work from
a guy in Iowa who sort of looks like Duffy
Design. I harrumphed and muttered, Too much
style and no substance.
Ive been muttering too much style and no
substance frequently for the past several years.
I love muttering it, and I hear all kinds of people I
respect and admire mutter it. Our great designer
institutions mutter it a lot. Ive noticed that its
usually muttered in relation to designers who are
younger than the mutterer. Too much style and
no substance is often coupled with flash in the

pan as a way of describing hot young designers
who get more than one piece in a design show.
What a wonderful way to demean youth!
Too much style helps us conceal that nagging
inkling we have that our own work may be out
of style, and no substance convinces us that
our potentially dated work is somehow more
meaningful, rendering style irrelevant. Sometimes it is even true.
But what all this muttering denies is the
great excitement in finding and creating style,
that thrill in putting the pieces together in a
way that looks new and fresh, if not to the design community at large then at least to ourselves. These are the kind of discoveries we
generally make early in our careers, when each
design is a new experience for us, when problem solving seems more experimental and some
of our solutions may be true breakthroughs. This
is when we are building and expanding the
graphic vocabulary that will probably serve us
for the rest of our careers, when we are establishing our rules and parameters, and breaking
them, and reestablishing them.
Ive always felt that a design career is like a
long, surreal staircase. At the bottom, the risers
are steep, and the landings are short. One makes
long leaps of discovery at the bottom in a relatively short period of timea step a year, or two,
and sometimes even one great leap to the middle of the stairs. Then, suddenly, the risers become shallow and the landings lengthen. We
trudge along the same endless plateau, and the
scenery doesnt change. The light becomes dim
around us, but there are sudden flashes back in
the distance from the bottom of the steps. We
dont dare turn around to look because we might
lose our footing. Worse yet, the flashes seem
ominous, hostile, like a potential fire that could
burn up the whole staircase.
If only we could scamper to the top with the

ease with which we loped to the middle. Instead
we take baby steps and mutter, Too much style
and no substance, because we learned that
line from higher-ups when we were hot young
flashes at the bottom.
Very often, when we look at the work of our
great graphic-designer institutions, we find that
so much of their truly important, innovative
work was produced over a relatively short period of time: five years, ten years, flashes in the
pan. Then there seems to be a leveling. Maybe
these institutions never made it to the top of
the staircase but were merely inching along
some other plateau in the dark. Maybe there is
no top, just shorter risers and longer plateaus
that go on forever.
Plateaus are actually very comfortable, because it takes less energy to move. The problem
is the dark. Perhaps the solution is to step aside
and allow a flash to trot by. With a little light from
that torch, we may find the next step.
RASHOMON IN THE
RECORD BUSINESS
Graphic Design, Volume 7, Number 4, 1990;
from a speech at the 1989 AIGA Dangerous
Ideas design conference in San Antonio, Texas.
Last winter, Milton Glaser called me to ask if I
would prepare a talk for a conference about
the history of the cover department of CBS
Records. He was specifically interested in the
rise of power in the marketing department and
how it affected the design of record covers. He
suggested that I trace record-cover design back
to its birth fifty years ago and create a case
study of a corporation, illustrating the increased
influence of marketing over the years.
Now, I hate marketing. Somehow it wheedles its way into everything I do, enforcing guar-
anteed mediocrity. I clearly remember beautiful

cover illustrations biting the dust at CBS Records, only to be replacedalways due to the influence of the marketing departmentwith trite
photos of overweight musicians who were uncomfortable in front of the camera. So I began
my research.
The very first call I made was to the newly
appointed East Coast art director Chris Austopchuk, who had worked as a designer at CBS
Records when I held his job. I enthusiastically
recited the premise of my proposed speech while
he listened in silence. Then he icily replied that
while that may be my view of CBS Records, it
certainly wasnt his and that my talk made it
sound like design at CBS Records had gone
downhill, while in his view it was better than ever.
I couldnt initially understand why Chris
would defend the marketing department. But
of course he wasnt. He was defending himself.
I was then persona non grata with the CBS
Records art department, and since I couldnt
expose the evils of marketing with the present,
Id have to rely on the past. Over the course of
this year, I have conducted a series of conversations and interviews with the past heads of
the CBS Records art department and some of
the designers who served under them.
A peculiar thing began to happen. None of
the stories really connected. There seemed to
be no thread. It was as if each reigning art director had existed in a space and time that was totally his own. Rules changed; corporate personality changed. It was Rashomon.
For those of you who have never seen it,
Rashomon is a film by the Japanese director
Akira Kurosawa, produced in 1951. The film is
set in eighth-century Japan and centers around
an alleged rape and murder as told by witnesses. Each witness gives his or her version of
the same story, but the stories are totally different, each affected by the persons point of view.
Alex Steinweiss: 193953

Alex Steinweiss graduated in 1934 from
Abraham Lincoln High School, where he had
been trained by Leon Friend. Steinweiss was
granted a scholarship to Parsons School of
Design and in 1937 began his career as an assistant to Joseph Binder. Shortly thereafter, he
started freelancing. In 1939 he got a telephone
call from Doc Leslie saying that CBS had just
bought a record company and that they were
setting up an advertising department and would
need an art director. An appointment was set up
with the new advertising manager, Patrick
Dolan. Steinweiss was hired. It was a thrilling
development in his life because he would be
doing creative work, and the work would be
connected with music, which he loved.
Steinweiss was responsible for creating a
visual image for the new company and was
given a free hand in the design of catalogs,
mailing pieces, posters, letterheads, and finally
the design of album covers. The 78 rpm records
were packaged in plain gray or tan folders, with
the name of the album simply positioned on
the cover in black or gold. Steinweiss thought
this was no way to present a beautiful thing to
the public, so he began designing bright, colorful, posterlike covers. Originally management
balked because of the increased production
cost, but when sales jumped 800 percent with
the first release, they got enthusiastic. By 1943,
Steinweiss had a staff of four or five designers,
including James Flora and Bob Jones, plus ten
writers and other specialists.
During the war, in 1944, Steinweiss joined a
unit of the navy that produced training ads for
sailors. It was located in New York, and he continued to design album covers for CBS on a
freelance basis. His hours for the navy were
from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M., and then hed go home and
work on album covers until 11 or 12 at night.
Hed mail the comps up to CBS in Bridgeport,

where his former assistants would do the finished art for reproduction. After the war, he set
up a freelance design office in his apartment
and was retained by Ted Wallerstein, president
of CBS Records, as a design consultant.
In 1948, he witnessed the birth of the
Columbia LP record and designed the record
jacket, which is still in use today for this product. He patented it, released the patent to CBS,
and found the manufacturer, Imperial Paper
Box Corporation, which was willing to invest
about $250,000 in new equipment to produce
it. Not long after, in 1953, Wallerstein had a serious disagreement with William Paley, the
chairman of CBS. His contract was bought up,
and he was out.
Steinweiss learned that Goddard Lieberson,
who had come into the company the same year
that Steinweiss had and for the same salary
$65 per weekhad been named president.
Lieberson and Steinweiss were old friends, having worked on a myriad of record releases over
the years. When Steinweiss went to see him,
Lieberson said, Whos going to protect you,
now that your buddy Ted Wallerstein is out?
Steinweiss said, The quality of my work is the
only protection I need!
Steinweiss adds that the newly appointed
art director, Neil Fujita, got rid of him within the
next month.
The package Alex Steinweiss invented was
later known in the trade as the wrap-pack. It
was printed on pieces of paper that were pasted
on a board backing. In the late 1960s, the shorepack was introduced, for which the image was
printed directly on a board and folded into the
package. CBS Records still manufactures wrappacks. The manufacturer is still Imperial Paper
Box Corporation.
I told Steinweiss that a lot of my talk here
would center on the rise in power of the CBS
Records marketing department. He seemed puzzled, then he said, Oh, you mean sales!
Thats it.
Those sales guys came in, like Goddard
Lieberson. Real Seventh Avenue types!
This is a picture of Goddard Lieberson. As
vice president and then president of CBS
Records, he would have a powerful effect on the
direction of the company and its graphics until
his death in 1977.
Neil Fujita: 195457; 195860

Neil Fujita was working for N. W. Ayer in
Philadelphia when he was hired to become the
first in-house art director of CBS Records. He
was recommended to Goddard Lieberson, who
was executive vice president at the time, by Bill
Golden, CBSs famous corporate art director.
I asked Neil Fujita whom he had replaced
at CBS Records, and he said, No one. There
was only an advertising manager, and he stayed
in place.
Fujita said that he had to develop a department from nothing. This began by upsetting the
arrangements that freelance designers and
studios had with the company because he had
been hired gradually to do all the design internally. He started with a secretary. Within a period of three years, the department grew to six
or seven designers and mechanical artists; by
the end of six years, he had nearly fifteen on
staff. He started by doing all the record covers
for Columbia Records and Epic Records plus
the promotional work. Some advertising was
done before an ad agency was retained. He
worked very closely with sales and A&R.
He started by working in Bridgeport,
Connecticut, at the companys plant and had to
learn how a record was made and how records
were packaged and mailed. He began designing the companys identity and everything re-
lated to that identifying image. Several months

later, he moved to New York and began to sort
out all the record labels under CBS. Fujita developed a new look for CBS packaging by calling in new and young photographers, designers, and illustrators, who offered a broad variety of solutions.
Neil Fujita says that he served as art director from 1954 to 1957, then left for a year to establish his own business. Roy Kuhlman replaced him but was fired after one year. Then
Fujita returned to CBS and remained until 1960.
He told me that he had been asked by Goddard
Lieberson to return until Lieberson could find a
suitable replacement. Roy Kuhlman says he
was hired at CBS in 1954 and fired in 1955. Alex
Steinweiss says that Fujita was hired in 1953.
Bob Cato says that he was hired in 1959 and
that Fujita was fired in 1959.
After talking to Roy Kuhlman about his
CBS tenure, I called back Neil Fujita to try to
straighten out the discrepancies in their stories. Fujita said, You know, Paula, someone
once told me the higher you get, the more people you have looking at your behind!
Still later, Neil Fujita came to visit me in my
studio. He talked about the department he built
and the designers he hired: Peter Adler, Bob
Sullivan, Ken Deardoff, George Gecomba, Marty
Moskoff, and Clara Gentry. He told me that he
was the art director who initiated the policy of
putting the type in the top third of the record
cover so it would be displayed properly. This rule
has been record-business dogma ever since.
I asked him about the marketing department, and he said, Oh, you mean sales! Yes,
they were involved, but I had no problem with
them. That stuff came later!
Fujita did remember two of the freelance
studios that he replaced. There was a studio
called Monogram, and there was another guy
named Art Schlosser.
Roy Kuhlman: 195455

