Paul Rand was an American designer who made a name for himself with some really powerful work that pulled on ideas that came out of modern art and design in Europe. The things that he produced starting in the late 1930's, immediately got the attention of a lot of other graphic designers. For the way that Rand could create powerful symbols but also retain a sense of play and humor and delight in his work. I'm going to show you a series of covers for a magazine that he designed starting in the late 1930s. It showcased the work of young writers. And Rand's approach to the covers was to always tap into something, either about the season or about the subjects, but in a really delightful, playful, but very symbolic way. Like, this is a January issue for 1939. So actually, it's a New Year's baby. The symbol of the new year often being a kid in diapers, right? Well, he gets rid of the diaper here. The kid is a stick figure. That white star in the front. Which is like legs, a torso, and arms super imposed on a red figure of both a flag that just says 1939 and then this face blowing a horn. A noisemaker for New Years, the party hat. So, you have this complete holiday symbol rendered in the simplest of lines. If you looked at a Paul Klee drawing from the Bauhaus, you'd see the same kind of ability to make a figure, or an idea, come to life through the use of the simplest graphic means. And that's what Rand is doing here in this cover. Another very Bauhaus influenced cover is this issue, two months later, for the March issue, which focused on many articles about contemporary dance. And Rand takes a photograph of a dancer and then he shows, in the upper left-hand corner, the dancer whole. So the photograph is silhouetted against this bright red. But then, in a kind of Bauhausian-Oskar Schlemmer way, he takes this body form, like the heart, the head, and two legs, and then puts the photograph in it again. So the dancer is duplicated, both whole, and then in this fragmented, but extremely modernistic way. Ao you have the two things happening at once, which makes you think both about the real experience of seeing a dancer and then the connection of the modern dancer to other modern art forms. Maybe the most powerful cover that Rand did for Direction is this one, the Christmas issue. Now, in December of 1940, the United States was participating in World War II, so this was a war time cover. And if you look at it, it looks at first like a package, a present, right? It's got ribbons crossing on the front and it has a tag, a gift tag. Which simply says Merry Christmas and then it gives you the date of the publication. And that's laid on top of the logo, which is always this plain stencil font with the paper kind of ripped around it. But of course the ribbons not ribbon. It’s a photograph of barbed wire. And so that simple gesture, of taking ribbon of the conventional form and transforming it. And then the red dots, which also could be Christmas decoration, are clearly also spots of blood. So you have this complete double reading. A thing that speaks of holiday celebration and then this thing that speaks of suffering and war and violence, compressed into one composition. When people talk about Rand and his power to manipulate symbols. I think of this cover as being one of the strongest examples of this idea of compressing a lot of ideas into the simplest of forms.
