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…

Herb Lubalin is known to have said that if he hadn’t split an egg with his twin brother Irwin, he probably would have been George Lois. A small skinny kid with peculiar eating habits, he was warned by his mother he’d end up as a cockroach powder salesman if he didn’t eat his lumpy oatmeal.…

In his distinguished career as art director, typographer, designer, and headline writer, the late Herb Lubalin epitomized the philosophy of the One Club. Herb the art director wrote his own headlines. Copy and layout functioned successfully in tandem to sell a product. To Herb, words had a two-fold destiny resulting in a single impact. Herb…

In the fall of 1938, when I was thirteen, my father’s uncle who lived in London came to visit. We were staying at a small “pension” in Versailles, refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria. He brought with him the current issue of Esquire magazine and left for London forgetting it in his room. I grabbed itand carried…

I became interested in what they used to call industrial design at an early age. But then I saw an Art Directors Show in 1950, which was totally dominated by a brand new agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach. I decided advertising could be so good it was worth doing. I joined DDB in 1954. By 1965…