Roy Kuhlman was the art director hired to replace Neil Fujita for one fateful year. Fujita said
that he had originally recommended Art Kane,
but Kane didnt want to do it and suggested
that Fujita hire Roy Kuhlman, who was a young
art director who did a lot of good work for
Grove Press.
Kuhlman remembers that Fujita called and
said he was going to recommend him for his
job because he was planning to leave CBS
Records. He asked Roy if he wanted it.
Roy said, Want it? Ye gods! Want it? I
thought I was going to have to bump someone
off to get a shot at something like thisto get
paid for doing album jackets!
So he put on his best Phils Mens Shop
suit, and Fujita ushered him into the baroque office of Goddard Lieberson. Kuhlman was properly awed by the salary offered but succeeded in
hiding the fact. He was not awed by the dinky,
scrungy bull-pen they told him was his new office. It looked very much like what he imagined
the owner of a sweatshop in the Garment District
might call an office.
Fujita let Kuhlman in on the budgets: total
$300 per, all-inclusive. That meant all: artwork,
type, stats, and mechanicals. But that didnt
bother Kuhlman; hed been doing Grove Press
covers for a third of that. He felt like a tycoon. He
hired a secretary and got it out in the grapevine
that he wanted to see portfolios.
He was getting along just jim-dandy with
sales by using Kuhlmans law: listening to what
they had to say, then doing it his way, later convincing them it was the right way for the job. He
didnt remember showing designs to recording
artists. Somebody may have, but Kuhlman was
blissfully unaware of it. The only artist he met in
the flesh was a new one theyd just signed on
by the name of Johnny Mathis.
Kuhlman was often asked to design flyers

for the sales department, usually 6,000 titles for
the record club, in a one-page format. His designs were too simple for sales, and they quickly
went back to their agency. Some of the records
needed special inserts for musical comment or
biographical notes, so he hired a hot young designer named Ivan Chermayeff to handle the
promotional things.
It was almost a year to the day since he was
hired, and he was still having a ball. The sales department was well trained, and the budget was
balanced, when he got a call to see Lieberson.
Roy, Im afraid Ive got some bad news for
you. Im afraid were going to have to let you go.
This was quite a surprise, and Roy asked, Has
anyone had any complaints about my performance as art director?
No, Roy. Thats not the reason, Lieberson
said. Neil Fujita wants his job back, and we
feel obligated to give it to him.
Kuhlmans epilogue to this story was that
Neil Fujita had left to start his own studio, and
Kuhlman had not given that studio very much
work because he didnt like their portfolio.
I was surprised to find out that Ivan Chermayeff
had worked for CBS Records, and I called to get
his recollection of the time. He remembered a
bizarre thing that had happened. He was hired
by Roy Kuhlman to work on promotional things,
but when he turned up for his first day of work,
he found out that Kuhlman had just been fired.
Chermayeff said he ended up working for Neil
Fujita. He described working on promotional
booklets that ran as long as sixteen pages with
no time for layout or design, and he specified
type by intuition. He described many of the covers produced at the time as real garbagean
ugly portrait of Johnny Mathis and a line of
type. Young Chermayeff lasted about six
months at CBS Records before he quit.
I asked him what the allure of record covers was in those days. He said, They were bigger than book jackets!
Bob Cato: 195968 and John Berg: 196084

Bob Cato told me that he originally met Goddard
Lieberson in 1949. Lieberson wanted to package a special twelve-record set of contemporary
authors reading the spoken word. Mitch Miller,
the powerful head of A&R in the 1950s and
1960s, had recommended Cato to Lieberson.
There was an instant rapport between Lieberson
and Cato, and Lieberson, a mere vice president
at that time, told Cato he would hire him when
he became president of the company.
I dont understand why he had to wait to
become president in order to hire Cato, because he seemed to be capable of hiring and
firing art directors all through the fifties; but he
did in fact hire Bob Cato right after he was
named president.
Cato also told me that he had to put together an art department quickly because, in his
words, There wasnt much there.
One thing thats troubled me throughout
my research is that every art director so far, including Cato, had to run out and set up a completely new art department. There was never
anything there. Where did it all go?
The department Cato built was called
Creative Services, which included packaging,
promotion, publicity, and advertising design. This
department remains pretty much intact today
and is still called Creative Services.
Cato describes himself as a music freak. His
two passions are art and music. He attended
the Chicago Art Institute and was also a student
of Alexei Brodovitch. Cato had done stints at
Junior Bazaar and Harpers Bazaar before being
hired by Lieberson. He was phenomenally so-
cial and charming. His demeanor was one of a

tall, elegant hipster, sophisticated and chic.
Goddard Lieberson had cast the perfect art director.
Catos initial graphic input was in advertising. He hired Richard Avedon and Irving Penn to
shoot big, glossy celebrity ads. He believed the
recording artists should become more involved
in their album covers. Barbra Streisand was the
first recording artist actually to come in and
move around type. Cato loved it. Streisand loved
it. Lieberson loved it. A trend was set that would
become expensive, annoying, and irreversible.
CBS Records at that time made its money
on big-selling musicals, like My Fair Lady, and
popular mainstream artists, such as Johnny
Mathis and Ray Conniff. Lieberson allowed the
classical division to lose money as long as the
pop division supported it. Lieberson was building an image of himself and CBS Records in
the CBS corporate mold: a classy company
that produces a public-worthy product but is
not above putting out a lot of garbage for the
quick buck. CBS was proud of their classical
division, called Masterworks, and their jazz
artists, like Miles Davis. John Hammond, a brilliant A&R man, had recorded Billie Holiday and
Bessie Smith, and later discovered Bob Dylan
and Bruce Springsteen.
Cato hired John Berg, a graduate of Cooper
Union who was working as the art director of
Escapade magazine. Cato was the guru, the
troubleshooter, and the political schmoozer,
and Berg ran the nuts and bolts of the operation. Berg did not have Catos savoir faire, nor
was he particularly comfortable with recording
artists; but Cato loved them and smoothed out
the rough edges. Berg liked winning awards
and finding talent, and he excelled in both
areas. Over the next twenty years, he would
hire a slew of young designers, among them
Henrietta Condak, Virginia Team, Ron Coro, Ed
Lee, Richard Mantel, Tony Lane, Nancy Donald,

Anne Garner, Lloyd Ziff, John Crocker, Karen
Lee Grant, Allen Weinberg, Teresa Alfieri, Gerry
Huerta, Andy Engle, Carin Goldberg, Gene Grief,
Chris Austopchuk, and me. He and his designers would also rack up a steady stream of
awards for the cover department, which would
enhance its reputation and glamour.
The Cato/Berg marriage set a perfect condition for exploratory design. Cato created harmony both within the corporation and with the
recording artists. The art department was expected to be creative. This resulted in making
the CBS Records packaging department one of
the real hot spots in New York, with a line
around the block filled with young designers, illustrators, and photographers all clamoring to
get a crack at the big graphic lollipop. The
record cover was king.
This didnt mean that there still wasnt
garbage. There was a lot of it; there was still
the Johnny Mathis and Ray Conniff cover. Later,
heavy-metal rock would become the garbage
cover. There was the garbage country and western cover and the garbage R&B cover. Anything
was potentially garbage, but anything was also
potentially good. There was simply a lot of everything, with plenty of room for tremendous success and terrible failure.
In 1968, four major events took place that
would begin to change the company forever.
Lieberson was promoted into the corporate
arena, and Clive Davis, a company lawyer, was
named president. Lieberson had become convinced during the sixties that CBS Records had
to become a rock-and-roll company.
Contrary to legend, it was Lieberson, not Clive
Davis, who initiated CBSs presence at the
Monterey Pop Festival in 1968, which led to the
signing of Janis Joplin, Sly Stone, and the
Byrdsbut Clive Davis took the credit.
Cato hated Davis. To Cato, Davis was pure

sleaze and unworthy of Liebersons position.
Apparently the feeling was mutual. Almost from
the day he became president, Davis began meddling with Catos ads. Cato quit.
John Berg inherited Catos job, but Berg
didnt want to be responsible for advertising. He
suggested that Creative Services be split into
two separate divisions: promotion and packaging.
Promotion was given to Arnold Levine, who had
designed ads under Cato. Berg kept packaging.
CBS Records first hired me in the promotion
department in 1971, three years after Creative
Services split. I worked for Arnold Levine. I was
there for two and a half years and never had any
idea that promotion and packaging had ever
been one department. The two departments
were on the same floor at Black Rock. Both
sides were filled with designers, but an icy wall
existed between the two. The packaging department was the glory department, and the promotion department was the cootie department.
Clive Davis rewrote almost every ad. I left and
went to Atlantic Records, where I began designing record covers. John Berg hired me back to
CBS exactly one year later, after my cooties had
been sufficiently removed.
Along with the major changes of 1968
came the invention of something called product management. Product managers were designed to be liaisons between the recording
artist and the company. They became the core
of the marketing department. In the late 1960s
and early 1970s, product managers were nice
hippies who had majored in liberal arts in college and liked to hang around with rock bands.
In the early 1980s, product managers were
nice yuppies who had majored in business in
college and liked to hang around with rock
bands. Some of them knew an enormous
amount about music, and a few of them actually
had very good ideas for record covers.
Clive Davis never really bothered Berg, but

