Great Designers

Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1903, died in 1969


Lester Beall
Lester Beall felt that the designer "must work with one goal in mind—to integrate the elements in such a manner that they will combine to produce a result that will convey not merely a static commercial message, but an emotional reaction as well. If we can produce the kind of art, which harnesses the power of the human instinct for that harmony of form, beauty, and cleanness that seems inevitable when you see it? Then I think we may be doing a job for our clients. The designer's role in the development, application and protection of the trademark may be described as pre-creative, creative and post-creative." Lester Beall believed that the designer cannot work in a vacuum. He remarked, "all experience in fields directly or indirectly related to design must be absorbed and stored up, to provide the inspirational source that guides, nourishes and enriches the idea-flow of the designer."






Saul Bass
One of the New York School’s pioneers, an acknowledged master of film titles and graphic designer, Saul Bass (1919-96) had the ability to express the nucleus of a design with images that became glyphs or elemental pictorial signs and exerted great graphic power. With the mastery of elemental forms, he pioneered an organic process of forms that appear, disintegrate, reform and transform in time and space, this combination, recombination and synthesis of form was carried over into the area of printed graphics.


Saul Bass broke the traditional portraits of actors and actresses promoting films plus the mediocre garish typography for film titles. By unifying both print and media graphics, he introduced the first comprehensive design program for motion picture film and titles. In addition to directing a number of films from short films to featured-length motion pictures, he created numerous corporate identity programs and embraced corporate visual identification. With iconic, widely imitated trademarks produced by Saul Bass, furthermore believed a trademark must be readily understood yet posses elements of metaphor and ambiguity that will attract the viewer again and again.


He approached each individual item as a unique communications problem resulted in the simplicity and directness of the designs enabled the viewer to interpret the content immediately. By means of utilizing irregular forms cut from paper with scissors or drawn with a brush, frequently simplified images to minimal statements and/or reduced messages to simple pictographic images lacking the exactness of measurement or structure that could make them determined.


Equally, Saul Bass and Paul Rand had a large amount of exposure from European designs while Paul Rand’s designs are dominantly influenced by constructivism. Saul Bass’ designs do not completely suggest constructivism even though; his designs are largely influenced by Paul Rand’s use of shapes and asymmetrical balance.


Josef Müller-Brockmann


'I would advise young people to look at everything they encounter in a critical light . . . Then I would urge them at all times to be self-critical'

Josef Muller-Brockman was born in Rapperswil, Switzerland in 1914 and studied architecture, design and history of art at the University of Zurich and at the city’s Kunstgewerbeschule. He began his career as an apprentice to the designer and advertising consultant Walter Diggelman before, in 1936, establishing his own Zurich studio specialising in graphics, exhibition design and photography. By the 1950s he was established as the leading practitioner and theorist of Swiss Style, which sought a universal graphic expression through a grid-based design purged of extraneous illustration and subjective feeling. His “Musica viva” poster series for the Zurich Tonhalle drew on the language of Constructivism to create a visual correlative to the structural harmonies of the music. Muller-Brockman was founder from and, from 1958 to 1965, co-editor of the trilingual journal Neue Grafik (New Graphic Designer) which spread the principles of Swiss Design internationally. He was professor of graphic design at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich from 1957 to 1960, and guest lecturer at the University of Osaka from 1961 and the Hochschule fur Gestaltung, Ulm from 1963. From 1967 he was European design consultant for IBM. He is the author of The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems (1961), History of Visual Communication (1971), History of the Poster (with Shizuko Muller-Yoshikawa, 1971) and Grid to many symposiums and has held one-man exhibitions in Zurich, Bern, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, Paris, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Osaka, Caracas and Zagreb. In 1987 he was awarded a gold medal for his cultural contribution by the State of Zurich.