Deffke’s essays and sermons to businessmen on the value of branding were a lot like today’s branding hyperbole (brand-speak). “Trademarks should be made only by professionals,” he wrote zealously. “These are judged by their qualified peers. These creators of trademarks display their talents in a publications of the alliance ‘German Work Alliance’ called ‘German Accomplishments’ MADE IN GERMANY!”
Deffke was an unapologetic cheerleader for his profession and his own business interests: “If a trade mark is created by competent hands, it will gain in importance, as it, in conjunction with other advertising means, reappears in ads in newspapers and magazines, business papers and brochures, on factory walls, vans and trucks. As a result, it will impress itself indelibly on people’s minds … They also help spread marks, by creating all manner of advertising materials.”
Self-interest notwithstanding, he advocated for a profession that not only made marks but named companies and provided viable identities, which was ahead of its time: “To see what there is to gain from a short word mark, one must only look at the world-famous brands of our leading companies. As they spread internationally they bear witness to German industriousness and German ability, displacing all other competition not as strong and assertive. Our technical factories compete with other large businesses for chemical products, food and luxury good production. All this is accompanied by short ‘buzzwords’ [or catchphrases. German: Schlagwort—literally “punching word”], the mark of their product or factory. The buzz around us in full color: AEG, Manoli, Benz and Odol, Bamag and Henckels. In order to expand the esteem and reputation of our German industry, we should affix seals to our products with great care, as these seals recommend and protect our products.”
Deffke’s sermonizing was his contribution to the new art of strategic design: “It is not enough to use trademarks occasionally to identify products,” he announced. “The trademark will forge an indestructible link between producer and consumer, which will successfully ward off any unfair competition.” Yet aside from having practical advantages, trademarks are of great importance, he noted, for all creative entrepreneurs who “wish to display the fruits of their minds and inventions to the world now and in the future. Trademarks remain forever in our memory and so display some of the characteristics usually associated with great works of art.”
Legal protection for logo designers was one of Deffke’s foremost concerns. He was well aware that not only did business require exclusivity, but in the absence of strict policing the designer could be compromised. “A trade mark is useless if it is not protected,” he insisted. “Only after it is strengthened by the force of law can it be an effective and necessary means of advertising. If a trade mark is too much like others its effectiveness becomes limited. If it is unlike others, it expands in effectiveness. In the latter case, the mark is not in danger of being mistaken for another.”
This zealous minimalist designer was nonetheless prone to overstatement: “The greatest marks are created by that talented home of German workmanship, the ‘Wilhelmwerk’ with rare talent and thoroughness,” he crowed.
His message was clear: Logos were essential to industry’s global success. But make no mistake, his logos and marks were the tools to achieve that goal.
Flight
E. MCKNIGHT KAUFFER
Edward (“Ted”) McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) was one of Europe’s most prolific and influential advertising artists of the 1920s and 1930s, certainly as innovative as his more celebrated French counterpart, A. M. Cassandre. In England, where he lived and worked, Kauffer brought advertising art into the twentieth century, yet in America only a few knew of the Montana-born expatriate’s achievements.
Kauffer was sent abroad at the behest of Professor Joseph McKnight (the young man’s mentor from whom he took his middle name). If he had not gone he might never have become a poster artist and graphic designer, and if he had not been introduced to Ludwig Hohlwein’s poster masterpieces in Munich and attended the Academie Moderne in Paris, his life would have taken a much different turn. Before crossing the Atlantic he stopped in Chicago where he was profoundly influenced by the Armory Show, the landmark exhibit that gave Americans their first exposure to the burgeoning European avant-garde—it had opened first in New York and then Chicago to critical, if not dismissive, reviews. Kauffer didn’t know what to make of the unprecedented Picassos, Cézannes, Duchamps, and Matisses on view: “I didn’t understand it. But I certainly couldn’t dismiss it,” he wrote some years later. Eventually, these paintings would inspire his own benchmark work entitled Flight (1916), which in 1919 was adapted as a poster for the London Daily Herald with the title Soaring to Success! The Early Bird, the first cubist advertising poster published in England.