some product managers did. Berg threw them
out of his office. But most product managers
were in awe of Berg because they had grown up
with his record covers.
In 1972, there was drug scandal in the
Columbia labels A&R department. Clive Davis
may or may not have been implicated, but he
was fired for using corporate funds to pay for
his sons bar mitzvah. The whole public scandal
tainted the relationship between CBS Records
and CBS corporate, which would steadily worsen
over the years.
For a year, someone from CBS corporate
managed CBS Records, and then Bruce Lundvall
was appointed president. Lundvall had grown up
in the records division. He was a Lieberson man.
He loved the cover department and John Berg.
The seventies were an incredible time for
the record industry. One year of profits was bigger than the next. CBS Records seemed to sell
anything it shipped to the stores. The company
grew layered and fat. Departments got restructured and restructured again. Berg got older
while the rest of the company got younger.
Product managers cut their hair and became
vice presidents. Creative Services became part
of something called Central Core Marketing,
which was headed by a vice president of merchandising, who reported to the vice president
of sales. The vice president of merchandising
changed three times in two and a half years.
Two of them were promoted to vice president
of something else. The packaging department
became larger also. Branches had opened in
Nashville and Los Angeles.
Above all this was Bruce Lundvall, who still
loved his art department, which was now referred to as the famous award-winning packaging department.
Berg was untouched by the new maze of
corporate hierarchy. He had become a perma-
nent fixture at CBS Records and an institution,

and had direct access to the president regardless of the maze.
Goddard Lieberson died of cancer in 1977.
He had been ill throughout the seventies. All of
the major vice presidents attended the funeral,
but the majority of the people who then worked
for CBS Records were unmoved. Most had been
hired after 1968 and had no idea who Goddard
Lieberson was.
In 1979, CBS Records, which had experienced nothing but continual growth in sales and
size for twenty-five years, crashed. For the first
time, records were returned from the stores in
huge amounts. There was a recession. Blank
cassettes were outselling records. Kids were
taping from the radio and spending their pocket
money on video games. CBS Records, once a
huge profit center for CBS corporate, for the
first time did not make its sales expectations.
There is nothing more horrific within a
corporation than the climate of fear that exists
in a time of massive layoffs. At CBS, the
layoffs came in waves every six months, then
more frequently. They were known as Black
Fridays. CBS Records was scaling down. They
closed plants; they closed branches; they fired
secretaries and merged departments. Bruce
Lundvall was demoted and quit. Another
president was hired and fired and replaced with
one even scarier than the last. It was like a
burning office building. One didnt know whether
to jump out the window or stay and get burned.
John Berg got burned in 1984. The merchandising vice president decided to merge packaging
and promotion back together, with himself as
manager, and appointed Holland McDonald,
who then ran the promotion department, to be
the head art director on the East Coast.
I jumped out the window in 1982. In the
midst of horrific corporate fear, I was having endless battles with the marketing department.
If I had not spent the past six months researching and remembering CBS Records, I
would have told you that marketing considerations overpowered everything, killed creativity,
and destroyed the Cato/Berg art department. I
am beginning to realize that marketing in the
abstract has nothing to do with anything and
never really did at CBS Records, either.
There were no market-research surveys.
Testing was tried once and then abandoned.
There were no demographic studies. There were
only people. People in something called the
marketing department. People in something
called the merchandising department. People
in something called sales. Too many people
in a corporation that had ballooned too quickly.
People afraid. People looking to impress other
people. People grappling for power or survival,
always in the name of something else.
The cover department lost power because
the art director no longer had the firm and loyal
support of the president of the company.
Holland McDonald and Arnold Levine

Holland McDonald was given the job of uniting
two departments that hated each other. He set
up a system in which each designer worked on
everything from the record cover to the smallest ad. The advertising designers liked this,
and the cover designers hated this. Some of
the cover designers quit, and McDonald replaced them. McDonald reported to the merchandising vice president, who didnt particularly support him, so the designers were run
ragged by increasingly aggressive product
managers who reported to a very aggressive
president named Al Teller.
The art directors of the West Coast and
Nashville offices reported to both the merchandising vice president and a finance person. They were geographically distanced from
the New York office and did not suffer the

same political problems.
CBS Records sales position had improved
dramatically with the help of MTV, the new technology of compact discs, and the phenomenal
performance of superstars like Michael Jackson.
In 1986, Al Teller moved the vice president
of merchandising to the purchasing department and then moved him out of the building
and into the Nashville office. Teller then hired
Arnold Levine to head up Creative Services.
Levine had been the head of the promotion department under Clive Davis and Bruce Lundvall
but was fired during one of the Black Friday
purges in the early eighties and was replaced
by Holland McDonald. Al Teller restructured
Creative Services by pulling it out of the merchandising department, which reported to the
sales department. Arnold Levine reported directly to the president of the company.
Holland McDonald didnt want to work for
Arnold Levine again, so he quit. So did some
other designers. Arnold Levine replaced them. By
all accounts, the political clout of the art department has grown stronger under Arnold Levine.
CBS Records was sold to Sony in 1988,
but the designers say that it hasnt noticeably
changed anything.
Shortly after CBS Records was sold to
Sony, Al Teller was fired and replaced. The new
president is still there at this moment.
None of the designers I spoke to knew who
Alex Steinweiss was. No one knew that Neil
Fujita designed the logo they put on their record
packages. No one thought that it was particularly odd that they didnt know. Like everyone
else before them, including me, they exist in
their own space and time at CBS Records, ignorant of the past and oblivious of the future.
Currently compact discs outsell records by
more than three to one. The expectation is that
LP records will be discontinued altogether in
one to three years. Masterworks has already

begun discontinuing LPs. The whole Masterworks operation is being moved to Germany. I
have been told that the new German management was appalled to discover how much input
American designers had in the creation of classical record covers.
The long rectangular CD package was developed by Adam Summers, a creative director
at Warner Communications. It is roughly the
same size as a book jacket. The rectangular CD
box became the industry standard in 1985, but
CBS Records is presently planning to discontinue the package in favor of shrink-wrapping
the plastic CD case.
In four to six years, compact discs that are
three inches in diameter will be introduced.
Their covers will be considerably smaller than
book jackets.
I feel a certain absurdity in the knowledge
that I have spent half of my adult life designing
something that is about to become an antique.
But how fortunate we all are to be graphic
designers and make these tangible objectsa
piece of paper, a folded boardbecause long
after all the power regimes rise and fall, rise and
fall again, all that remains that is certain and true
is our work. And the work speaks for itself.
THE DEVALUATION OF DESIGN

BY THE DESIGN COMMUNITY: I
HAVE SEEN THE ENEMY, AND HE
IS US
Whats wrong with this picture?
The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
selected five designers in a paid competition
(base price $1,000, though some reportedly got
more) to create a new identity for the museum.
The winner was then awarded the job.
I.D. Magazine considered a number of designers for its redesign and asked at least one
of them to provide comps on spec but did not
award him the job.
The Industrial Designers Society of America
(IDSA) contacted three or more design firms requesting a proposal for its new identity package even though it was a pro bono job, because
they didnt want to show favoritism. They received some critical responses from some of
the design groups they had approached, rescinded their policy, and awarded one firm the
unpaid job.
The American Institute of Graphic Arts
(AIGA), which assigned its annual jacket to a designer on a pro bono basis (plus $1,000 to cover
expenses), decided that the jacket was too
important a marketing tool to rely on what the
designated designer submitted. The institute
changed its policy and requested a minimum of
three sketches from the chosen designer while
the assignment remained pro bono, and the expense money remained $1,000.
All of these events occurred in the last
year and a half. In that same time period, MTV,
a winner of the AIGA Design Leadership
Award, asked twenty designers and illustrators
to create political art for the cause of their
choice, to be aired at the MTV Video Music
Awards ceremony and to be printed in the program. The artists were requested to produce
the art for a fee of $500, which would be donated to any charity they designated, with MTV
matching the donation. (MTV is owned by
Viacom, which is currently locked in the
Paramount take over battle.)
Each organization operated with apparently
altruistic motives, inspired by the design community itself. In three cases, the organizations
are not-for-profit and rely on funds given by the
communities they support. They are aware that
many designers would love to work on their
projects for prestige or exposure or the opportunity to produce award-winning graphics, and
they emphasize this as the selling point of the
free work. In fact, with so many designers available and eager to work for so little, they probably feel the need to be fair about it and spread
the opportunity around. When one considers
this, its not surprising that MTV would follow in
kind with the added kicker of political-cause affiliation. And suddenly Seagrams has developed a similar attitude toward its annual report,
which it touts as a marvelous opportunity for
exposure with cachet for any good designer.
They asked three firms to compete and produce several ideas on spec.
These events can be blamed on the economy or on the overpopulation of the design
community or, when one gets really far-fetched,
on young designers using computers. If one is
employed by an educational or other institution,
a corporation, a publication, or an organization
that supports, promotes, or is allied with graphic
design in some way but does not rely on a paying clientele other than designers for survival,
one can ignore these events altogether and assume they speak only to the commercially competitive concerns of design firms. Unfortunately,
they speak to all of us. They are the symptom of
a design community contemptuous of itself,
a community so splintered by social, political,
academic, sexual, regional, and aesthetic factionalism that it has lost sight of its original
collective goals.
When I first became active in the AIGA in
the 1970s, its goals were very clear: to promote,
protect, and document the profession of graphic
design and to encourage, support, and recognize quality work. What made the AIGA especially appealing was its stated tenet: the AIGA
was about design, not designers. The belief was
that by elevating the profession of graphic design, the AIGA would also elevate design value
to the American business and civic communities

