HERMAN MILLER MILTON GLASER TV GRAPHICS INTERNATIONAL COVERAGE MONSTER TYPE TIM MANTOANI EXHIBIT 50TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE 5 0
T H
A N N I V E R S A R Y
years of
creative excellence
March/April 2009 Twenty-Four Dollars www.commarts.com
HOW AN IDEA FOR A SIDELINE BUSINESS BECAME THE LARGEST TRADE JOURNAL IN VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS AND CONTINUES TO EVOLVE TODAY
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Communication Arts at
by Patrick Coyne
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n the mid-1950s, my father, Dick Coyne, and his business partner, Bob Blanchard, were running a successful design firm on the San Francisco Peninsula that included their own in-house typesetting shop. They also wanted to build a color separation and litho stripping facility to provide better service to their growing list of clients, and to satisfy their interest in improving reproduction techniques, but there simply wasn’t enough work from the design business to keep such a facility profitable. After numerous discussions, their best idea was to launch a commercial art magazine to pick up the slack.
“If my background could be interpreted to mean credentials in publishing, they were zip,” Dick said in a self-conducted interview in 1969. “Like many of my colleagues in this field, I felt there was a need for a design magazine. But it never occurred to me that I would be the one who did it. One thing was certain: We couldn’t do the kind of magazine we wanted without the litho-prep facility. And since no other ideas had emerged, it looked like we couldn’t have the prep facility without the magazine.
Above: Lloyd Pierce designed our inaugural cover, which featured mechanical-color screen tints and the original CA logo designed by Freeman Craw and closely related to his Craw Clarendon Condensed. Right: Dick Coyne and Bob Blanchard. Typographer Jay McKendry with some of the foundry type used to set the first issues of CA. Cover of a pre-publication tight comp used to obtain subscriptions and advertising. Cover of a sixteen-page pre-launch brochure. The largest use of the brochure was for counter displays in art material stores who were selling subscriptions and future single copies of CA. Brochures were also mailed to key people in the field to solicit subscriptions and attract submissions of work that might be shown in the magazine.
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“We also knew that some real changes, some excitement was going to happen in the design field. In our own case, we were working on total corporate design accounts—graphics, packaging, signing, films—corporate image programs, although we hadn’t heard the term yet. Thinking back, it’s hard to believe how fast things have happened, how much this business has changed since 1958 when we were planning the magazine. Only ten commercials were accepted for the New York Art Director’s show that year. Videotape had just been introduced. The Volkswagen campaign hadn’t happened yet. Most of the graphic design you saw was panels, shapes and Mondrian patterns. Clean design really stood out.” Once on the table, the magazine idea proved difficult to forget. Dick and Bob discussed the concept with colleagues and received a generally favorable response. There was some doubt, however, about getting the numbers it would take to make a magazine viable. “Starting a new magazine is both an exhilarating and a frightening experience,” Dick said. “For every Playboy, there were a dozen magazines that never published a second issue. With a concept for a different kind of trade magazine—printing by lithography, 4-color editorial reproduction, more dependence
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R
ed barns, tractors, grain silos, fields, an interstate highway with trucks zooming by hauling turkeys, soybeans and office furniture. That’s the view from the desk of Steve Frykholm, vice president and creative director at Herman Miller in Zeeland, Michigan. His workspace in a building called The Marketplace is not typical for a design office, either. It’s an organic-looking Herman Miller Resolve office system, with a friendly, curved desktop and accessories like literature racks and phone shelves that hang from poles that delineate the space and hide the electrical conduit. If Frykholm has time to sit down—in between consulting, designing, mentoring and presenting—he does so in an Aeron chair, revolutionary when introduced in 1994, and now shipped around the world at the rate of about two per minute from the GreenHouse, the newest of Herman Miller’s environmentally-progressive office and manufacturing facilities.