The art capitals of Europe beckoned, but the clouds of war loomed, and in 1914 Kauffer became a refugee with just enough money in his pocket to return to America. Instead of sailing straight home, however, he discovered England, and with it a tranquillity he had not experienced in America. “I felt at home for the first time,” he wrote. Kauffer volunteered to serve in the British army but was ineligible because he was an American citizen. Instead he did a variety of menial jobs while waiting for painting commissions to come along.
At this time Kauffer met John Hassall, a leading English poster artist, which led to a meeting with Frank Pick, the publicity manager for the London Underground Electric Railways. Pick was responsible for the most progressive advertising campaign and corporate identity program in England. He had the vision to both unify the Underground’s graphic system and diversify its publicity, thus making it more efficient and appealing. He commissioned Edward Johnston to design an exclusive sans-serif typeface and logo for the Underground (both are still in use) as well as England’s finest artists to design posters for its stations. Kauffer’s first Underground posters, produced in late 1915, were landscapes rendered in gouache or poster paints advertising picturesque locales. These and his 140 subsequent Underground posters, spanning twenty-five years, evidence Kauffer’s evolution towards modernism.
During his first year in England, Kauffer became a member of the London Group, a society of adventuresome painters who embraced cubism. He refused to abandon painting for his new advertising career, but rather questioned the growing schism between fine and applied art. “He could see no reason for conflict between good art work and good salesmanship,” wrote Frank Zachary in Portfolio #1. In fact, he was dismayed by the inferior quality of English advertising compared to work being done on the continent. During the 1890s there had been a period in which the “art poster” flourished in England, exemplified by Pride and Nicholson (known as the Beggarstaff Brothers), yet this flicker of progressivism was soon snuffed out by nostalgic fashions. Although Kauffer’s earliest posters were picturesque, they were hardly sentimental; he intuitively found the right balance between narrative and symbolic depiction in prefigurations of his later abstract images.
It is likely that Kauffer saw the first exhibit of the vorticists in 1916, and that this avant-garde movement of British futurists, who worshipped the machine, had an impact on his own work. Flight, in its minimalism and dynamism, echoed the vorticist’s obsession with speed as a metaphor for the machine age. This is “Kauffer’s major work,” wrote Kauffer biographer Hayward Haworth-Booth, “[and] also the finest invention of his entire career.” The image departed just enough from direct quotation of cubist form as to become the basis for a personal visual language. “He had a childlike wonder and admiration for nature,” continued Haworth-Booth referring to how Kauffer based this image not on imagination, but his first-hand observation of birds in flight. However, Flight might not have become an icon of modern graphic design if Kauffer had not submitted it in 1919 to Colour magazine, which regularly featured a “Poster Page” where unpublished maquettes were reproduced free-of-charge as an inducement for businessmen and advertising agents to employ talented poster artists. The poster was seen as one means of helping England get back o
n a sound commercial footing after the war. Flight was bought by Francis Meynell, a respected English book publisher and printer who organized a poster campaign for the Labour newspaper, the Daily Herald. Meynell interpreted that the soaring birds represented hope, and Kauffer’s novel design somehow suggested renewal after the bloody world war. The poster was hung everywhere, and soared its maker into the public eye. Kauffer soon received commissions to design campaigns for major English wine, clothing, publishing, automobile, and petroleum companies, most notably Shell Oil and Shell Mex.
Flight, in its minimalism and dynamism, echoed the vorticist’s obsession with speed as a metaphor for the machine age.