and thereby improve the visual standards and
expectations of our society. The notion of value
here had very little to do with money. Money is
only one American symbol of value. The AIGA
was interested in the power of the design profession, the ability of good graphic designers
to become powerful enough individually and
collectively to persuade cumbersome bureaucracies that good design is good business and
good for society. How to do it? Organize a national community of designers. Publish. Involve
the educational community. Alert the press.
Create a journal, develop dialogue and criticism. Record history. Stage a national conference. Create professional practice guidelines.
Encourage press coverage. Create awareness.
The events and activities of the design
community in the 1980s and 1990s remind me
of almost every boxing movie Ive ever seen.
The young idealistic fighter who has trained
hard, has good family values, and a nice girl
back home hooks up with a neer-do-well promoter with mob ties, who quickly pushes the
young boxer to fame and fortune so heady and
corrupt that our hero forgets his early family
values one by one. He dumps the girl back
home, compromises his principles, breaks his
immigrant fathers heart, and finally breaks his
fingers, so he can neither fight nor play the violin. Moral of the story: Dont forget your values.
In the eighties, the design community witnessed the great rise of professionalism
(now a euphemism for the production of noninnovative but stylishly acceptable workusually in corporate communicationscoupled with
very good fees). Along with professionalism
came the business consultant to the designers, who proclaimed, Design is a business.
This became the mantra of the eighties. The
AIGA, along with other organizations and publications, produced seminars, conferences, and
special magazine issues devoted to the business of design. These were followed by a
plethora of design self-help books, which told
you how to set up your own business, how to
promote, how to speak correct business jargon,
how to dress, how to buy insurance, and so on.
There was nothing inherently wrong with
this except for the subsequent confusion it
caused. Professional work did look more professional, and corporate communications in
general were visually improved. The level of
design mediocrity rose. Also, practicing designers as a rule had previously been rather
sloppy about running their businesses. They
were easily taken advantage of, didnt know
how to construct proposals, and were generally more interested in designing than in minding the store, networking, or planning for the
future. The business seminars did no harm, but
the political and economic climate of the eighties in general, coupled with the pervasiveness
of the design is a business hype, perverted
the design communitys overall goal. The goal
became money.
How and Step-by-Step Graphics magazines were born in this climate. Both publications explained how to be a professional graphic
designer. A young reader could learn how to set
up a design business, how to furnish it, how to
buy equipment, how to make a design and sell
it to a client, and how to do award-winning work
just as the rich and famous designers featured
in the magazine did.
It was not surprising that enrollments at
colleges with halfway decent design programs
shot up in the eighties. Graphic design had become a viable profession, with the promise of
glamour and success. In the 1950s and 1960s,
graphic design had been a relatively obscure
profession, largely undocumented and poorly
reported. As a profession it seemed risky, populated by talented mavericks, and not a place
where a person could count on making a living.

The publications of the eighties changed all
that. If the goal of the AIGA was to change the
general perception of graphic design and to
create awareness of the profession, then this
was our greatest area of successan ambiguous success at best.
With all the young designers graduating
from various design programs and entering the
field, the design-publishing boom was on. More
and more awards competitions were founded,
more magazines, more books on type, on trends,
on letterhead design, package design, shopping bag design, trademark design, magazine
design, the history of design, famous designers,
famous designers from California, famous designers under forty, women designers, more alternative design books featuring people left out
of other books, and more books one could buy
into to use for self-promotion.
The proliferation of graphic-design books
in the eighties and nineties made all trends
readily apparent and ripe for immediate imitation. The graphics publications began reporting
on design trends like fashion columnists watching hemlines. Trends were news. Even the general press could understand them. Recently an
article in the New York Times Style section reported that the typeface Bodoni has become
popular in magazine design. I had never seen
the word Bodoni in the New York Times before,
but I dont think this is what we had in mind
when we wanted to create general graphic design awareness.
The increased number of annual award
shows put a new financial and professional burden on the design community, a heightened
sense of obligation to promote, be noticed, published, acclaimed, and have a national presence
in every annual, in all compendiums then appearing, in total, almost monthly. The pressure
was considerably less on older designers with
established reputations and recognizable work.

For unknown young designers working on corporate communications, promotional material,
obscure packaging, and obscure magazines,
getting noticed was more and more impossible.
The last design firm to gain national standing
through design annuals was the Duffy Design
Group, in the mid 1980s. If there is no substantial change in the number of annuals and frequency of publication, no designer or design
group will gain that kind of national prominence
again. The mass of work displayed in the total
annual publishing output cancels out new designers. Familiar names remain familiar, and
unfamiliar names stay unfamiliar.
Pick up a Communication Arts Design
Annual and thumb through it, then flip through
Prints Regional Design Annual. Follow it up
with an AIGA Annual, then breeze through the
graphic design section of the New York Art
Directors Club Annual, Graphis Design, the
American Center for Design 100 Show, the
Society of Publication Designers show, the I.D.
Magazine Annual Design Review, and wind it all
up with the Type Directors Club Annual. Do it all
in one sitting, and dont read any of the copy.
Make sure they are all from the same year, or at
most a year or two apart. The effect will be a
numbing sameness. There are some general
stylistic differences in the work selected by
various annuals, but only when one confronts
the same piece three or four times in different
books does that individual piece develop a
character of its own, separate from the rest of
the work in the publication. In fact, one could
generalize about contemporary graphic design
as viewed in annuals exactly the way Paul
Rand did in the essay From Cassandre to
Chaos in Design: Form and Chaos. Rands
analysis of stylistic approaches is separated
from the intent and content of the work. It overgeneralizes the way annuals do.
Several years ago I thumbed through an

Art Directors Club Annual from the mid 1950s.
The print ads all seemed to have dumb line
drawings of creatures with smiley faces that
closely resembled the drawings in Paul Rands
El Producto ads. The drawings were coupled
with quaint, poorly letter-spaced typography,
some of it stenciled, some of it, apparently, in alternating colors (the annual was black-andwhite), and some of it with cute little curlicues
at the ends of the letterforms. The El Producto
ads may have been in there too; I honestly dont
recall. I just remember that everything looked
the sameall style and no substance.
It was not surprising that by the end of the
design is a businessridden eighties, we got
good and disgusted with our own rhetoric. The
Dangerous Ideas AIGA National Conference
in San Antonio in 1989, which attempted to
highlight important social issues, was a refreshing change from the 1987 conference in
San Francisco, which highlighted an insurance
salesman. I applaud two social themes explored
at the conferences: that wasteful packaging is
a pollutant, and we need to take responsibility
for it; and that our communications can be powerful and damaging to people, so we need to
take responsibility for them.
Actually, the messages are the same. We
are responsible for our work and its consequences. Responsibility is a crucial part of our
professional ethic. We are also responsible (according to our original goals) for encouraging
and supporting quality design. Therefore racism,
sexism, and other forms of personal prejudice
have no place in the design community.
That said, I believe that the phrase social
relevance has replaced design is a business
as a mantra for the nineties. Confusing social issues with design issues is dangerous. Theyre
not the same.
Its hard to write this with dispassion because I hate mass mantras. I never trust or believe them, because they always pervert themselves, even when the mantra is in sync with
my own views. Progressive political and social
beliefs are generally lifelong, deeply held convictions, not transient group mores. Yes, consciousness can be raised, and I always love it
when someone who voted for Ronald Reagan
wakes up and smells the coffee, but Im nervous when we try to make converts through the
AIGA or I.D. Magazine. If theyre that easily
converted, they may respond just as positively
to the mantra of the next decade, which could
well turn out to be fascism.
The social relevance mantra disturbs me
mostly because it confuses and diminishes
our primary goals. It becomes easy to decry
graphic design as a trivial profession. If one
factors in all the world wars, diseases, poverty,
illiteracy, and natural disasters, a well-designed
hangtag is silly. But I dont think the responsibility for the visual environment of our society is
silly or trivial, and collectively, that is our charge.
Social relevance can also become a
strange criterion for judging design. I was on a
jury last year with a judge who voted for work
on the basis of the organization that commissioned the work. This is OK if the point of the
exhibition is to highlight politically correct organizations; but if the point is design excellence, then a poorly designed brochure for an
AIDS benefit is not better than a brilliantly designed brochure for an investment banking
company, no matter how much ones sympathies run toward the AIDS brochure.
The recently created Chrysler Awards for
Innovation in Design offer a cash prize of
$10,000 to architects, product designers, and
graphic designers for their individual contributions to society. The items in the programs
definition of design excellence for graphic
design appeared in the following order:

Sustainability (environmentally sensitive), accessibility (seen by people), technology (the
appropriate use of it), communication (successfully speaks to its audience), beauty (that
extra aesthetic something that sets the design apart).
Had we been constantly reinforcing our original
goals, the first three parts of this definition
would be irrelevant, merely expected aspects
of any responsible design. But here, communication and beauty are last, implying that the design community is so irresponsible that it cannot even meet the minimum requirements. An
environmentally sensitive design that doesnt
communicate is a real waste of papereven
unbleached, recycled paper with the proper
amount of postconsumer waste. An environmentally sensitive design that actually communicates its message but looks like such holy
hell that you dont want it in your home, on your
desk, or in your hands for one minute is still a
piece of garbage. Visual environmentalism matters, now more than ever.
Overall design goals also become confused
when they are coupled with womens issues.
Women represent the largest percentage of the
design community while holding the lowestpaying jobs. They feel robbed of opportunity,
prestige, and even history. They are constantly
confronted with the previous and still powerful
generation of male design leaders, who, through
their generations culture, remain inherently sexist and completely unaware of their bad behavior. Theres valid reason for anger.
Also, women as a group face a real struggle
in overcoming centuries of sociological baggage. They must confront their fears of self-assertion, management, and success. In this respect, the Special Interest Groups provided by
AIGA on the chapter level are immensely helpful and successful.

