Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  The designers’ motivations for solving the problem of filling sixteen pages were different, but each followed his own muse, not a client’s. Beall, who was coming to the end of his career as a designer of corporate identity, was interested in returning to his early inspirations, which borrowed from dada and surrealism. His “essay” was concerned with the tension between typographic precision and a free-form environment. Lubalin, who was beginning to have influence on contemporary typography with visual puns and type-pictures, was attempting to bust through the confines of hot metal (which he would later do with phototype). Brownjohn Chermayeff Geismar, which had been doing conceptual design in a modern idiom since the late 1950s and was about to split up, leaving Robert Brownjohn on his own, was seeking the nexus of art and design. “Ours was impossible typesetting and useless prose,” added Chermayeff. “But it was also an attempt to use typography as paint, and to explore relationships that were based on texture not language. We were doing no less than what David Carson is doing today. However, for us to be completely irresponsible required a sympathy with language.” In addition to overlapping and layering through intricate film processes that were made into engravings, this typeplay mixed numbers with letterforms to make words. For Federico, an advertising art director with a special interest in type, Love of Apples was an excuse for a poetic polemic about nature’s beauty being radically altered, as is exemplified by the line: “When we, in business, industrial America, began to get smart about apples, we packaged them and packaged them and packaged them until the apple itself became the package,” which he illustrated with a photograph of an apple with a string tied around it.

  About U.S. is one of modern American design’s most important artifacts, both as a chronicle of the end of hot metal and as a clarion of impending photo composition. It is also one of the first public displays of conceptual and expressionistic typeplay that would alter advertising and editorial practice in the 1960s and usher in the method (or style) of design known as the Big Idea—noted for witty copywriting wed to smart conceptual typography, illustration, and photography. About U.S. is a snapshot of the moment when type first talked.

  Ha Ha Ha: He Laughs Best Who Laughs Last

  LOU DORFSMAN

  The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was the foremost American television network from the 1950s to the 1980s. No other network had such intelligent news and entertainment programming, nor had earned such public confidence. During its golden years, the “CBS eye” was a proud emblem that stood for a reputation of service and quality built by William Paley, founder and former CEO, and later, Frank Stanton, former chief of the broadcast division. Yet even inherently great programming required an equally great corporate image, an identity born of memorable graphics and compelling advertising. It can be argued that if not for the originality of its promotion CBS would have had to slug it out much harder against ABC and NBC, whose advertising rarely reached the same heights.

  CBS management understood the value of a strong graphic identity, which is why in 1937 Paley hired William Golden, who created the venerable CBS trademark, and why after Golden’s death in 1959 Paley and Stanton named Lou Dorfsman (b. 1918), then the promotion art director of the radio division, to take his place. Dorfsman earned the job through inspired trade advertising designed to sell advertisers on the viability of radio at a time when television was decidedly the more compelling market.

  Dorfsman was the engine that drove the company’s most successful advertising campaigns, and ultimately its entire graphic design program. He wrote much of his own copy and practiced the art of visual persuasion with rare wit. What his ads lacked in typical hyperbole was made up for in uncommon intelligence. He never lowered himself or his company to hard-sell tactics. He was a master of the Big Idea, a conceptual strategy characterized by understatement, self-mockery, and irony, and noted for clean design and strident copywriting wed to intelligent illustration and photography. In the more than forty years that Dorfsman managed CBS’s visual identity there is not a single example where he used a typeface as novelty or decoration simply to grab attention, or abused a photograph, painting, or drawing merely for shock value. The audience was never treated as visually illiterate, and by making the public feel good about CBS’s intrusion into their lives, Dorfsman instilled a pride of viewing.