Kauffer argued that nonrepresentational and geometrical pattern designs “can effect a sledge hammer blow if handled by a sensitive designer possessing a knowledge of the action of color on the average man or woman.” He believed that the artist’s job was to foster an appreciation of diverse visual stimuli that transcended the conventional marketing tricks. Nevertheless, even Kauffer had to lead clients by the hand: “In most cases it has not been possible to give me full freedom,” he wrote, “and my clients have gone step by step rather than by leaps, but by this slow process we have argued and discussed each advance until our opposite points of view have reached a synthesis, and it is because of this mutual understanding that I confidently expect England to progress to international distinction, not because of myself but through the new talent that is making way in many directions… .” His own productivity is evidence that certain businessmen appreciated the communicative power of unconventional form, but even in such a receptive milieu (particularly when compared to American advertising) there were hostile critics who referred to Kauffer’s abstract designs as “McKnightmares.”
Despite these occasional barbs, critics realized that Kauffer made significant inroads in the applied arts, first in the application of cubist form, and then after 1923 when he realized that vorticism no longer offered viable commercial possibilities and he entered his so-called jazz style, in which he created colorful, art moderne interpretations of traditional form. In 1927 he took a three-day-a-week job at Crawfords, the largest advertising agency in England, which lasted two years and marked the end of his jazz style and the move towards modernist photomontage, influenced by German and Russian advertising of the time. Kauffer expanded on this revolutionary vocabulary, and in his own work he replaced diagonal with rectilinear layouts, crushed his type into parallelograms, used positive/negative lettering frequently, and most importantly took up the airbrush to achieve the streamlined effect that characterized his work of the 1930s. Kauffer was further involved with the popular new medium of photomurals, and developed the “space frame” to give an illusion of multiple vantage points on a single picture plane.
Kauffer was called the “Picasso of advertising design.” Critic Anthony Blunt wrote: “Mr. McKnight Kauffer is an artist who makes one resent the division of the arts into major and minor.” And in the introduction to the 1937 Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalog of Kauffer’s posters, Aldous Huxley praised Kauffer’s primary contribution to modern design: “Most advertising artists spend their time elaborating symbols that stand for something different from the commodity they are advertising. Soap and refrigerators, scent and automobiles, stockings, holiday resorts, sanitary plumbing … are advertised by means of representations of young females disporting themselves in opulent surroundings. Sex and money—these would seem to be the two main interests of civilized human beings… . McKnight Kauffer prefers the more difficult task of advertising products in terms of forms that are symbolic only of these particular products. Thus, forms symbolical of mechanical power are used to advertise powerful machines; forms symbolical of space, loneliness, and distance to advertise a holiday resort where prospects are wide and houses are few… . In this matter McKnight Kauffer reveals his affinity with all artists who have ever aimed at expressiveness through simplification, distortion, and transposition… .”
McGraw-Hill Paperback Covers
RUDOLPH DE HARAK
If modernism imposes coldness and sterility, as critics have argued, then Rudolph de Harak (b. 1924) must have done something wrong. A devout modernist, his work for public and private institutions has been uncompromisingly human. For proof take 127 John Street, a typically modern skyscraper in New York City’s financial district. Before de Harak designed its entrance-level façade it exuded all the warmth of glass and steel on a winter’s day. But with the installation of his three-story-high digital clock (composed of seventy-two square modules with numerals that light according to hour, minute, and second), the mysterious neon-illuminated tunnel leading to the lobby entrance, and the bright canvas-covered permanent scaffolds that serve as sun decks, 127 John Street was transformed from a modern edifice into a playground.
De Harak’s innovative addition to the John Street building enlivened a faceless street; likewise his inspired exhibition designs for museums and expositions have transformed didactic displays into engaging environments. Dedicated to the efficient communication of information, he used detail the way a composer scores musical notes, creating melodies of sensation to underscore meaning. His exhibits were indeed symphonies that both enlightened and entertained. His exploded diesel engine, the centerpiece of the Cummins Engine Company Museum in Columbus, Indiana, in which virtually every nut and bolt of this complex machine was deconstructed in midair, was evidence of the designer’s keen ability for extracting accessible information from even the most minute detail. And yet while his exhibition design explored the rational world, his graphic design uncovered the subconscious.
