Herb Lubalin A look into the life and process of one of the most influential American designers. Dubbed the father of typographics and winner of dozens of awards, Herb Lubalin revolutionized the face of the communicative arts and redfined what it means to be a graphic artist.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Early Life..................................... 3 Early Work................................... 4 Sudler & Hennessey....................... 5 Herb Lubalin, Inc.......................... 6 Eros.............................................. 7 Fact.............................................. 9 Avant Garde.................................. 10 LaterYears..................................... 11 Selected Works.............................. 13
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If he hadn’t split an egg with his twin brother Irwin,
he probably would have been George Lois.
1918-1935 M
arkedly known growing up as the wildly inappropriate boy whose only artistic inclinations were doodling erotic nudes of Tarzan & Jane in his school notebooks and graduating high school to become a student of Cooper Union with the lowest possible entrance score, Herb most certainly did not look like the man who would eventually receive the 62nd AIGA medal and become the face of advertising in the mid 19th century. Only entering into Cooper Union because it was the only college he was accepted to, Lubalin had very little direc-
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tion and vision of where he wanted to go with his life. During his first semesters he was almost kicked out several times because his work was so bad. It wasn’t until he was asked to do calligraphy in class, which is an art form that has to be done with the right hand because of the angle of the pen, he realized his potential. Lubalin had always used his left hand for drawing, but nobody knew that Herb was actually ambidextrous. His teacher assigned him the project, apologizing because she had thought of the terrible handicap it must cause him to use his right hand. Little did anyone expect Herb to find it so easy, and out of pity, he earned the highest marks in his class, which encouraged him to explore type.
Early Works
“It wasn’t until about four years ago when I received a medal for professional achievement from Cooper Union and I had to give a speech that I told them that I had cheated my way into the art profession.”2
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most of his competition was in the army at the time. Herb had met his wife in college, got married very young and had children so he was exempt from the draft.
He went through the majority of his schooling at Cooper Union with no specific career path really piquing his interest. It wasn’t until his final years when he haphazardly entered a design competition that would be his stepping stone into the world of design.
1936-1945
uring his years at Cooper Union, he became fascinated with the communicative arts and how the choice of forms can change the entire feel and message of a composition. Gertrude Snyder notes that during this period Lubalin was particularly struck by the differences in interpretation one could impose by changing from one typeface to another, always “fascinated by the look and sound of words (as he) expanded their message with typographic impact.”1
Herb however found himself in a field that he felt ill suited for. Without his wife, he has noted, he would have never had the inspiration or motivation to become a great designer. He left school with terrible technical skills, but a wonderful perspective on how to solve design problems creatively and proactively.
Herb entered a McCandlish outdoor poster contest, walking away with 2nd place and the winning sum of $50, which was no small feat at the time. Bursting with pride and an artistic fascination for communication and interpretation, he launched his career that would bring him to the forefront of design and redefine the boundaries of taste and media. He went through an extraordinarily difficult time finding a job after school, bouncing from firm to firm. Luckily,
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“I love to create advertising. But in the right amounts and with 2 the right people.”
1945-1964 Sudler & Hennessey
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inally, after a short stint at Reiss Advertising, Herb found himself taking a position at Sudler & Hennessey, a firm involved in the pharmaceutical trade. He refined his skills on packaging, editorials, and identity alongside people like George Lois, Art Kane, and John Pistilli. Lubalin was bored of the old designs in the industry, he decided to create what he dubbed ‘typographics.’ Illustrated typography interwoven with illustration, elevating the message to a type of art, a method he would use later in his post-advertising years and become so well known for. At this point in America, consumers could no longer stand advertisements that appealed to class snobbery, they now had to engage the viewer and work to sell mass produced products. Modern and minimal became the style, containing wit and personality in order to interact with the viewer. It was in his era, the 50s, our country was emerging from war, and our old notions of advertising had to be revolutionized to reach the new eyes of consumers. It was of this vein, Lubalin flourished.
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1964-1981
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oon after wining the award and becoming a partner at Sudler & Hennessey, Herb went on to create his own firm, Herb Lubalin, Inc. in 1964. In creating his own agency, he sought to rebuild the foundation of advertising as he saw fit although he stayed on board as a consultant to Sudler & Hennessey. Herb is well documented in his qualms and criticisms of how advertising agencies worked. He often complained that “there were too many people between the designers and the consumers”2 and that advertising was “unrewarding from a moral standpoint”2.
