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Essay / Paul Rand: Life and Career
Table of ContentsPaul RandEarly Life and EducationModernist InfluencesPaul RandPaul Rand was an American film director and graphic designer, popular for his logo designs in the corporate sector, including the logo of UPS, Enron, Morningstar , Inc., Westinghouse, ABC and NeXT. He was one of the first American commercial artists to adopt and practice the Swiss style of graphic design. He was professor emeritus of graphic design at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he taught from 1956 to 1969 and 1974 to 1985. He was accepted into the Art Directors' Club Hall of Fame from New York in 1972. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayEarly Life and EducationPaul Rand was born as “Peretz Rosenbaum” on August 15, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York. He embraced design from a young age, painting signs for his father's grocery store as well as school events at PS 109. His father did not believe art could provide his son with a sufficient livelihood , and so he got Paul to attend Haaren High in Manhattan. School while taking evening classes at Pratt Institute. Paul was essentially a “self-taught” designer. He discovered the work of AM Cassandre and Moholy-Nagy through European journals such as Gebrauchsgraphik. Paul also attended Parsons The New School for Design and the Art Students League of New York. Influences and other work Theory development Although Paul was a hermit in his creative process, carrying the vast majority of the design load despite having a large team at different points in his career, he was very interested in producing books of theory to explain his philosophies. .Moholy-Nagy may have influenced Paul's passion for knowledge when he asked his colleague if he had read art criticism when they first met. Paul said no, prompting Moholy-Nagy to respond, “Too bad.” Heller further explains the impact of this meeting, noting that "from that point on, Paul consumed books by the greatest philosophers of art, including Roger Fry, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey." These theorists will have a lasting impression on Paul's work; In a 1995 interview with Michael Kroeger discussing, among other topics, the importance of art as Dewey's experience, Paul explains of Dewey's calling: […art as experience] deals with everything — there is no subject that it does not cover. This is why it will take you a hundred years to read this book. Even philosophers today talk about it. Every time you open this book you find good things. I mean, it's philosophers who say that, not just me. You read this, and then when you open it next year, you'll read something new. As is evident, Dewey is an important source for Paul's hidden views on graphic design; On the first page of Paul's groundbreaking "Thoughts on Design," the author begins to draw lines between Dewey's philosophy and the need for "functional-aesthetic perfection" in modern art. Among the ideas Paul put forward in "Thoughts on Design" was the practice of creating graphic works capable of retaining their recognizable quality even after being blurred or damaged, a test Paul regularly performed on his design identities. business. Modernist Influences Without doubt, the key ideology that drove Paul's career, and therefore his lasting influence, lay in the modernist philosophy that he admired. He celebrated the works of artists from Paul Cézanne to Jan Tshichold, their applications in design.