  Among the ads that still resonate—indeed could be reprised today without changes—“Ha, Ha, Ha: He laughs best who laughs last” is economical yet eyecatching. The word ha grows larger according to the Neilson’s ratings response to the comedy shows of the three television networks, turning into the largest Ha, which represents CBS’s high standing. Without the benefit of a hard-sell slogan or sensational image, but by harnessing the power of irony, Dorfsman let type alone to do the persuading. For an ad entitled “Worth Repeating, CBS News” Dorfsman used bold, disproportionately large quotation marks sitting majestically upon a pedestal of copy. These curiously abstract marks have greater shouting range than any single line of type or picture. “Dominate,” a series of four advertisements used to convince potential advertisers that CBS enjoyed dominance in the ratings, was an example of “talking type.” Once again, without the benefit of an image, Dorfsman used four words—“Captivate!” “Elucidate!” “Fascinate!” “Exhilarate!”—each set in a different typeface with an exclamation point dotted with the CBS eye. The copy suggested the range of CBS’s programs in a market it totally controlled. Yet another exemplar was a soft-sell idea entitled “A Glossary of Television Terms,” an illustrated lexicon of words such as fish bowl, one shot, and audio, that were introduced to the public through television. Cleverly illustrated, this compendium of trivia captured the interest of even the casual reader. After holding the reader’s attention it smartly climaxed with the word “Leadership: The quality invariably associated with the CBS Television Network.”

  These ads did more than remind, inform, and persuade potential clients of the network’s virtues, they increased the recognition of CBS by giving it a uniform identity, which in turn underscored the value of its corporate culture. Rarely were any of Dorfsman’s designs, even the more decorative logos and trademarks, lacking an idea. In fact, if an idea was not readily apparent, he went to great lengths to concoct one. Without Dorfsman CBS would have had its eye, but with him the eye became the most positive logo in America.

  Going Out

  GENE FEDERICO

  Good graphic design was long an exception to the rule in American advertising. Beginning at the turn of the century, copywriters were allowed to rein over designers and nuances of type and image were secondary to the hard sell of a product or message. Unlike European advertising of the same period, which was aggressively visual and pictorially innovative, in America it was virtually inconceivable that an art director would be much more than a glorified layout man subservient to the needs of the text. This changed in the 1930s when the advertising pioneer Earnest Elmo Calkins discovered that the effective marriage of word and picture could produce startling results. Prefiguring the “creative team” and creative revolution by more than three decades, he brought copywriters and designers together, forging a creative union. By 1939, when Gene Federico (b. 1918), a twenty-one-year old Pratt Institute graduate with a special interest in typography, entered the advertising field, a few exceptional designers had already begun to change the look (and often the content) of mainstream advertising, paving the way for a distinctly American modern style.

  “Lester Beall opened my eyes to the idea that type could be used to emphasize the message,” Federico said about one of American advertising’s leading modern typographers. “One of his ads had the great line, ‘To Hell With Eventually. Let’s Concentrate On Now.’ The e in eventually was very large and now was the same size. The simple manipulation of these letterforms allowed the reader to immediately comprehend the message.” Federico’s method was also based on the integration of text and image. He always worked intimately with a copywriter and played with the nuances of language
. He looked for those simple elements in copy that expressed or emoted, and suggested that when a designer doesn’t read the copy to catch the sound of the words, he or she runs the risk of misconstruing the typography. “If the rhythm of the words is disregarded, the copy is likely to be broken incorrectly,” he continued.

  Federico was more concerned with attitude than with style. Despite Lou Dorfsman’s assertion that he was the prince of Light Line Gothic (admittedly one his favorite typefaces), few of his ads conformed to a single formula or evoked stylistic déjà vu. Nevertheless, one trait was dominant; his love of type. Letters served as sculptural forms placed on or against an image. Type both communicated messages and evoked a time and place.

  The goal of the ad was to persuade potential advertisers that three million-plus devoted readers went out of their way to buy this checkout counter magazine.