Herman Miller, Inc. and Steve Frykholm:
On the day of my visit, when the hardwood trees in this region ideally suited for furniture-making flaunted their most vivid hues of red, orange and yellow, Frykholm generously took a break from the projects he’d been working on to show me around. On his desk were not-so-neat piles of Real Voices dvds, in which Herman Miller’s furniture designers—a worldwide network of top talent— talk about what it’s like to work for the company: “As if you’re designing for somebody you love” and “Like playing for the Yankees.” Stacks of research for a new Web site, submitted by Los Angeles interactive firm Hello, were ready to review. Needing immediate attention were proofs of “Connections 2008,” a report by ceo Brian Walker, designed by Todd Richards of San Francisco, who also designed SEE, a Herman Miller magazine that visually explored topics like “purpose” and “balance.” Next to the proofs were printed samples of a wire-obound mini booklet, Bill Stumpf’s Design Checklist, which, like most Herman Miller publications, restates its commitment to design excellence, this time in the quirky words of the co-designer of the Aeron chair.
American Design
ICONS
© Bill Hebert
by Ellen Shapiro
“I get to mix it up,” Frykholm says, grinning through his shaggy beard. “I get interesting projects. And there’s an abundance of interesting people to do them with: smart researchers and engineers, smart writers, smart designers, smart company leaders who inspire us to do great work.” Just as the company taps the world’s top industrial design talent to develop its products, Frykholm, a Cranbrook mfa and aiga Fellow noted for his own contributions to the field, beginning with the iconic picnic posters that graced the ca Design Annual almost every year since the early ’70s—has chosen to collaborate with many of graphic design’s most respected practitioners. “John Massey of Container Corporation was my mentor early on,” he says, “and his firm designed superb brochures, posters and ads for us. Tomoko Miho designed some of our most beautiful catalogs. Sara Senior writer and editor Clark Malcolm supplied the caption information. This page: “The Herman Miller (HM) GreenHouse, a ‘Pioneer’ LEED status building, was designed in 1995 by architect Bill McDonough with landscape architect Peter Pollack; the Design Yard was designed in 1989 by Jeff Scherer of Minneapolis-based Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle.” Right: “The HM logo first appeared in this 1946 ad.” Irving Harper, George Nelson Associates, designer.
© Lea Babcock
“As Frykholm tells the story, this drawing by well-known chair designer Bill Stumpf accompanied a request that HM put its logo on the back of one of Stumpf’s chairs. It then became a poster parodying the kinds of uncomfortable chairs Stumpf spent his career improving upon.”
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“One year before CA published its first issue, HM introduced the Indoor Outdoor Group. Later called the Eames Aluminum Group, the chairs were designed by Charles Eames for Irwin Miller, CEO of Cummins Engine, and his house in Columbus, Indiana. Alexander Girard, who designed the interiors of the house—itself designed by yet another famous designer, Eero Saarinen— requested Eames’ help.” Office of Charles and Ray Eames, design firm.
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TIMELINE
The following twenty pages provide a brief overview of the evolution of creativity in visual communications and its relationship to society, culture and technology. While never intended as a comprehensive history, we’ve included projects and campaigns that were either noted as influential in our magazine, other published sources or by individual creatives. Our selection, of course, is open to debate as each creative professional will certainly cite different projects as having an influence on their careers.
graphic design & advertising
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years
1959
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Saul Bass designs title sequence and directs shower scene for Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Psycho
Communication Arts first issue
Parisian Bakeries identity: Marget Larsen
Litton annual report: Robert Miles Runyan Associates VW Beetle print campaign begins: Doyle Dane Bernbach
Exodus film logotype: Saul Bass & Associates
Westinghouse logo: Paul Rand
Monet exhibition poster: Norm Gollin
Eagle Shirtmakers print ad: Weiner & Gossage
Hunt Foods print ad: Young & Rubicam
“Around the World“ ad for IBM: Benton & Bowles
politics & culture
Getty Images provided most of the photographs for the politics & culture section. Detailed credits are listed on page 174.
International Paper logo: Lester Beall
NASA “meatball” logo (revived in 1992): James Modarelli
Space constraints limited our coverage to work from the United States. Work from the most recent years was chosen solely from our Annuals due to lack of corroborative sources. The positioning of work is approximate; accurate dates are difficult to locate due to lack of public documentation, conflicting dates found in multiple sources and project durations that span more than a year.
