Jessica Helfand, "Poetic Lines from the graphics-art drawing board." Philadelphia Inquirer, (Feb 13, 1994) H1,6. 

Paul Rand, arguably one of the world's most distinguished graphic designers, was my advisor in graduate school. Plugging through my second-year as an MFA candidate in the Graphic Design program of the Yale School of Art, my thesis topic was an endless treatise on the square: at 192-pages and counting it was, to say the least, a theme which baffled (and bored) most of my professors. 

Not Mr. Rand. 

A devout modernist with a penchant for purism, he was a virtual treasure trove of information. I would visit him in his Connecticut home, and we would sit at his kitchen table and drink tea and talk about aesthetics. 
"You can't criticize geometry," he would say, matter-of-factly. "It's never wrong."

In that phase of my education, when I questioned anything and everything, these ex-cathedra statements often helped me sleep at night. Mr. Rand is famous for such declarations. Recently, in an interview with a distinguished design journal, he was asked to explain how he chose to be a graphic designer. 

I didn't choose," he replied, without missing a beat. "God chose."

He reminded me then, as he still does, of both of my grandfathers: small and solidly built, acerbic, opinionated, fiercely intelligent, with a heart as big as the whole world. And an impressive library, to boot.
"And another thing you should read," he would begin, padding off to retrieve yet another stack of books, all of which he had read, and knew, intimately. 

So I read. I read Alfred North Whitehead and Bertram Russell. I read Henry James and John Dewey. I read William Safire and Henri Bergson and George Bernard Shaw. And we talked. We talked about painting, architecture and graphic design, about intuition and imagination, and about ideas. Mr. Rand is passionate about ideas, (which he refers to as ?the designer's raison d'être'), especially his own, especially when they're about design. 

"To design," he writes, primer-style in his latest book, Design, Form and Chaos (published last fall by Yale University Press) "is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry." 

For Paul Rand, design is poetry. It is rhythym, balance, proportion, repetition, contrast, harmony and scale. It is process as well as product, borne of a vocabulary comprised of simple form, specific function and symbolic content. In Rand's vision, a circle can be a globe, an apple, the moon, a face, a stop sign; a square becomes a package (the UPS trademark), an Egyptian frieze (the IDEO trademark), or a child's toy (the ColorForm trademark.) And that's just the beginning. There's the logo for IBM. There's the logo for ABC. There's the Westinghouse logo, the NeXT logo, The Limited logo. There are posters and packaging, book covers, magazine spreads and countless illustrations. It is a prolific portfolio that spans over half a century, and shows no signs of slowing down--except for a few hours on the evening of April 21st, when he will appear as the guest of the University of the Arts, to give the final lecture in the series Dialogues on Design, co-sponsored by the University and the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. 

Perhaps more than any other designer of his generation, Paul Rand is credited with bringing the modernist design aesthetic to post-war America. Born in Brooklyn and educated at Pratt Institute, the Parsons School of Art and the Art Students League in New York, he was named art director of Esquire in 1937. Three years later--still in his early 20s ? he left to join the William H. Weintraub & Co. advertising agency, where he spent the next thirteen years producing ads for, among others, Producto and Dubonnet. He was hired by Josef Albers to teach at Yale shortly after the graduate program in graphic design was founded there in the early 1950s, and he continues to teach at Yale's summer program in Brissago, Switzerland. Mr. Rand has written several books, including Thoughts on Design (1946) and Paul Rand: A Designer's Art (1985) as well as the current, critically acclaimed Design, Form and Chaos. The recipient of numerous awards for his distinguished contributions to graphic design, his work has been exhibited internationally, and is in the permanent collections of museums in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Highly influenced by the European modernists--Klee and Picasso, Calder and Miro, among others--Rand's formal vocabulary signalled the advent of a new era. Using photography and montage, cut paper and asymmetrical typography, he developed a body of work which can be largely characterized by an overwhelming attention to clarity. The ideas, though intellectually complex, are distilled to their most salient forms. The style is playful, the message immediate, the communication undeniably direct. The results are engaging, effective, and indeed memorable.

Despite the many changes going on in the world around him, Rand's work has changed very little over the last few decades, a fact about which he is most proud. It is the ultimate manifestation of his opposition to fashion, an endorsement of his supreme advocacy on behalf of content--what he calls the 'raw material' of design. 
"Good design doesn't date," he is quick to point out. "Bad design does."

As my thesis advisor, he argued with me constantly, disagreed with me about everything. He disagreed with himself about everything. Still does.

"Design," he announced to me on the phone the other day, "has nothing to do with the success of anything."

His conversation is peppered with just these sorts of contradictory observations. Though he openly professes to despise academia, he was a devoted member of the Yale Design faculty for some 30-odd years and remains close to many of his former students. Despite his staunch criticisms on the topic of market research, he admitted to me recently that some market research may actually be beneficial. 

"There's a certain kind of research you have to listen to--the factual stuff, not opinion," he told me. "Facts are facts. Sugar is sweet--it's not a matter of opinion. It just is. Even for people like you and me, people who happen to be really smart."

Flattery aside, this idea of being smart is key: it is worth noting here that he remains one of the few distinguished practitioners of graphic design who have seen fit (or found time) to publish on the subject. More importantly, he is perhaps the only designer of his generation to stake out a truly theoretical position where graphic design is concerned.
Rand's purist, even orthodox approach to design is passionately articulated in his current manifesto, Design Form and Chaos--a series of critical essays which collectively support what design historian Steven Heller has called 'Randism': "a rare blend of rationalism, purism, formalism and street smarts." Heller, who will be interviewing Mr. Rand here in Philadelphia on the evening of April 21st, believes that one of his subject's greatest accomplishments lies in the work itself. "He raised graphic design from a service to an art," writes Heller in a recent issue of the American Institute of Graphic Arts Journal. "His work promoted the cause louder than any words, and yet his words to students and professionals helped forge the inextricable bond between applied and formal arts that underlies the Modern ethic." 

It is Rand's fervent devotion to upholding this ethic which may well account for his continued success in an industry which, like so many others, has had to suffer the turbulent consequences of a lengthy recession. Despite the rattled economy, Rand is famous for commanding six-figure fees for a logo design. He has managed to remain both popular with his clients and true to himself ? an enviable position, indeed.
And he remains busy. At present he is designing a new identity program for a major American corporation. He is lecturing in Philadelphia. And he is already thinking about his next book.

Paul Rand will turn 80 next summer. And how does he spend his time? 
"I work," he announced to me, matter-of-factly when I asked him several days ago. "What else should I be doing?"