Paul Rand

Paul Rand – Early artistic influences of Cassandre and Moholy-Nagy

Paul Rand was born Perutz Rosenbaum on 15 August 1914 in New York. The son of a strict Jewish Orthodox home, he was confronted early on with the comprehensive prohibition of images in his religion. He got around this by copying the models on the advertisements he saw in his father’s grocery store, much to his father’s disapproval, who advised his son to stay away from any further artistic activity as it would not earn him any money. Despite this, Paul Rand was permitted to attend the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, even though, in hindsight, he realised that he did not learn anything to contribute to his artistic path and acquired all the necessary knowledge as an autodidact. Considerably more formative and significant for his development as a designer were the essays in European art magazines which exposed him to the ideas of A. M. Cassandre and Lâszló Moholy-Nagy, whilst part-time work as an illustrator in a design agency also proved instructive for Rand.

Simple and accessible: Posters and advertisements laid the groundwork

Paul Rand was guided by German poster art, as developed by Lucian Bernhard, and from the ideas of the largely forgotten Danish industrial designer Gustav Jensen. He also decided to cover up his Jewish heritage and changed his name from Perutz Rosenbaum to Paul Rand – a name which would soon become synonymous for modern graphic design. With the world economic crisis weathered, there was a boom and an increased need for advertising: hardly anyone served this as directly and pointedly as Paul Rand, whose simplified design emerged as an irresistible eye-catcher for customers and clients. Despite his commercial success, Rand was not driven by profit: he published a number of noteworthy designs in the magazine Direction, just for the sake of artistic freedom. Regardless of this, Rand quickly became an industry favourite and received a great number of commissions. 

Paul Rand’s company logos are still in use today

Paul Rand did not believe in the forced search for originality. He advised his potential followers not just to go after that something special, but to seek the unusual in the usual. Yet Rand anchored the unusual so firmly in the public consciousness, that is has long seemed ordinary. Logos still in use today by companies such as ABC, Enron, IBM, NeXT, UPS and Westinghouse have become part of everyday life and are rarely recognised as special design art. Corporate design became the key discipline in Paul Rand’s extremely successful career, but he liked to point out that behind the supposedly simple designs and depictions was a usually long and often laborious creative process: in principle, he could solve every problem – just not immediately, the artist said with his own mix of self-confidence and modesty.

Paul Rand died on 26 November 1996 in Norwalk in the US American state of Connecticut.