But there is a tremendous danger of enforcing womens issues at the expense of the
design communitys primary goals. Blatant
tokenism implies that a standard is being
breached. Contemporary womens shows and
books have the same implication. They inadvertently set different criteria for judging the
work of women and may serve to diminish real
achievement, not promote it.
At the AIGA National Conference in Miami
in 1993, some women were infuriated by the
small number of women invited to speak (five
women were asked, one canceled, and twenty
men participated as speakers). The number is
low when we consider how many terrific women
practitioners, educators, and writers with something important to contribute there are. But what
was worse was that three of the women speakers were giving talks that had the word women
in the title. This implied that women speak only
to womens issues. In the planning of the conference, women had accidentally become segregated, as if operating under a separate
agenda. The anger of the women at the conference was focused on the number of women
though, not the content of the speeches.
Im sure that the conference organizers
meant well. Womens issues were addressed in
three presentations, more than for any other single issue. This kind of thinking, however, either
by or for women, is ultimately more damaging to
women and the design community than it is
helpful. Womens issues and overall design
goals dont necessarily reinforce one another,
and they may create destructive factionalism.
But an even broader example of angry factionalism that damages our community is
something I have come to call ageism, simply
for want of a better word. Ageism reflects the
divide between what are perceived to be East
Coast establishment designers, largely from

an older generation, and younger designers
with differing cultural and aesthetic sensibilities. Some ageism can be defined as regionalism because a lot of the aesthetic splits have
to do with technologically experimental design
emanating from the West Coast. Some ageism
returns to womens issues when it involves
splits between the so-called East Coast establishment and women who head aesthetic
movements (Kathy McCoy at Cranbrook or
Lorraine Wilde at CalArts) or socially oriented
design movements (Sheila de Bretteville at
Yale). Or ageism can be perceived as the split
between establishment/practicing designers and
academic/experimental designers.
Aesthetic debate is crucial to our community
and has always existed. The modernism/eclecticism debate has raged for years while devout
practitioners on both sides have come together
in mutual admiration and respect because their
goal is always the same: quality in graphic design for the betterment of business and society.
With ageism, fear, loathing, and disrespect
bury our overall design goal. The goal of
ageism is power, but not the power and influence of the design community as a whole. It
becomes a power struggle within the various
political and aesthetic factions to win control of
the debate to define quality. As Ive stated previously, Im wary of value being defined by social and political agendas, but the aesthetic debate had become unnecessarily ugly, divisive,
and destructive.
Im not sure how ageism came to be. Its
roots start in the early 1980s with the tremendous growth of the design industry and the
perversion of its original goals. With the increase of design publishing and the proliferation of annuals, the older generation of designers became distanced from the younger generation. They stopped learning their names. (I
think the last generation to be absorbed included Woody Pirtle and Michael Vanderbyl.)
When they stopped learning young designers
names, the veterans of graphic design began
to refer to the work in terms of stylistic elements, like layering, letterspacing, leading,
retro, and, finally, that computer stuff. That
there was appropriate and inappropriate use of
each element became lost on them, simply because of the pervasiveness of it all (exactly my
response when I looked at that Art Directors
Club Annual from the fifties). The work had become all style and no substance.
Knowing (and liking) an individual helps to
mute the competitive animosities caused by
aesthetic differences. In the New York design
community, Pushpin and Herb Lubalin lived
harmoniously with Vignelli and Rudy de Harak.
They all knew one another. Theoretically speaking, Massimo Vignelli should be as repulsed by
Ed Benguiats work as he is by that of Rudy
Vanderlans. But Massimo knows Ed. Ed is a fine
fellow, and after all, they both agree that what
matters most is the continual striving for quality. Their goals are the same even if they approach them from different directions.
But the young designers featured in annuals
and articles have become faceless and therefore
valueless to this Eastern Establishment.
A progressive community turns reactionary
when it believes it is about to lose something.
This couldnt be more true of the Eastern
Establishment. New technology has totally revolutionized the method, craft, and structure of
the design practices that have existed for forty
years. The technological shift has been coupled
with a devastated economy, particularly on the
East Coast. In the midst of layoffs, price reductions, and a general sense of demoralization,
healthy perspectives become elusive. The computer is seen as an evil enemy, a dangerous
tool in the hands of valueless incompetents
bent on destroying the design profession. When

this fear is coupled with strange social agendas
by some design groups, with angry women, and
with bizarre experimental work by design
schools receiving an amazing amount of press
attention, suddenly it looks like the whole world
is going to the dogs. It looks like the standards
of quality are being destroyed.
The question then becomes, What is quality work? This is the eternal debate. We know
design must function properly, but design functions differently for different problems and audiences. Ray Gun works perfectly for its audience but wont be received well by someone
over forty-five who doesnt care about rock and
roll. Is it quality or garbage? Aesthetics is a
tricky business.
One can admire the aesthetics of a specific school without loving it. I admire Emigre
without loving it. Its ten years old now. I admire the publication and some of the typefaces even though Ill never use them. But the
Emigre designers were innovators. I felt the
same way about Herb Lubalin. In fact, I feel the
same way about Paul Rand. I never loved his
work as I love Cassandres, El Lissitzkys,
Pierre Mendells, and some of Fred Woodwards
Rolling Stone spreads. But I admire it. I know
how important it is. One builds admiration from
a distance, in retrospect. It takes time.
With ageism there is no admiration for any
work produced by a younger generation. None.
No shining example, no beacon among the heathens. Its all bad: Neville Brody: bad. Emigre
garbage. Fabien Baron: a rip-off of Brodovitch.
Chuck Anderson: too many advertising cuts.
Cranbrook: feh. Rick Valicenti: P.U. Et cetera.
Pretty soon theres nothing left to eat. Only designers from their own generation or the distant past merit praise. At the end, there is no
debate, no enlightenmentonly a divide. And
we are all losers.
We are losers because the ensuing factionalism, hurt feelings, confusion, resentment, and
anger are damaging to the most important goals
of the community. If we fear and loathe one another, how can we persuade society of the collective value of good design? If were all chopped
into different factions with different agendas, collectively we have no power at all. We destroy our
credibility. When we are contemptuous of one
another, we invite the contempt of business and
society. We devalue design.
Everyday I find myself in supermarkets, discount drugstores, video shops, and other environments that are obviously untouched by our
community. No bad Brody or Emigre garbage,
or for that matter, no saintly Vignelli, Rand, or
Glaser. Just plain, old-fashioned, uncontroversial
bad design, the kind of anonymous bad weve
come to ignore because were too busy fighting
over the aesthetics of the latest AIGA poster. We
dont talk or write about it, it heads no ones
agenda, but its still most of America.
So I come back to the petty list from the
beginning of this article. Whats wrong with the
picture is that four organizations that exist in
support of design demonstrated that they have
absolutely no idea how to hire or work with a
graphic designer. Responding to the contemptuous, factionalized climate we have created,
they pitted designers against one another in
competition for free work, and they lost sight of
the fact that pro bono is a donation. They assume that the designers benefit from the free
job is greater than theirs. (With all the angry criticism they receive from the various design
camps regardless of what is produced, maybe
they have a point.) Yet for all our annuals, seminars, conferences, political- and sexual-consciousness-raising groups, environmental lectures, aesthetic manifestos, and diatribes, respect and understanding of the graphic design
profession is worse than it was in the seventies.
At the end of all the boxing movies, the

fighter always learns that his original ideals were
valid and that things went wrong when the ideals
were perverted, corrupted, and abandoned. The
same lesson applies to us.
a role model? Has role modeling been thrust

upon you? Please let me know.
Sincerely,
Julie Lasky
Managing Editor
THE BOAT
Originally published in Print, March/April 1993
Editors note: The following letters were exchanged between Julie Lasky, managing editor
of Print, and Paula Scher. Laskys letter has
been edited for brevity; Schers is reproduced
in its entirety.
Dear Paula:
Thumbing through the latest AIGA Annual, we
ran across the picture of Pentagrams partners
gathered together on a boat on the Thames,
and we couldnt help noticing that you were the
only woman in the group. And then we recalled
that the art department at CBS Records wasnt
exactly a bastion of feminism, either.
How would you feel about writing 1,000 or
so words for us on the subject of breaking into
and working for the boys clubs? (I know its not
an original topic, but you always provide an
original point of view.) Has your experience in
the male-dominated Pentagram of the early
1990s been different from working in the maledominated CBS Records of the early 1980s and
before? Have you ever suffered tokenism? At
the Chicago AIGA Conference last year, Cheryl
Heller remarked that being the lone woman
among male professionals brought an element
of surprise that worked to her advantage: She
could easily soar above the low expectations of
her colleagues and clients. Has this been your
experience? Does your status as a woman executive bring more responsibility in terms of
mentoring other women, both within and beyond your workplace? Do you consider yourself
Dear Julie:
Ive long resisted the notion of writing a
womans issue piece or what its like to be
the only woman blah blah. Im genuinely uncomfortable with the subject because I have
conflicting feelings about it. Id have to have
been an ostrich not to have experienced the
painful exclusivity of corporate boys clubs,
glass ceilings, and financial exploitation. I can
sing along with any womans group about the
sexistinsensitivenoncommunicativeemotionally inept nature of men and add a few twosyllable adjectives of my own for good measure. But my confusion comes not in the worthy
politicizing of womens issues but in their valid
application to a life in graphic design.
Every time I give a presentation to a design
group, Im asked what its like to be a woman
blah blah. When Im invited to give the presentation, Im told that women will really want to
hear about being a woman blah blah. They go
like this: Hello, can you judge the annual
Peoria Hang Tag competition? Please say yes
because we need a female juror. How I envy
my male partners, who are invited to speak
based on their achievements and prestige as
opposed to their sex. I cannot separate my
achievements from being a woman blah blah.
On the other hand, the tokenism has had
its advantages. Ive been able to attain a visibility that might have been harder to come by if I
were male. The visibility may be helpful professionally, but its always clouded by the veil of
womens issues. How ironic that the grand attempt in the graphic community to promote
women designers (me in this case) serves to

