PAUL RAND, 82, DESIGNED LOGOS FOR IBM, ABC.Byline: The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times Paul Rand, a seminal figure in graphic design who made innovative visual identities for some of America's major corporations and book and magazine publishers, died Tuesday in Norwalk, Conn. He was 82. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Marion Swannie Rand. Rand is perhaps best known for the corporate logos he designed for IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Westinghouse, American Broadcasting Co. and United Parcel Service United Parcel Service, Inc. (NYSE: UPS), commonly referred to as UPS, is the world's largest package delivery company, delivering more than 15 million packages[1] a day to 6.1 million customers in over 200 countries and territories around the world. . He also created posters, packages and textiles and illustrated children's books. Rand advanced the cause of modernism in graphics as an influential professor at Yale and as an author. An exhibition of his work is currently on view at Cooper Union in Manhattan. In the 1930s, when American commercial art and advertising were dominated by hard-sell copy and realistic illustration, Rand introduced the formal vocabulary of the 1920s European avant-garde art movements to business communications and publishing. He was one of only a few American designers to lay claim to the modernist traditions of Cubism cubism, art movement, primarily in painting, originating in Paris c.1907. Cubist Theory Cubism began as an intellectual revolt against the artistic expression of previous eras. , de Stijl, Constructivism constructivism, Russian art movement founded c.1913 by Vladimir Tatlin, related to the movement known as suprematism. After 1916 the brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner gave new impetus to Tatlin's art of purely abstract (although politically intended) and the Bauhaus, and was influential in bringing what was called the New Typography - the rejection of archaic and sentimental type and layout treatments - to the United States. Rand was a pioneering functionalist func·tion·al·ism n. 1. The doctrine that the function of an object should determine its design and materials. 2. A doctrine stressing purpose, practicality, and utility. 3. who relied on strong visual ideas and dynamic typography to convey a message. ``Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are at best superficial ornamentation ornamentation In music, the addition of notes for expressive and aesthetic purposes. For example, a long note may be ornamented by repetition or by alternation with a neighboring note (“trill”); a skip to a nonadjacent note can be filled in with the intervening unless logically employed,'' Rand maintained. He continued in later years to be a staunch proponent of modern design as both a practitioner and author of books and manifestoes. Rand's graphic design, which he actively practiced until his death, was characterized by wit and simplicity. His advertisements in the 1930s, '40s and '50s for such clients as Orbach's department store, Disney Hats, Schenley Liquors, Playtex and El Producto Cigars, as well as hundreds of book jackets and covers for Alfred A. Knopf and other publishers, combined formal elements from modern painting with the geometric purity of contemporary typography. |
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