Paul Rand

There isn’t much that I can say that hasn’t already been said about Paul Rand, so I’ll just reapeat what George Lois wrote in Steven Heller’s book “Paul Rand” published by Phaidon,

‘Every art director and graphic designer in the world should kiss (as they say in Paul Rand’s native Brooklyn) his ass…’

Paul Rand on wit,
‘I do not use humour consciously, I just go that way naturally. A well known example is my identity for United Parcels Service: to take an escutcheon – a medieval symbol which inevitably seems pompous today – and then stick a package on top of it, that is funny.’

When Steve Jobs left Apple, he decided to create the best computer possible ! It was the new education computer company, NeXT. Jobs also understood the purpose and power of logo which explains the decision to pay $100.000 for the logo created by Paul Rand in 1986. Also what is interesting is that Tim Berners Lee built the initial version of the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer!

One of the things that is notable is that DELL, today, is black and looks very similar. Later on, there was also a model called NeXTdimension and again, DELL has a model with the same name. I didn’t go further to explore is it just me or there really is a connection.

Eye, Bee, M poster, for an in-house IBM event and logo for Morningstar Investment Advisers, designed in 1991.