undermine and diminish achievement.
The thing of it is I never set out to be the
only woman blah blah. I set out to be a designer. I set out to be a designer who could design all kinds of things well with the hope that
those things that I designed well would lead me
to even more things to design. I set out as a designer not thinking that being a woman had
much to do with anything. What mattered was
the work. After all, designers produce tangible
products. You can see the results. There is physical evidence of success or failure. I believed
that good work brought more good work, and
that money, while dictated by the marketplace,
could mushroom, to a degree, in relationship to
good work and reputation. Ive held these beliefs for twenty years. Ive had to, or I would not
have been able to continue to work. The ability
to produce work continually, make professional
changes, take advantage of business opportunities as they arise, and create the opportunities yourself when they dont arise is absolutely
key to the growth and development of a designer, male or female.
I dont believe that pursuing this course
while happening to be a woman is particularly
special, nor do I believe there should be special standards for women. I havent broken
into boys clubs. I am merely following the path
of a life in design at a time when doors are
opening for women, not only because they are
women but also because they are successfully
following that path.
Which brings me to the photograph of the
Pentagram partners on the boat. It is interesting
how one photographic image can perfectly encapsulate my feelings. You said you couldnt
help noticing that I was the only woman on the
boat. I was less interested in the fact that I was
the only woman; I already knew that. I was
struck more by the pure visual physicality of the
Left to Right: Michael Bierut, Kenneth Grange, Alan Fletcher, John Rushworth, Peter Harrison, Theo Crosby, Mervyn Kurlansky, Peter Saville,
David Hillman, me, Jim Biber, Kit Hinrichs, Woody Pirtle, Neil Shakery, Colin Forbes, John McConnell, Lowell Williams
situationnot the oddity of the sex, but the

strangeness in scale. There I am, halfway down
the side of the boat, in between rugged David
Hillman and James Biber, who is twice my size.
Kit Hinrichs, who is actually sitting behind
James Biber, has a head that is half again as
large as mine. And Colin Forbes, who stands
with John McConnell and Lowell Williams way in
the back, appears much larger than me. I look
like a person who was originally standing far
beyond Lowell Williams and was then stripped
into the middle of the photograph but not
blown up in proportion to the new position.
The photograph has made me look at my
own professional situation and those of other
women today as a matter of strange scale. Im in
the picture, but Im not blown up in proportion to
the new position. (If the photograph had pictured
the same number of men and women, the scale
wouldnt be strange; Id just be short.)
I saw a similar thing in the New York Times
several weeks ago. There was Donna Shalala
standing next to Bill Clinton and Al Gore and
some male senators and newly appointed cabinet members, and she was not blown up in
proportion to her new position. The same
week, in the same New York Times, I read
about how womens groups were upset with
Clinton for not appointing enough women to
cabinet posts and how Clinton railed against
the quotas. All of this served to diminish the
wonderful accomplishments of the excellent
women who were appointed. One woman in
the group. Two women in the group. Their
individuality is lost, and all one sees is the
strangeness of scale.
Im physically odd at Pentagram, the way Im
physically odd at a corporate meeting with
clients who happen to be men. Im physically
odd to women who work for men in groups and
view me as out of scale to the men in those
groups.
I joined Pentagram the way I set out to design. I had had a business with one male partner for seven years. We had been split for one
year, and I had continued running the business
myself. I was offered the opportunity to join
Pentagram, and I took it because I wanted to
design things well and get more new things to
design. Theres no more to it than that. No crusade, no breaking down back-room doors. I
took some personal risk to take advantage of a
new business opportunity, with the price being
the daily discomfort of being out of scale.
I cant equate Pentagram and CBS Records.
Pentagram is a group of very intelligent, talented, and relatively sensitive men who design
well and want to get more new things to design.
I may be out of scale at Pentagram, but I was out
of sync at CBS Records. Thats much worse than
being out of scale. One doesnt have to be a
woman to be out of sync. All that requires is for
one to have a completely different set of values
than the larger group. Being out of scale can be
uncomfortable. Being out of sync is dangerous.
Women need to learn the difference.
It seems to me from your letter, particularly
in reference to Cheryl Hellers talk, that you are
looking for some sort of modus operandi for
surviving in male-dominated working situations.
There isnt one. Men are different. Situations are
different. And women are different. The only
thing that is a constant for me is my relationship
to my work. When I find myself in a professional
situation that is purely about politics or personalities and not about the effectiveness of design,
I tend to fail.
Which brings me back to my ambiguous
feelings about womens issues in relation to design. A profession that has long been dominated
by men is changing. There are simply more
women. There are more women who are terrific
designers, more women running their own businesses, more women corporate executives,
more women changing the scale of things and

appearing out of scale in the process.
There are also more underpaid women,
more women juggling careers and motherhood,
more women who feel squeezed out in a bad
economy, more women going to art school and
going nowhere afterwards, and more women
who are resentful of their lack of success because they are women. There are more women
in design groups, more womens panels, more
women mentoring women, more women who
want women to mentor them, more women
looking for women role models, and more
women who dont like other womens success.
I dont know what my responsibility is in all
this. Im not sure I have one as it relates to
women in general. There are things Ive done
naturally through relationships that existed by
chance. I felt supportive of the terrific women
designers at CBS Records because they were
my friends. I have encouraged talented students, male and female, equally. Ive supported
those people I know and care about who want
to design well and get more things to design. It
is not a planned activity or a duty; it is simply
part of a life in design.
I dont want to be anyones role model. I
dislike the term because it diminishes my life
by implying that Im playing some kind of role
for other peoples benefit. It places my entire
life out of scale.
This takes me back to the picture on the
boat, where Im confronted with my own image
within a group. The boat ride on the Thames
was really lovely. There was a good lunch, terrific conversation, and all in all it was the most
pleasant part of an exhausting partners meeting. I dont remember feeling like an oddity on
that boat, but in the photo there is that
strangeness of scale.
Womens issues in design are focused
on scale. We count the numbers, look at the
statistics, and demand change; and all the while

change is occurring. Change doesnt come in
one great thump. It comes one by one by one by
one, and it looks kind of funny.
And then it doesnt.
Sincerely,
Paula Scher
Partner, Pentagram Design, Inc.
CREDITS
PART 1: CORPORATE
POLITICS 101
All work in this section for
CBS Records unless
otherwise noted.
Eric Gale, Ginseng
Woman, 1976
Design: Paula Scher
Lettering: Andy Engel
Illustration: David Wilcox
Eric Gale,
Multiplication, 1977
Yardbirds Favorites, 1977
Ralph Macdonald
Universal Rhythm, 1979
Googie & Tom Coppola,
Shine the Light of Love,
1980
Design: Paula Scher
Illustration: David Wilcox
Sidewalks of New York,
1976
Heatwave, Too Hot to
Handle, 1977
Design: Paula Scher
Illustration: Robert
Grossman
Lake, Lake, 1977
Lake, Lake 2, 1978
Lake, Paradise Island,
1979
Lake, Ouch!, 1980
Design: Paula Scher
Illustration: James
McMullan
Boston, Boston, 1976
Design: Paula Scher
Illustration: Roger
Huyssen
Logo: Gerard Huerta
Johnny & Edgar Winter,
Together, 1976
Muddy Waters, Hard
Again, 1977
Design: Paula Scher
Photography: Richard
Avedon
Muddy Waters, Im
Ready, 1978
Design: Paula Scher
Illustration: Philip Hays
Bob James and Earl
Klugh, One on One, 1979
Design: Paula Scher
Photography: Arnold
Rosenberg
Mongo Santamaria,
Red Hot, 1979
Bob James, H, 1980
Bob James, Touchdown,
1978
Wilbert Longmire,
Sunny Side Up, 1978
Wilbert Longmire,
Champagne, 1979
Bob James, Heads, 1977
Mark Colby, Serpentine
Fire, 1978
Design: Paula Scher
Photography:
John Paul Endress
Barrabas, Heart of the
City, Atlantic Records,
1975
Design: Paula Scher
Photography:
Arnold Rosenberg
Retouching: Ralph Wernli
Leonard Bernstein,
Poulenc, Stravinsky,
1976
Design: Paula Scher
Fabrication: Nick
Fasciano
50 Years of Jazz Guitar,
1976
Design: Paula Scher
Fabrication: Nick
Fasciano
Urgent, Thinking Out
Loud, EMI-Manhattan
Records, 1987
Design: Paula Scher
Photography:
John Paul Endress
Dance the Night Away,
1980
Blast, 1979
Design: Paula Scher
Illustration: John OLeary
John Prine, Common
Sense, Atlantic Records,
1975
Design: Paula Scher
Illustrator:
Charles B. Slackman
Eugene Ormandy and
the Philadelphia
Orchestra, Prokofiev:
Peter and the Wolf, 1977
Design: Paula Scher
Illustration: Stan Mack
Al Dimeola, John
McLaughlin, Paco
DeLucia, Friday Night in
San Francisco, 1981
Design: Paula Scher
Hand Lettering: Seth
Shaw
Charles Mingus, Changes
One and Changes Two,
Atlantic Records, 1974
Jean-Pierre Rampal,
Japanese Melodies, 1978
The Yardbirds, Great
Hits, 1977
Best of Phoebe Snow,
1981
Busch Serkin Busch,
Schubert: Trio No. 2 in
E-Flat Major, 1978
Gary Graffman, Bartk,
Prokofiev, Lees, 1978

