Paul Rand and Corporate Identity

Similarly to Saul Bass, Paul Rand’s work was also in the wake of modernist designs and as such was highly influenced by styles such as De Stijl and Constructivism. While Saul Bass was very popular for his designs for movie posters and intros, Paul Rand was very successful when it came to corporate branding, specifically in the field of logos. Paul Rand is very interesting to discuss because of his work with logos and how relevant they are today. Many of the logos he made more companies are still used by those same companies today, so many years later.

Over here we can see some examples of the logos that Paul Rand has made over his career. At first glance, we can note down his use of typeface across different projects. There is a mix of serif and sans serif fonts but in both cases the type seems to retain a very clean and formal look. These characteristics found in the font are very important design decisions that are carried over to other aspects of the logo design. Paul Rand's logos became very popular and widely sought after and I believe a reason for this was because of how simple yet effective they were. When looking at these examples we can see that most of them are either composed of very basic shapes mixed with a clean font so from a technical standpoint they are not doing very much, but the little that is done is very effective. This is a concept that harkens back to the earlier modernist principles like the posters and publications we see in the constructivist style.  His use of colour is also worth noting with these designs. The colour, like the other modernists before him, is generally composed of single shades of block colour or not colour at all in the case of the purely black and white ones. This was important for logos especially due to how easily recognisable they needed to be and any excess clutter would hinder that principle.

This next example by Paul Rand was a magazine cover for the publication ‘Direction’. With this example we can see a concept that I haven’t really gotten to talk about much in these blog posts which is the use of humour or wit in a visual form.  Through the use of photomontage, Paul Rand was able to play with the visual concept of a wrapped Christmas present, only his rendition of a present uses barbed wire as a ribbon. A subtle detail in this poster is the use of the small red dots randomly placed on the white background to mimic a pattern for the wrapping, only, in the context of the barbed wire, those red dots suddenly take a much darker tone and turn to blood in our minds. This is an interesting lesson in the importance of context in design as well as other art forms.

While certainly not the first artist or designer to attempt something like this, I personally feel that Paul Rand had achieved something quite innovate and niche to his design that would be the source of inspiration for many contemporary artists and designers alike.

References:

·         Paul-rand.com-paul-rand.com-2014[ http://www.paul-rand.com/ ][Last accessed on 23/01/2015]

·         Library.rit.edu-2014 [http://library.rit.edu/gda/designer/paul-rand][last accessed on 23/01/2015]