David Rand Biography

Rand’s understanding of the visual representation having a meaning to it was the most important aspect of his work. In the beginning of 20th century in America, ‘commercial art’ was the name given to what we know now as graphic design. Commercial art, as seen in Rand (1985) was the art in which importance was given to “Hackneyed” and “literal illustration” (p. xiii). As mentioned earlier, Rand in his earlier phase of life changed the approach of design from being traditional to a distinct and professional design approach. In his earlier phase of professional life, he worked for magazines such as Apparel Arts, Esquire and Direction as an editorial designer. He created work under the influence of European artists and discovered as seen in

Huge sums of money were being spent by many American companies to advertise their products (Heller & Rand, 1999). During this time, William H. Weintraub, a senior partner at Esquire sold his to the company and started his own advertisement firm. He offered Rand to be the chief art director at his firm, and Rand “without a moment’s deliberation” accepted his offer (p.35). Around 1941, Rand created posters for advertising the “Coronet-Brandy”. He started playing around with positions. The Magazine advertisement for the wine company is shown in Figure 2 was taken from Rand (1985), Rand comments on this work by

After end of the Second World War, the political, social situation of the country had depreciated. As Heller & Rand (1999) mentions “Multi-national corporations started to spring up in the United States.” On such corporation known as International Business Machines (IBM), as stated in Eskilson (2007), hired Rand as a consultant for their company. Eskilson (2007) further states that “designers have always seen the logo as the heart of the enterprise (p.325).” This implies that out of all the elements, the logo is the most important one for a corporation. In his book Design, Form and Chaos, Rand explains the logo as “an illustrative device, serves the dual purpose of identifying a business and dramatizing a visual idea.” He designed many logos for IBM and each of those logos communicated in a different manner. One of his logos for IBM as shown in Figure 3, shows a whole different approach to design. It is for the identification of the same thing, but the technique used is unique. Rand says “Innovation leads one to see the new in the old and distinguishes the ingenious from the ingenuous. It frowns the clichés and deja vus, as it recognizes the difference between freakishness and freshness. It is the lifeblood of intuition, imagination, and invention- the essence of originality (Rand, 1993, p.144).