1960
Cuba: Castro takes power
Kennedy and Nixon debate on television
Frank Lloyd Wright dies
U2 spy plane shot down
France: de Gaulle becomes president
Ornette Coleman releases “Free Jazz”
Hawaii becomes 50th state
U.S. nuclear sub circumnavigates earth under water
George Grosz dies
Barbie introduced IBM 401 computer Xerox photocopying machine
Robert Noyce creates planar integrated circuit, allowing commercial development
John F. Kennedy elected president
1961
1962
1963 Commemorative postage stamp for the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation: Georg Olden
United Parcel Service logo: Paul Rand
Burlington Industries annual report: George Tscherny Eros magazine: Herb Lubalin, art director
Hillside Press logo: Keith Bright Holiday magazine: Frank Zachary, art director
Levy’s Bread print ad: Doyle Dane Bernbach CBS Television Network print ad: Lou Dorfsman/Al Amato
Show magazine: Henry Wolf, art director
Wolfschmidt vodka print ad: Papert, Koenig, Lois
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American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) trademark: Paul Rand
Chun King TV commercial: BBDO, agency; Freberg Ltd., production company
Helvetica® ABCDEFGHIJKLM abcdefghijklm1234 Helvetica (Linotype), a reinterpretation of existing Grotesks by Edouard Hoffman and Max Miedinger in 1957, becomes one of the most widely specified typeface families in the U.S. during the ’60s and ’70s. Redesigned and expanded as Neue Helvetica in 1983
Newton Minow, FCC chairman, lambastes TV as a “vast wasteland,” calls for more federal regulation; the same day, Hubert Humphrey calls TV “the greatest single achievement in communication that anybody or any area of the world has ever known” First manned space flight, Yuri Gagarin orbits earth Thalidomide birth defects
T. Eaton Co. Ltd. print ad: Jack Parker, art director National Broadcasting Company ad: Chermayeff & Geismar, designers; McCann-Erickson, agency
Alan Shepard first American in space
Campbell’s Soup Cans: Andy Warhol
Amnesty International formed
Seattle World’s Fair: Man in the Space Age
Berlin Wall constructed
Cuban Missile Crisis
Ernest Hemingway kills himself
John Glenn becomes first American to orbit earth
Assassination of Dominican Republic president Rafael Trujillo Molina MIT develops first timesharing computer
The Jetsons
Marilyn Monroe dies
Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange
Avis Rent-a-car ad campaign: Doyle Dane Bernbach
First interracial network commercial: Wisk detergent Roper poll shows 36% of Americans favor TV as an information source vs. 24% for print John F. Kennedy assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president Edith Piaf dies Army-Navy football game: first instant replay in television sports Digital Equipment Corporation introduces first minicomputer
Martin Luther King, Jr. gives “I have a dream” speech
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INTERNATIONAL ver the years, we’ve run over 100 articles on design and advertising outside of the U.S. and Canada, as seen mostly through the eyes of our intrepid contributors. Besides profiles of innovators in most major regions of the world, we’ve shown political posters from both sides of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, Russian design during the height of Communism and South African creativity after the fall of apartheid. Just a few of the more fascinating trips: Artist-reporter Earl Thollander toured Europe for three months in 1959 and returned with 225 drawings of his own and some examples of commercial art from Russia. “Having all factories under the same ownership must be a discouraging prospect to the up-and-coming Muscovian ad man,” Thollander said.
Bill Tara traveled to the Balkans in 1965 to look at work from Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia. Tara bravely traveled without visas. “I arrived at the borders and said, ‘Hello there.’ They said, ‘Hello’ right back. I saw no remnants of the ‘Iron Curtain.’ It may have been melted down for tv antennas.” Tara returned after two months, loaded down with a wealth of posters, books, proofs and slides, which culminated in a three-part series of what was probably a first-time look for most western creatives of work from Eastern Europe after World War II.
