Paul Rand Essay

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Ashley Canzater Intermediate Type April 8, 2013 Paul Rand, an American graphic designer, was born Peretz Rosenbaum on August 15, 1914 in Brooklyn, NY and is renowned for his corporate logo designs. He was one of the originators of the Swiss style of graphic design. Rand was educated at the Pratt Institute (1929-1932), the New School for Design (1932-1933) and the Art Students League (1933-1934). In his early career, he decided to camouflage and abbreviate the overtly Jewish identity conveyed by “Peretz Rosenbaum,” shortening his forename to ‘Paul’ and taking ‘Rand’ from an uncle to form his new surname. Morris Wyszogrod, a friend and associate of rand, noted “He figured that ‘Paul Rand’, four letters here, four letters there, would create a nice symbol, so he became Paul Rand.” Rand was a professor at Pratt, Cooper Union and Yale University. He was inducted into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1972 and designed many posters and corporate identities, which are considered to be “timeless icons” including the IBM, ABC and UPS logos, which are still very prominent today. Rand designed other corporate logos including Enron, an American energy, commodities, and services company based in Houston, TX, Westinghouse, an American manufacturing electric corporation, and Steve Jobs’ NeXT, an American computer company. In 1947, Rand’s book “Thoughts on design” was published, which influenced the idea of graphic design and continues to educate students and professionals today. Rand first made a name for himself as an editorial designer, doing work for magazines such as Esquire, a men’s magazine, and Direction, the first regularly published online news magazine covering geospatial technology. He even worked for free in some cases in turn for creative freedom, and as a result his style became known in the design community. Rand was part of a

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