Later on in Lester Beall's career, he became one of the first
designers to create a practice.
And this is a picture of him in his office looking at all the logos that he had
designed for different companies.
So he was able to take his thinking about the use of symbols and
apply them to identities for local corporations.
This is a double page spread from a book that Lester Beall designed for
a local insurance company, Connecticut General.
And it takes the initials of the company, a ‘C’ and a ‘G’.
He creates this kind of lozenge shape,
actually to your eyes it might look like a skateboard,
and that is the logo that can be used either as one of a kind or
in graphic patterns like the way you see the logos stacked here.
This document is actually what's called a corporate identity manual.
And what it does is it shows
other designers who might work with Connecticut General,
how to take the design that Lester Beall has done and apply it.
This is a way that designers develop their practices after World War II,
so that they were not always just working inside companies,
but could work outside as consultants.
This is another document that is designed by Beall to describe
the kinds of typography and the kinds of color palettes that could be used for
Connecticut General documentation.
Again, this is a design for other designers to be able to follow so
that as companies grew, and as their communication needs grew more and
more, they couldn't essentially keep design consistent.
There's a kind of beauty in the practicality of the use of both
abstract form and then simplified typography,
in order to keep a corporate identity consistent.
This is another example of a very famous design done under Beall for
International Paper.
International Paper being a huge company that had traditionally had a logo type
of a fir tree and it was an old engraving probably from the 19th century.
Lester Beall took the form of the fir tree, or pine tree, and
abstracted it into a triangular arrow pointing up in a circle, and
that became the symbol of International Paper, applied to packages of paper.
But it also was used under his direction on everything from those small packages,
to things like appearing on the sides of trucks, or even on the sides of buildings.
So this kind of corporate identity that utilized basic symbolic
language became part of a practice after World War II.
Louise SandhausFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
Lorraine WildFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