Best of Dexter Gordon,
1979
The Best of Jazz poster,
1979
Trust Elvis poster, 1981
Design: Paula Scher
PART 2: STYLE WARS
Great Beginnings for
Koppel & Scher, 1984
Design: Paula Scher,
Terry Koppel, Rosemary
Intrieri, Anne Petter,
Richard Mantel,
Jackie Murphy
Manhattan Records
identity, 1984
Rosemary Intrieri, Jackie
Murphy, Anne Petter,
Drew Hodges
Illustration (label ideas):
Jon Matulka, Louis
Lozowick, Guy Billout,
Hugh Kepets, Jim
McMullan (not shown)
The Films of Jack
Nicholson cover for Carol
Publishing / Citadel Press,
1990
Art Direction: Steve Brower
Design: Paula Scher
The Album Cover Album
cover for Simon &
Schuster / Prentice Hall,
1987
Art Direction: J.C. Suarez
Design: Paula Scher
Zen to Go cover for New
American Library / Plume,
1989
Uncommon Wisdom
cover for Simon &
Schuster, 1988
Real Estate cover for
Simon & Schuster /
Poseidon Press, 1988
Thank God for the Atom
Bomb cover for Simon &
Schuster / Summit Books,
1988
Beijing Jeep cover for
Simon & Schuster, 1989
Art Direction: Frank Metz
Design: Paula Scher
21 Collected Stories
cover for Houghton
Mifflin, 1990
Growing Up in Moscow
cover for Houghton Mifflin
/ Ticknor & Fields, 1989
Art Direction: Michaela
Sullivan
Design: Paula Scher
Goodbye, Columbus
cover for Houghton
Mifflin, 1989
Art Direction:
Michaela Sullivan
Design: Paula Scher
Illustration: Karen Barbour
James Dean: Behind
the Scene for Carol
Publishing / Birch Lane
Press, 1990
Ron Louie
Photos from Warner Bros.
Archives
Those Lips, Those Eyes
for Carol Publishing /
Birch Lane Press, 1992
David Matt, Ron Louie
Photos from the Lou
Valentino Collection
A Room of Ones Own
for Heritage Press, 1993
Ron Louie
Photography: Duane
Michals
Grimm for Heritage
Press, 1997
Lisa Mazur
Illustration: Seymour
Chwast
Suffragettes to
She-Devils for Phaidon
Press, 1997
Design: Paula Scher, Lisa
Mazur, Esther Bridavsky,
Anke Stohlmann
ola packaging and
identity, 1986-88
Deborah Bishop, Ron Louie
Swatch Watch Family
ads, 1984
Drew Hodges
Photography: Gary Heery
Swatch Swiss campaign,
1984
Drew Hodges
Beautiful Faces,
Beautiful Faces II, and
Dingbats for Champion
International, 1986-89
Design: Paula Scher, Ron
Louie, Cheri Dorr,
Deborah Bishop,
Rosemary Intrieri, Jackie
Murphy, LuAnn Graffeo,
Mary Bess Heim,
David Matt
Print, parody issue, 1985
Co-editors: Paula Scher
and Steven Heller
Tony Sellari, Jackie

Murphy, M&Co.
Copy: Paula Scher,
Steve Heller, Bob Sloan,
Danny Abelson
Illustration: Eric Dinyer
Deli photography:
Edward Spiro
To Be Good Is Not
Enough poster for
School of Visual Arts,
1987
Art Is poster for SVA,
1996
Design: Paula Scher
Great Ideas Never
Happen poster for
SVA, 1992
Art Direction:
Silas Rhodes
Design: Paula Scher
Copy: Dee Ito
Silent Night poster for
Ambassador Arts /
Serigraphia, 1988
The Big A poster for
Ambassador Arts, 1991
Design: Paula Scher
Alphabet poster series
for Ambassador Arts /
Champion International,
1994-95
Art Direction: Paula
Scher, Woody Pirtle
Design: Michael Bierut,
Seymour Chwast, Paul
Davis, Shigeo Fukuda,
Tom Geismar, Woody
Pirtle, Peter Saville, Paula
Scher, Rosmarie Tissi,
Yarom Vardimon
AIGA/NY poster, 1999
Tina Chang
Type Is Image poster
for DDD Gallery, 1999
Keith Daigle
Cigarette poster for AIGA
Raleigh, 1994
Ron Louie
Photographer:
John Paul Endress
Blah Blah Blah poster,
based on an illustration
for Worth magazine, 1997
Keith Daigle
Toulouse-Lautrec poster
for Le nouveau Salon des
Cent / Scheufelen, 2001
Sean Carmody
Coexistence poster for
the Museum on the Seam,
2000
Avni Patel
page, 2000
Design/Illustration:
Paula Scher
Wonderbrands West
poster for Metropolis
magazine, 1999
Keith Daigle
PART 3: IN THE
COMPANY OF MEN
Net@work poster for

Metropolis, 2000
Keith Daigle, Tina Chang
Tategumi Yokogumi
magazine cover, 1999
Art Direction: Ikko Tanaka
Design: Paula Scher
Useless Information for
Champion International,
1992
Ron Louie
Copy: Tony Hendra,
Paula Scher
Research:
Melissa Hoffman
Series Art Direction:
Paula Scher, Bill Drenttel
Food photos by
Buddy Endress
Photos in The Two-Party
System spread courtesy
Wide World Photos
Your Name Here for
Mohawk Paper Mills,
1998
Anke Stohlmann,
Keith Daigle
Copy: Paula Scher
Design Renaissance
poster for ICOGRADA,
1993
Dare Dear, Read
poster for AIGA Denver,
1997
Tomato / DAmato
poster for Pentagram, 1998
Graphic Design USA: 11
cover for AIGA, 1990
Language Is a Deadly
Weapon illustration for
MTV Networks, 1993
Self-portrait, 1992
February illustration for
Cooper-Hewitt, National
Design Museum /
Universe, 1997
South America
word-map, 1993
World word-map, 1998
USA word-map, 1999
Manhattan word-map,
2002
Head illustration for the
New York Times Op-Ed
page, 1998
Defective Equipment:
The Palm Beach County
Ballot illustration for the
New York Times Op-Ed
The Public Theater

identity, 1994
Ron Louie, Lisa Mazur
New York Shakespeare
Festival campaigns,
1994-2001
Louie, Lisa Mazur, Jane
Mella, Anke Stohlmann,
Tina Chang, Sean Carmody
The Public Theater
posters, 1994-2001
Louie, Lisa Mazur, Anke
Stohlmann, Keith Daigle,
Christoph Niemann
Photography: Paula
Court, Teresa Lizotte,
Peter Harrison, Carol
Rosegg, Lois Greenfield
Bring in Da Noise, Bring
in Da Funk Broadway
campaigns,1996-1998
Mazur, Anke Stohlmann,
Keith Daigle
Avedon, Eduardo Patino,
Lois Greenfield
Noise/Funk
souvenir program, 1996
Lisa Mazur
Avedon, Michal Daniel
On the Town campaign,
1998
Keith Daigle
Photography:
Lois Greenfield
The Wild Party
campaign, 2000
Tina Chang
Illustration:
Miguel Covarrubias
Citi identity, 1998-2001
Michael Bierut, Tina
Chang, Keith Daigle,
Anke Stohlmann,
Brett Traylor
Ballet Tech identity and
posters, 1997-2002
Mazur, Anke Stohlmann,
Keith Daigle
Photography:
Lois Greenfield
Metropolis magazine,
1999
Editorial redesign: Paula
Scher, Anke Stohlmann,
Keith Daigle
Issues pictured:
Creative Direction:
Paula Scher
Art Direction:
Esther Bridavsky
Photography: Franois
Robert, Judith Turner,
Charlie Drevstam,
John Ricisiak,
Elizabeth Felicella
770 Broadway for
Vornado Realty Trust, 2000
Rion Byrd, Dok Chon,
Bob Stern
Architecture: Hardy
Holzman Pfeiffer
3Com packaging guidelines, 2001
Tina Chang
New 42nd Street
Studios/The Duke
Theater, 2000
Design: Paula Scher, Dok
Chon, Rion Byrd, Bob
Stern, Tina Chang
Fabrication: Lettera Sign
& Electric Co., VGS, Dale
Travis Associates
Architecture:
Platt Byard Dovell
NJPAC Lucent
Technologies Center for
Arts Education, 2001
Rion Byrd, Dok Chon,
Keith Daigle
Fabrication: Signcraft,
Inc., ICS Builders, Inc.
Architecture: Kaplan
Gaunt DeSantis Architects
ADDITIONAL CREDITS
Boston LP cover paintings by Stephen Keene
Reprinted with the permission of the artist
Less Than Zero by Brett
Easton Ellis 1985
Simon & Schuster
Reprinted with permission
The Art of New York
1983 Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Steven Heller
Word and Image:
Posters from the
Collection of the
Museum of Modern Art
1968 The Museum of
Modern Art Reprinted with
the permission of MOMA
Threepenny Opera
poster by Paul Davis for
The Public Theater, 1976
Reprinted with the permission of Paul Davis
American Wood Type:
1828-1900 by Rob Roy
Kelly 1968 Van
Nostrand Reinhold Co.
Portrait of George C.
Wolfe by Paul Davis for
The New Yorker, 1996
Reprinted with the permission of Paul Davis
Spread from Us, 1998
Photo: Davis Factor/
Corbis Outline
Article by Tom O'Neill, Us
Magazine, March 1998
Us Weekly LLC, 1998.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission.
Page from New York
magazine, 1997
Ad for Chicago from the
New York Times, 1996
Reprinted with the permission of Drew Hodges
Ad for Mind Games, 1998
Reprinted with the permission of Marc Salem
PROJECT
PHOTOGRAPHY
Kurt Koepfle, pp. 175, 191
Tracey Kroll/Esto, p. 91
Peter Mauss/Esto, pp.
237-239, 241-245, 249,
251-254
Peter Margonelli, p. 173
Alfredo Parraga, pp. 58,
66-70, 74-75, 77-89, 92,
101, 104-105, 108-109,
128-129, 140-144, 146149, 171, 194-197
Matt Petosa, pp. 198-199
James Shanks, pp. 198,
200-201, 211, 215
Reven T.C. Wurman, pp.
169, 172
My editor Mark
Lamster, who
encouraged me to
write this book
and gave me
pivotal advice
that made it better.
John Rushworth
Peter Saville
Neil Shakery
DJ Stout
Lisa Strausfeld
Daniel Weil
Lowell Williams
My graphic design
team at Pentagram,
who designed this
book a million
times, principally
Tina Chang and
Sean Carmody on
the cover and
spreads, Keith
Daigle on the
charts, Steffi Jauss,
who coordinated
and typed it, and
Kurt Koepfle and
Jim Brown, who
provided the
archive research.
Partners (in work)