Although he was open with his concerns, he still often referred to advertising as the “most exciting visual media”2. This consulting agency, which he would later fondly refer to as the “First International Graphics Cartel”3 gained fame world-wide and gave him the ultimate creative freedom. Not only did Herb think of advertising as second nature, he also worked closely with copy, which is the soul of his typographics. It was in the agency that he took on the position of creative director for three of the most controversial American magazines in conservative America; so controversial in fact that it launched lawsuits, a full FBI investigation, and landed one of his closest friends in jail for pornography. 6
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1962 D
uring this reorganizational period, Herb found very little time to actually create work. Although he was tight up for time, he did manage to take on one very big project that has won him fame and recognition to this very day. It all started with a magazine called ‘Eros’, which began with Ralph Ginzburg, as Herb tells...
“He walked into my office one day and said,
“How would you like to design a new magazine?” and explained what it was. And I said,
“If I am given complete design integrity, I would be happy to do it.” He said, “All right.” and he gave me the assignment. I think at that time he had selected three art directors and he wanted to pick one of the three and when he came up and saw the work I was doing, he said, “I want you”,
so that’s how we got together.”2 Eros was a magazine based out of the counterculture of that time, devoting it’s content to the new sexual revolution. Breaking boundaries and celebrating the freedom and beauty of sexuality. The magazine itself was high quality, printed in large format in black and white with a higher quality paper than most publications that day, Eros looked more like a book. Void of advertisements, many argue that this was the best editorial design that Herb ever did in his career. But as the sexual revolution was beginning to take hold, so was the conservative backlash. The US Postal Service quickly filed a lawsuit against them and the entire project and publication was canceled.
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1964-1967
Undeterred and dedicated
Ginzburg came up with the idea for another magazine
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act’s content was largely based off of the reaction of the treatment of ‘Eros.’ Fact, taking on more of an anarchist tone, hired struggling new-age writers whose opinions and work were too risqué and uncommon to be published anywhere else. The managing editor described that “most American magazines, emulating the Reader’s Digest, wallow in sugar and everything nice; Fact has had the spice all to itself.”4 When designing the editorials and identity for Fact, Herb worked minimalistically, deciding to balance high quality illustrations with large and simple serif type. Because they had run tight on funding, the magazine had to be printed black and white, only using one or two typefaces. They
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also hired out illustrators to make large amounts of work rather than having numerous artists work on one issue. The end result was a magazine that looked nothing like anything else on the shelves with it’s high quality minimal appearance. Although the magazine could have easily looked amateurish, it looked mature and stood apart from the publications with flashy text and bright illustrations. Because there was no corporate sponsor dictating what they could create, Fact published some of the most controversial articles to date. This daringness is what made the publication and Herb’s work so well respected, but it was also it’s demise. One issue had been based off of the Republican presidential candidate at the time, Barry Goldwater. The magazine made claims
that Barry was mentally unfit to be president and slandered him in ways bombastic for 1960s America. Barry soon took action, filing lawsuit and suing the magazine for $90,000 ($650,000 today). There was no possible way that Fact could go on, once again, they had to shut down production.
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ut as their spirit and creativity wouldn’t be satiated, they now came back together to create what would be their most famous and successful publication, Avant Garde.
