Marc English Design

Logos, Flags, and Eschutcheons by Paul Rand"It reminds me of the Georgia chain gang," quipped the IBM executive, when he first eyed the striped logo. When the Westinghouse insignia (1960) was first seen, it was greeted similarly with such gibes as "this looks like a pawnbroker's sign." How many exemplary works have gone down the drain, because of such pedestrian fault-finding? Bad design is frequently the consequence of mindless dabbling, and the difficulty is not confined merely to the design of logos. This lack of understanding pervades all visual design. There is no accounting for people's perceptions. Some see a logo, or anything else seeable, the...View the rest of this entry.

Why Paul Rand?In the early 1990s I was fortunate enough to be at an intimate dinner with Paul Rand, after his AIGA lecture in Boston at the Massachusetts College of Art. Paul Rand's stature as one of the country's leading graphic designers is incontestable. For half a century his pioneering work in the field of advertising design and typography has exerted a profound influence on the design profession; he almost single-handedly transformed "commercial art" from a practice that catered to the lowest common denominator of taste to one that could assert its place among the fine arts. His identity work for IBM,...View the rest of this entry.