All of the work
produced in this
book exists as
collaboration with
many talented
young designers,
who began their
careers working
with me.
They are:
Richard Baker
Daphna Bavli
Gina Bello
Weston Bingham
Deborah Bishop
Rion Byrd
Sean Carmody
Tina Chang
Dok Chon
Billy Cole
Tim (Kiwi)
Convery
Darren Crawforth
Diane Cuddy
Keith Daigle
Cheri Dorr
Paula Eastwood
April Garston
Tanja Gaul
Kim GernsbacherSwiler
LuAnn Graffeo
Mary Bess Heim
Laurie Henzel
Laurie Hinzman
Drew Hodges
Barbara
Hofrenning
Rosemary Intrieri
John Jay
Abbey Kuster
Annika Larsen
Carmen Lazul
Ron Louie
David Matt
Lisa Mazur
Jane Mella
Jennifer Muller
Jackie Murphy
Christoph
Niemann
Tim Nuhn
Dottie OConner
Avni Patel
Ann Petter
Tracey Primavera
Allen Richardson
Tony (Bodoni)
Sellari
Anke Stohlmann
Jany Tran
Michele Willems
Elsie Woolcock
Lynn Breslin
Esther Bridavsky
Steven Brower
Bob Brown
David Brown
Saul Brown
Peter BuchananSmith
Cora Cahan
Linda Cahill
Tracey Cameron
Deborah Carr
Jim Charney
Rick Chertoff
Ed Chiquitueto
Maggie Christ
Gerald Clerc
Jeanne Collins
Greg Colucci
Henrietta Condak
Barbara Cooke
Joanne Cossa
Jean Coyne
Patrick Coyne
Richard Coyne
Bart Crosby
Michelle Cuomo
Cristina Cursino
Myrna Davis
Paul Davis
Bob Defrin
Tom DeKay
Josephine
Didanato
Nancy Donald
Tyler Donaldson
Bob Downs
Stephen Doyle
Bill Drenttel
Heinz Edelmann
Sara Eisenman
Stuart Elliott
John Paul Endress
Andy Engel
John Evangelista
Nick Fasciano
Eliot Feld
Anne Ferril
Louise Fili
Susan Fine
Victor Fiorello
Neil Flewellen
John Fontana
Marty Fox
Bill Freston
Judith
Friedlaender
Alan Friedman
Benno Friedman
Howard Fritzen
Janet Froelich
Shigeo Fukuda
Ellen Futter
Tom Geismar
Steff Geissbuhler
Milton Glaser
Lester Glasner
Adam Glick
Nathan Gluck
David Glue
Carin Goldberg
Larry Goldman
Stan Goodman
Morris Greenberg
Nancy Greenberg
Ric Gref
Gene Greif
Bob Grossman
Barbara Gunn
Ellen Guskind
Bob Guisti
Haber
Typographers
Brian Hagawara
Peter Hall
Gary Haney
Hugh Hardy
Vikki Hardy
Sarah Haun
Wiley Hausam
Horace
Havemeyer
Phil Hays
Duncan Hazard
Gary Heery
Patricia Heiman
Cheryl Heller
Steve Heller
Seamus Henchy
Tony Hendra
Dick Hess
Mark Hess
Caroline
Hightower
John Hildenbiddle
Stephen Hinton
Brad Holland
Jim Houghton
Marilyn Hoyt
Gerard Huerta
Roger Huyssen
Warren Infield
Karrie Jacobs
Bob James
Stewart Jones
Tibor Kalman
Emil Kang
Michael Kaplan
Rich Kaplan
Karen Karp
Wendy Katcher
Karen Katz
Andrea Klein
Chip Kidd
Tom Kluepfel
Frank Lalli
Tony Lane
Criswell Lappin
Julie Lasky
Maud Lavin
Lou Lenzi
Martin Leventhal
Herb Levitt
Harris Lewine
Robert Lewis
Nina Link
Margo Lion
Bob Logan
Gregory Long
Frank Lopez
Elaine Louie
Bruce Lundvall
Ellen Lupton
Liz Lyons
Nicholas
Maccarone
Anne Macdonald
Stan Mack
Peter Mauss
Kathy McCoy
Tony McDowell
John McElwee
Kevin McLaughlin
James McMullan
Allen McNeary
Gloria McPike
Liz McQuiston
Phil Meggs
Linda Mele-Flynn
Pierre Mendell
Alicia Messina
Frank Metz
Jackie Meyer
Duane Michals
Melissa Milgram
Victoria Milne
Giselle Minoli
Patrick Mitchell
Susan Mitchell
Ivette Montes
de Oca
Kristine Moore
Celia Moreira
Vickie Morgan
Jennifer Morla
Adam Moss
Christopher Mount
Dixon Muller
Terry Nemeth
Barbara Nessim
Marty Neumeier
Joseph Nevin
Jared Nickerson
Bobbie Oakley
Emily Oberman
John OLeary
Dennis Ortiz Lopez
Alfredo Parraga
Greg Parsons
Elena Pavlov
Chee Pearlman
Dick Peccorella
Marty Pedersen
Marty Pekar
Janet Perr
Neal Peters
Jim Petersen
Diane Pilgram
Steven Pipes
Charles Platt
Nicholas Platt
Myron Polenberg
James Polshek
Lisa Post
Beth Povie
Don Povie
Rick Poynor
Byron Preiss
Dan Reardon
Steven Reed
Susan Reinhold
David Rhodes
Silas Rhodes
Nancy Rice
Margaret
Richardson
Rebecca
Robertson
David Rockwell
Susan Rodriguez
Arnold Rosenberg
Jack Rosenthal
Carl Ross
Walter Rossi
Richard Roth
Steve Roth
Randal Rothenberg
Ruth & Marvin
Sackner
Stefan Sagmeister
Paul Sahre
Scott Santoro
Todd Schliemann
Jim Schmidt
Donald Schmitt
Olga Schubart
Marc Schulman
Joe Scorsone
Sandra Seim
Jackie Seow
Evan Shapiro
Seth Shaw
Laura Shore
Eric Siegel
Bonnie Siegler
Tom Smith
Florie Sommers
Lanny Sommese
Ed Sorel
Susan Soros
David Starr
Steven Starr
David Sterling
Bob Stern
Abbie Sussman
Fred Swanson
Susan Szenasy
Ikko Tanaka
Virginia Team
Rosmarie Tissi
Ed Tyburski
Rick Valicenti
Michael Vanderbyl
Yarom Vardimon
Carol Wahler
Katie Watts
Alan Weinberg
Tom Weir
Phillippe
Weissbecker
Laura Wenke
Ralph Wernli
Peter Wertimer
Bride Whelan
David Wilcox
Richard Wilde
Tracy Williams
Dick Wingate
Richard Winkler
George C. Wolfe
Amy Wolfson
Wang Xu
Susan Yelovich
Artie Yourainian
Stanislas Zagorski
Lloyd Ziff
Michael ZweckBronner
Daniel Zylberberg
Thanks For
The Good Work
My partners
Terry Koppel
(at Pentagram)
Lorenzo Apicella
Jim Biber
Michael Bierut
Bob Brunner
Theo Crosby
Alan Fletcher
Colin Forbes
Michael Gericke
Kenneth Grange
April Greiman
Fernando
Gutirrez
Peter Harrison
David Hillman
Kit Hinrichs
Angus Hyland
Mervyn Kurlansky
John McConnell
J. Abbott Miller
Justus Oehler
Woody Pirtle
David Pocknell
Partners
(in collaboration
or commiseration
or competition)
John Alcorn
Richard Alcott
Hugh AlderseyWilliams
Julian Allen
Margarida Amaro
Chuck Anderson
Jim Anderson
Philippe Apeloig
Bobby Arbesfeld
Dana Arnett
Elizabeth Arnold
Chris Austopchuk
Susan Avarde
Richard Avedon
Irene Bareis
Ola Bartholdson
Stephen Bear
Dan Beck
Laurie Beckelman
Bill Bennet
Ted Bernstein
Merrill C. Berman
James Bernard
Rob Biro
Ayse Birsel
Nicholas Blechman
Stephen Bradshaw
And my partner
in life
Seymour Chwast
OVER
A designer I respect warned me that the danger of doing a book on my own work,
beyond the obvious egotism involved, is that after its publication Id be over. Ive
been over at least three times, rather prominently. Being over is a little embarrassing
the first time, but if one considers that the average period of being not-over is
perhaps five years, possibly now shortening to three, being over is inevitable and
something a designer should plan for. The great thing about being overafter one
finishes the self-flagellation partis that one can start right up again. This book is over.

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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What does the author warn about doing a book on their own work?

What does the author warn about doing a book on their own work?

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

LEGAL & FIN.

LEGAL & FIN.

office to obtain the necessary approvals from various people

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

finger in the air to signal me to wait. When he finished the phone

human beings naturally behave in complicated hierarchical

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

is pointless, even if it exists purely to obtain the design fee. The

the ads I produced for my

To produce notable work I would have to break recordadvertising conventions.

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

If, however, the most powerful person in the organization has

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

This perception was nearly impossible to achieve at age

that were typographic were comparatively easy to sell to product

LEGAL & FIN.

LEGAL & FIN.

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

findthat I am always battling yesterdays success in the stylistic expectations of my clients.

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

powerless to determine imagery and were instead relied upon to

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

The cover was nominated for a Grammy Award in

plied the rows of bunnies. In the top row of bunnies, in the

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

The Yardbirds Favorites, Shine the Light of Love and

wasnt in any way involved in the process. Repackages

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

idea, he said it sounded frigid, that there needed to be

me I was being smug. He then showed the cover to a

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

A friend at CBS Records in the seventies predicted that

The bands manager liked the spaceship but thought

come. Timing is everything. Hits have their own life. I

The scientific aspect of the cover struck a chord with

technology companies. I had no experience whatsoever

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

BLU E SKY RECORDS

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

When Avedon shot Muddy Waters for Hard Again (1977),

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

Pete Turner had produced his first four albums. Heads (a

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

Most of the Tappan Zee albums have been reduced to

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101

COR P ORATE P OLITICS 101