Herb designed the Avant Garde logo, which originally was just supposed to be a logogram, not a commercial typeface. Later on in his practice, his partner and him would decide to turn it into a full fledged typeface for common usage. “I asked him to picture a very modern, clean European airport (or the TWA terminal), with signs in stark black and white,” Ginzburg’s wife and collaborator, Shoshana recalled, “Then I told him to imagine a jet taking off the runway into the future. I used my hand to describe an upward diagonal of the plane climbing skyward. He had me do that several times. I explained that the logos he had offered us for this project, so far, could have been on any magazine but that Avant Garde (adventuring into unknown territory) by its very name was something nobody had seen before. We needed something singular and entirely new.”4 According to Ralph Ginzberg, “The next morning, driving to work from his home in Woodmere he pulled over to the side of the road and phoned me (the first time he ever did that). ‘Ralph, I’ve got it. You’ll see.’ And the rest is design history.”4 Lubalin’s tight and angular letter forms captured what Ginzburg’s vision was, a visual embodiment of innovation and the future. The editorial design was much like their first magazine, Eros. The pages almost in a square format with covers bound with cardboard. This unique combination of design aspects quickly made it a talking point in the New York City design community. He experimented with typography and employed full page typographic titles which was unheard of then, eventually inspiring people like, Fred Woodword, art director of Rolling Stone. He would also experiment with colors and photographs, breaking the rules of conventional design. As the fate with the other publications, there was soon charges filed against his partner, Ralph Ginzburg. Many of their issues from all of their magazines included nude photographs of models and interracial intimacy; the courts charged him with distributing pornography. He lost all the cases, it even went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, and was sent to jail in 1966. At the time, his conviction was well supported by the public. Avant Garde, which had been distributed over 250,000 copies and growing, had to cease all publication. 10
Right now, I have what every desi good fortune to achieve. I’m my o
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esigner wants and few have the y own client. Nobody tells me what to do
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fter all of the legal issues, no further publications with Ginzburg were pursued. Instead, Herb went on to concentrate on creating his own circular, U&LC magazine (short for upper and lowercase). His own typographic journal, Lubalin used it to break more rules and continuing stretching the limits of experimentation on type. U&LC also doubled as advertisement for his services. His company kept changing as he collaborated and brought other influential designers on board, incorporating the talents of Ernie Smith, Tom Carnase, and Roger Ferriter. A year after that, several subsidiaries were added: Lubalin, Delpire & Cie, Paris, Lubalin, Maxwell Ltd., London, Good Book Inc. (“a highly unsuccessful publishing venture”), and Lubalin, Burns & Co., with its highly successful typographic offspring, International Typeface Corporation. In 1975, the logo was further changed to LSC&P Design Group, incorporating the name and talents of Alan Peckolick. Herb Lubalin also had a thriving Hawaiian operation going called Aki, Lubalin, Inc. With the creation of ITC, Herb had finally addressed the widespread plea of making Avant Garde a typeface, which he so did. However, to his and his partners dismay, it became one of the most widely misused types. However with this one disappointment, Herb went on to design some of the most popular things in American society, he was nearly impossible to escape in the 60s & 70s. He created two redesign attempts for the Saturday Evening Post, Air Mail stamps, along with a new 13¢ one, for the U.S. Post Office, a poster for the American Exhibition in Moscow, and a few articles for the USIA publication, Amerika. Out of all his works, he noted saying that the masthead design for a Curtis Publication, “Mother & Child,” and his late involvement as editorial and design director of U&lc, the International Journal of Typographics are his favorite pieces he’s created, along with his pride for his sons and his family. He died in May 1981, after blazing a trail through the design community during one of the most influential creative careers in all of history. 12
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Works Cited 1. Snyder, Gertrude. “Herb Lubalin: Art Director, Graphic Designer and Typographer.” Graphis: International Journal for Graphic and Applied Art ISSN 0017-3452 41 (Jan-Feb 1985): 56-67. 2. “An Interview with Mr. Herb Lubalin.” Interview by Tadahisa Nishio. はてなダイアリー. N.p., 03 July 2007. Web. 21 Apr. 2015. 3. ”Herb Lubalin.” ADC • Global Awards & Club. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2015. 4. Meggs, Philip B. “Two Magazines of the Turbulent ‘60s: a ‘90s Perspective.” Print 48 (Mar-Apr 1994): 68-77 OCLC 201042699. Works Referenced “Blog.” Unit Editions — Herb Lubalin Advertising. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2015. “A Brief History of Avant Garde « Thinking for a Living.” Thinking for a Living RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2015. “Fonts by Appearance.” Identifont. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2015. “Herb Lubalin | Biography, Life, Work, Logos and Awards.” Famous Logos RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2015. “Herb Lubalin - Typographer Extraordinaire – Voices of East Anglia.” Herb Lubalin - Typographer Extraordinaire – Voices of East Anglia. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2015. “Herb Lubalin.” ADC • Global Awards & Club. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2015. “An Interview with Mr. Herb Lubalin.” Interview by Tadahisa Nishio. はてなダイアリー. N.p., 03 July 2007. Web. 21 Apr. 2015.
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Written and Designed by Kristen Hanlon