Paul Rand

As part of my Typography class, I had to do a little presentation on Paul Rand. When I looked him up, I found his biography to be pretty fascinating. It turns out he's the designer for a lot of famous icons that you see today. Some of them include:






I learned that Paul Rand was not too much into great details. According to Rand, he pointed point out in A Designer’s Art that “ideas do not need to be esoteric to be original or exciting." He really believed that by making the design simple, it still portrayed a powerful message to the viewer. For his ABC logo that he created in 1962, it really epitomized that ideal of minimalism while proving a point that a logo “cannot survive unless it is designed with the utmost simplicity and restraint." Even Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, claims that Paul Rand was the greatest graphic designer of all time.

Looking at Rand's works makes me realize that design can work with restraints and rules. When you life those restraints, your mind can run endless on different possibilities but sometimes, those ideas can be too much and might make a confusing design. But if you're given a set guidelines you have to follow, your mind learns to work with it and create things you might have never thought you could've done.