14:38 Wednesday, 22 July 2009
Paul Rand
Paul Rand was a truly great graphic designer and one of our heroes. Rand designed the logos IBM, ABC, UPS and NeXT. Recently video of an interview with Paul Rand has appeared on YouTube (part 1, part 2, part 3). What's interesting about this interview is that like most people who are terribly good at something he doesn't think it's such a big deal. The interviewer seems to be looking for some kind of epiphany but Rand is very straightforward.
I like Rand's approach to client presentations: he doesn't give an endless stream of options. He gives one solution with a rationale of how he got there. As illustrated by this story of the NeXT presentation:
'...how as Steve Jobs turned each page of the presentation booklet Jobs' smile seemed to grow bigger and bigger until finally he reached the last page and asked Rand, "Can I hug you?" and Rand replied "Sure." He then commented, "You know you’ve made a good logo mark when your client wants to hug you."'
A picture of the book used for Rand's NeXT the presentation is here. The NeXT CI presentation book is now selling for USD 2,000.
A video of Steve Jobs talking about Rand here.
Steve Heller interviewed Rand in 1994 at a AIGA conference (YouTube) Again no BS from Rand - very straightforward.
BTW: When I was researching this article I discovered Rand designed the logo for Europeiska Ferieskolan which became Education First, which in Shanghai is English First.
