Gallery: Paul Rand’s Classic A Designer’s Art Is Finally Back in Print
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Paul Rand's 1985 manifesto, *A Designer's Art* has been out of print for 16 years. This month, Princeton Architectural Press revives it, in a remastered edition.
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Rand wanted *A Designer’s Art* to be the book people remembered him by. Like Rand himself, the book was more scholarly than a typical coffee table book. He cited academics in his essays, and use his own work as supporting examples for his ideas about design and aesthetics.
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Rand produced some of his most famous work for IBM. Here, he explains some of his thinking: "The stripes of the IBM logo serve primarily as an attention getting device. They take commonplace letters out of the realm of the ordinary...Visually, stripes superimposed on a cluster of letters tend to tie them together." Packaging designs illustrate his point.
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Next to designs for Westinghouse, Rand writes: "If artistic quality depended on exalted subject matter, the commercial artists, as well as the advertising agency and the advertiser, would be in a bad way. For years I have worked with light bulb manufacturers, cigar makers, distillers, and others whose products are not visually unusual. A light bulb is almost as commonplace as an apple, but if I fail to make a package or advertisement for light bulbs that is lively and original, it will not be the light bulb that is at fault."
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Essays were the strategy, but plenty of the pages in *A Designer's Art* showed off splashy images of Rand's work. From 1944, advertisements for the leg makeup women wore during the war, when pantyhose were scarce.
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Rand's book included prints of his famous logo work for IBM, ABC, and Westinghouse (seen here, on the right), as well as indie work for magazine and books (on the left).
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On the left, a 1948 advertisement for the now-defunct Kaiser-Frazer automobile company. On the right, a 1944 illustration for Stafford Fabrics.
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On the left, a 1945 ad for children's medicine. On the right, a design from 1968, for the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
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A cover design, left, and a book illustration, right.
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With *A Designer’s Art*, Rand pursued broader acknowledgement from outside the design industry in every way possible. For his publisher, he avoided the usual trade houses and opted instead for the bigger-name Yale Architectural Press.
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His choice to go with Yale paid off as well: “If it had been a trade book, the editor of the New York Times Book Review would never have reviewed it,” says design critic Steve Heller, who worked at the paper of record at the time. “Yale gave it credibility. The Times gave it a front page treatment.”
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That marked a turning point. Prior to that, the paper would only allot short blurbs to describe design-related books. Afterwords, following the front page review of A Designer’s Art, editors gave more space to graphic design topics.