In 1973, Byron Ferris spent a week in Hamburg, Germany, visiting studios and interviewing designers. “In Hamburg you can feel the affluence in the air. Industry, shipping and design are all prosperous,” Ferris said. The result was a 26-page article on German design since the Bauhaus. On the following pages is just a small sample of the international work we’ve shown in the last 50 years, along with a few quotes from some of the fascinating people that were interviewed on our behalf. CA 110
March/April 2009
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—Vanessa Eckstein, “blok design” (Mar/Apr 2008)
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The culture of graphic design in Mexico is very young. In the past, graphic design was the ugly Rego, Matiz, duckling of architecture. —Alvaro “¡Viva! Diseño en México” (Mar/Apr 2001) 3
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1. Retrospective of Chicana Film poster, 1979. Julioeloy (Las Villas), artist. “The Cuban Poster Crises” (Sep/Oct 1994). 2. Linha Flora packaging. Karine Kawamura/SilvioSilva Junior/Vanessa Knorst, designers; Lumen Design (Curitiba), design firm. “Brasil! Brasil! Brasil!” (Mar/Apr 2003). 3. Cultural Poster. Silvio Giorgi/Belén Mena (Ecuador), designers. “Brno Biennale” (Jan/Feb 2003). 4. Poster for the Colombia Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Marta Granados (Colombia), designer. “11th Biennial Colorado International Invitational Poster Exhibition” (Jan/Feb 2000). 5. Telephone directory design for Paginas Doradas. Carlos Vanancio/Marcelo Sapoznik, designers; Fontana FVS diseno (Buenos Aires), design firm. “Creativity in South America” (May/June 1996). 6. Logo for Combinado Cárnico Bayamo sausage factory, 1982. Santiago Pujol (Havana), designer. “Cuba Si!” (May/Jun 2006). 7. Symbol for Baselca mineral water. Graham Edwards (Mexico City), designer. “Laboratorio de Diseño” (Sep/Oct 1977). 8. Identity for a production company whose initials happen to be the same abbreviation of Distrito Federal, the official name of Mexico’s capital. Vanessa Eckstein (Mexico City), designer; Distrito Films, client. “blok design” (Mar/Apr 2008). Communication Arts
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Palmer Jarvis
VANCOUVER
Visual Communications
GENEALOGY
Bozell & Jacobs
Rethink
O
ur industry is filled with entrepreneurs, creatives who dream of opening their own offices and having greater control over their creative output. Fortunately, our industry is also filled with mentors—professionals willChiat/Day Seattle ing to take the time to help up-and-coming talent mature. For many creatives, the typical career progression has been to learn the ropes at an established agency or firm before striking Livingston & out on their own.
Fallon McElligott Rice
MINNEAPOLIS
mono Barrie D’Rozario Murphy
CramerKrasselt
Company
So who begat whom? While we weren’t able to show seven Copacino + WongDoody degrees of separation, we’ve Fujikado attempted to map the origins of Big Bang Idea some well-known ad agencies and Engineering SEATTLE design firms and indicate their pedigree, with the single requirement that we show a minimum of three “generations.” In the case of creative partnerships, we traced the William “lineage” of any partner we could to make a Cain Inc. connection; with only a few exceptions, we’ve listed the name of the firm at its inception. Our research sources included our feature articles, judge’s bios and extensive Web searches. While this list certainly isn’t exhaustive, our The Bomb research was. You can help Factory make it more comprehensive by e-mailing us at editorial@ commarts.com with any additions and corrections.
PORTLAND
Wieden & Kennedy
MILWAUKEE
Bozell/ Chicago
Kohnke Koeneke
McConnaughy Barocci & Brown
Rink Wells & Associates
CHICAGO Euro RSCG Tatham Chicago
weights & pulleys
Downtown Partners
Jones
Leland Oliver Company
SAN FRANCISCO Hal Riney & Partners Atlas Citron Haligman & Bedecarre
davidandgoliath Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein
Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners
March/April 2009
LOS ANGELES Venables Bell & Partners
Cutwater 124
Zechman Lyke Vetere
Goldberg Moser O’Neill
Ogilvy & Mather
AKQA
Frankenberry Laughlin & Constable, Inc.
Stein Robaire Helm
Chiat/Day Siltanen & Partners