Paul Rand is one of the most famous American graphic designers. He studied in the 1930s at Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, and the Art Students League. He worked across book design, advertising design and corporate identity design.
His advertising work for clients like Esquire and El Producto stood apart from other advertising work being produced in America at the time. His work was witty, formally rigorous, and built on visual ideas rather than decoration. Later, his corporate identity work for IBM, Westinghouse, ABC, UPS, and NeXT shaped how generations of designers thought about logos.
As well as designing, Rand wrote extensively on the subject, releasing books including Thoughts on Design (1947), A Designer’s Art (1985), and Design, Form, and Chaos (1993). His visual identity for IBM, with its striped rebus logo, remains one of the most studied examples in the history of corporate design.