  Federico’s series of advertisements for Woman’s Day, which appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1954 and were targeted at media buyers, typified his rhythmic sensitivity. One of the most well known had the catch-line “Going Out,” and showed a photo of woman riding a bicycle with wheels made from the two Futura Os in the headline—a visual pun in the modern tradition. The goal of the ad was to persuade potential advertisers that three million-plus devoted readers went out of their way to buy this checkout counter magazine. The ads apparently did well for the client, but more importantly proved the power of persuasive visual simplicity in a field that often erred on the side of overstatement.

  Man with the Golden Arm

  SAUL BASS

  There are two Hollywoods. One, the land of fantasy and glitz. The other, the land of formula and convention. It was into the latter that Bronx-born Saul Bass (1920–1996) arrived in 1945 intent on producing unconventional advertising for the movie industry. But the odds were against him. In those days Hollywood promotion was mired in formula. Convention dictated the look and feel of posters, foyer cards, and ads. Romantic realism was a conceptual and aesthetic panacea, and the common poster showed something for everybody whether it was in the movie or not—bits of romance, action, drama, and, of course, unblemished portraits of the stars.

  Bass, who had read and was influenced by Gyorgy Kepes’s Language of Vision (1944), became a reductionist designing in a modern idiom. When he worked in the New York office of Warner Brothers, he toyed with the picture and text components of movie ads, mostly playing with scale, which was the only latitude he was allowed. Of course, it was a dead end. “I could only carry it so far, because the other ingredients had to be there,” he recalled in Graphic Design America (Harry N. Abrams, 1989). So he packed up for Hollywood and went to work for Buchanan & Co., the agency that handled Paramount Pictures. Finally, in 1949 he designed his first breakthrough ad for The Champion, Kirk Douglas’s seminal motion picture.

  … He believed that all aspects of a movie should fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

  The ad was totally black with a tiny halftone and a little lettered scrawl below it. It took up about an inch and a half in the center of the page. In contrast to cluttered conventional ads, it was a real eye-opener. It was also the auspicious beginning of what evolved into Bass’s expressionistic approach to Hollywood publicity, the precursor of the innovative advertising and film title sequences that he created first for Otto Preminger and, later, for Alfred Hitchcock.

  In 1954 Bass designed the titles for Preminger’s Carmen Jones, which were decidedly unique compared to the mundane lettering superimposed over backgrounds common in Hollywood movies at that time. In 1955 he made a bolder leap with the print advertising for The Man with the Golden Arm, which eschewed a picture of its star, Frank Sinatra, in favor of a pattern of black bars that framed a primitive woodcut-like rendering of a crooked arm. Theater owners were not pleased with the absence of the one-two punch of star portrait and heroic vignette. But one incident tells the story of Bass’s subsequent success: “[Preminger] was sitting with his back to me—he didn’t know I was there—talking on the phone, obviously to an exhibitor somewhere in Texas,” Bass recalled in Graphic Design America. “The exhibitor was complaining about the ads and saying that he wanted to have a picture of Sinatra… . And I heard Otto say to him, ‘Those ads are to be used precisely as they are. If you change them one iota, I will pull the picture from your theater.’ And hung up on him.” Rather than hype the film, the graphic reduced the plot, the story of a tormented drug addict, to an essence—a logo really—that evoked the film’s tension.

  Jumping at the opportunity to animate this simple graphic form as the title sequence for the film, Bass created a series of moving white bars on a black screen, which was transformed into an abstract ballet of erratic shapes. After a few moments the bars metamorphosed into the arm. “There was a tendency, when I did the title for The Man with the Golden Arm to think it worked because it was ‘graphic,’” Bass explained in Print (1960) “but that was incidental. If it worked, it was because the mood and feeling it conveyed made it work, not because it was a graphic device.” Nevertheless, by creating a graphic symbol that was effective for use in both the print campaign and the opening title sequence, Bass had introduced a new design form.