Although de Harak deliberately employed neutral typography to anchor his design, the hundreds of book jackets, record covers, and posters he created between the opening of his design office in 1952 and its closing in 1990, are evidence that throughout his career he expressed emotion through type and image. While not the raw expressionism of the most fashionable designers of the 1990s, de Harak employed abstract form ever so subtly to unlock alternative levels of perception. He related this practice to abstract expressionism, which in the early 1950s he wholeheartedly embraced, and while this may be difficult to see amid his orthodox, systematic design, the nearly four hundred McGraw-Hill paperbacks he designed in the early 1960s bring this relationship into clear focus. De Harak’s rigid grid was, in fact, a tabula rasa on which both rational and eccentric imagery evoked ideas. The subjects of these books—philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and sociology, among them—offered de Harak a proving ground to test the limits of conceptual art and photography. At the same time he experimented with a variety of approaches inspired by dada, abstract expressionism, and, ultimately, op-art.
His on-the-job research helped push the design practice towards an art-based theory. With one eye on the international typographic style, the other was focused on pushing the bounds of letterform composition. Following in the tradition of poetic typography of the 1920s, de Harak imposed his own levels of legibility through experimentation with various forms of letter and word spacing.
He built his typographic scheme on Berthold’s Akzidenz Grotesk from Berlin. This bold European typeface effectively anchored de Harak’s design and gave him a neutral element against which to improvise with a growing image repertoire. His early experiments, including fifty covers done for Westminster records, were the basis for the decidedly modern book jackets that he designed for Meridian Press, New Directions, Holt Rinehart and Winston, and Doubleday. And all the approaches he developed during the late 1950s led to his opus, the McGraw-Hill paperback covers that became laboratories for his experiments with color, type, optical illusion, photography, and other techniques. More important, these covers would define his design for years to follow.
McGraw-Hill paperbacks were emblematic of 1960s design. At this time the international typographic style and American eclecticism were the two primary design methodologies at play in the United States. The former represented Bauhaus rationalism,
the latter 1960s exuberance. De Harak was profoundly influenced by the exquisite simplicity of the great Swiss modernist Max Bill, but as an American he wanted to find a vehicle for reconciling these two conflicting sensibilities. Just as he resisted the hard-sell approach in advertising, he also rejected the eclectic trend to make typography too blatantly symbolic. “I never saw the need to put snowcaps on a letterform to suggest the cold,” he offered as an example of the extreme case. Instead he worked with a limited number of typefaces, at first Franklin Gothic and News Gothic, preferring it over Futura, then Akzidenz Grotesk, and ultimately Helvetica. De Harak believed that Helvetica gave him all the color, weight, and nuance he required to express a variety of themes and ideas.
The McGraw-Hill covers were pure visual communication. Since de Harak did not allow for anything extraneous, each element was fundamental. Yet as economical as the covers were, each was also a marriage of expressionistic or illusionistic imagery and systematic typography, the same repertoire of elements that de Harak would use in other graphic work where he was known for reducing the complex without lessening meaning.
Dylan
MILTON GLASER
Bob Dylan arrived in New York in January 1961 at the age of twenty-one. In five years he produced seven albums and came to symbolize a generation caught between the unprecedented consumer prosperity that followed World War II and the Cold War’s chilling rhetoric of mutually assured destruction. The 1960s generation adopted Dylan, projecting onto him its collective hope and cynicism. On July 29, 1966, it was reported that while riding his motorcycle on the back roads in Woodstock, New York, the back wheel locked, and Bob Dylan was thrown over the handlebars and seriously injured. Rumors abounded. Some thought he was dead, and some thought it was a ruse to cover up a recovery from an overdose. Whatever the truth, the words and the music stopped.
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