When Ivan Chermayeff arrived at Harvard in the early 1950’s he presented the Dean of Undergraduate Studies with an unusual request. Rather than majoring in any particular subject, Chermayeff wanted to major in professors. A man of obvious perception, the Dean gave his approval. As a result, Chermayeff’s program of study was a crazy-quilt of…

Issey Miyake (1938-2022) was born in Hiroshima in 1938. He graduated from the Tama University, Tokyo in 1963 with a degree in graphic design. In 1965, he left for Paris to study at the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. From 1966-1969 he worked for different fashion houses in Paris and New…

Strong, clean, and impactful are the best descriptives you could use to describe Ikko Tanaka’s work. They are universal images, honed with a fastidious eye: finding the natural flow of photographs in a book spread, steadying the central point of a corporate symbol so the mind retains every detail, and enriching the typographic and illustrative…

Howard Zieff is the advertising legend whose comic eye and flawless direction put Benson & Hedges 100s and Alka-Seltzer on the map. He is also the Hollywood film director whose boundless energy, attention to detail, and acute sense of timing contribute immeasurably to the success of films likePrivate BenjaminandMy Girl. Zieff grew up in Los…

A few words on Howard Gossage by Jeff Goodby Actually, out of all the people I’ve never met in my life, I feel I know Howard the best. I sort of triangulated him back to life from meeting a lot of you, like a planet you can’t see but you know it’s there because you…

Heyworth Campbell once redesigned a newspaper. The result was so handsome and so original that Robert Benchley was impelled to “review” it in theNew Yorker. The newspaper wasThe Morning Telegraph, and its new Campbell format, said Benchley, was “as beautiful as anything we have ever seen in a newspaperwe may just frame a copy and…

Imagine a crisp September day in Brooklyn during the 1950s. For many second-year design students at Pratt Institute, it’s the beginning of a new semester. Time to start looking beyond their present studies, focusing on more serious endeavors, like employment in the fields they aspire to work in. The bell rings, signaling a class change.…

Designed fifty typefaces (covering three stages of printing technology: hot metal composition, phototypesetting, and digital typography); work in calligraphy, book typography, and writings on graphic design. Hermann Zapf (pronounced “tsáff,” born November 8, 1918) was a German typeface designer who lived in Darmstadt, Germany and was married to calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf von…

Herbert Matter taught himself how to shoot pictures with a camera left in the Paris apartment where he was staying while a young painting student. We can be grateful because Matter, a life-long experimenter, probably would not have fared as well if he had adhered to a single school or approach. Instead, he went his…

If Herbert Bayer had produced nothing after the age of 28, his accomplishments to that point alone would make him one of the great pioneers in visual communication. Bayer is exactly as old as the century. He was born in Austria in 1900 and became a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar when he was…