  Actually, he returned to the essence of motion pictures before sound, Technicolor, Cinemascope, and other pyrotechnic advances upped the ante of filmmaking. Movies began as a purely visual medium. “We’ve come full circle,” Bass once explained, “[we] went to a theatrical stage approach with inordinate reliance on dialogue, and now we’re back again to a greater reliance on the visual, but in a way that is more real and more current with our lives today.” Not surprisingly, Bass was often called upon to direct certain sequences within films where the visual scheme was more important to moving the story along than the dialog.

  The Man with the Golden Arm was more than a fine piece of abstract animation. It was Bass’s first movie within a movie, and it had less to do with specific aesthetics of design than a sense of the story (a key trait in Bass’s later work). Yet it was not an independent effort; he believed that all aspects of a movie should fit together like pieces of a puzzle. “In every title I’ve done, I’ve been very conscious of the fact that the title has a responsibility to the film, that it is there to enhance the film, to set it up, to give it a beginning—and not to overpower and preempt it,” he asserted in Print. For Bass the title was only the beginning of something, never the thing itself.

  He continued making title sequences for four decades, many as memorable as the films themselves. And his work evolved from “mood-setting” animation into what he called “metaphorical live action” in Walk on the Wild Side (1962), where a black cat and a white cat meet, have a fight, and then part, as a metaphor for New Orleans street life. Later he pioneered the film prologue with John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966), for which Bass traveled around the world directing camera crews in the shooting of racing sequences.

  Forty years after challenging the studio’s conventions and taboos, creative movie title sequences are facts of motion picture history. Indeed every designer who has ever designed film titles owes a debt to Bass. As a coda to the breadth of his influence, in 1995 director Spike Lee paid dubious homage when he copied Bass’s logo for Anatomy of Murder as the print graphic for his own film, Clockers. Although Bass did not appreciate the larceny, it vividly illustrated the extent of Bass’s contribution to the movie industry.

  The Area Code (Parenthesis)

  LADISLAV SUTNAR

  If recognized at all, graphic designers earn cultural kudos for work that has a direct impact on society. Yet even under these circumstances the world is usually oblivious. Which is why Ladislav Sutnar (1897–1976), a Czech modernist graphic and product designer who emigrated to the United States in 1939 and worked in New York until his death, has not received even a modicum of credit for a unique graphic innovation that has had far-reaching effect. Although it may well be considered arcane, his invention was the parentheses around American telephone area code numbers when the
system was introduced in the early 1960s.

  Sutnar is not credited for the appearance of the area code because the concept was so integral to the design of the Bell System’s new calling apparatus that it was instantly adopted as part of the vernacular. Moreover, Ma Bell never offered or gave Sutnar credit; for this company, graphic designers—like the functional graphics they produced—were invisible. Nonetheless, Sutnar’s other contributions to information architecture, the commissions that brought him to the Bell System’s attention in the first place, are milestones not only in graphic design history but of design for the public good. Sutnar developed logical and hierarchical graphic systems for a wide range of American businesses that clarified and made accessible vast amounts of complex, often ponderous information. He took on the thankless job of transforming routine business data into digestible and understandable forms.

  Before most designers focused on the need for information organization, Sutnar was in the vanguard, driven by the missionary modern belief that good design applied to the most quotidian products had a beneficial, even curative effect on society. In his role as a pioneer of information design and progenitor of the current trend in information architecture, Sutnar’s sophisticated data-management programs, which he designed during the late 1950s and early 1960s for America’s telecommunications monopoly, allowed customers to scan directories more efficiently. The Bell System was engaged in the technological upgrade of its huge network, and Sutnar’s brand of functional typography and way-finding iconography made public access to both emergency and regular services considerably easier while providing Bell with a distinctive identity. But in the history of graphic design, Saul Bass received more attention for his late-fifties/early-sixties redesign of the Bell System logo, which had little direct consequence for the public, than Sutnar did for making user-friendly graphic signposts. In recent years information architect Richard Saul Wurman has also utilized Sutnar’s model in developing the California Bell telephone directories known as “smart pages.”