Paul Rand, professor emeritus of graphic design at the School of Art whose logos for such corporations as IBM, the American Broadcasting Company, Westinghouse and the United Parcel Service are familiar across the nation, died of cancer Nov. 26 in Norwalk, Connecticut. He was 82 years old.
Known for his pioneering role in graphic design, Professor Rand taught at Yale from 1956 until his retirement in 1985. In his professional work, his teaching and his publications, he advanced the cause of modernism in graphics and was influential in bringing what was called the New Typography to the United States, stressing that type should be utilized to carry a message rather than solely as decoration.
Professor Rand once said: "Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are at best superficial ornamentation unless logically employed."
In the 1930s, Professor Rand introduced European avant-garde art movements to business communications and publishing, and he continued throughout his career to be a proponent of modern design. In the 1930s through the 1950s, he combined elements from modern painting and contemporary typography in his advertisements for such clients as Orbach's department store, Disney Hats, Schenley Liquors, Playtex and El Producto Cigars, as well as in the hundreds of book jackets and covers he designed for Alfred A. Knopf and other publishers. In some of his early ads, he also used icons and symbols -- a new concept at that time -- and introduced simple designs that incorporated white space and color as framing devices.
Professor Rand was born in Brooklyn in 1914 and began drawing pictures of store signs as a preschooler, despite the Orthodox Jewish laws followed by his family that prohibited him from making pictures. As a high school student in Manhattan, he took night classes at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and later attended the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League, where he studied with Georg Grosz.
His first job was for the George Switzer Agency in Manhattan, where Professor Rand designed lettering and packages for Squibb and other clients. In 1935 he opened his own small studio on East 38th Street. A year later, at age 21, he began designing pages for Apparel Arts magazine and was hired as an art director for its parent company, Esquire-Coronet, developing fashion and gift layouts for Esquire magazine.
He further developed his own graphic style designing covers for Direction, an arts and culture magazine with an anti-Fascist focus. In 1941 he became art director at an advertising agency started by William Weintraub, a partner at Esquire-Coronet. There he created designs for Dubonnet, Lee Hats and Auto Car Corporation.
Professor Rand was hired as the graphic design consultant for IBM in 1956 and designed the corporation's logo and entire identity system. This work was followed by his creation of logos for Westinghouse and United Parcel Service in 1961, ABC in 1962 and Cummins Engine in 1979. All of these logos are still in use.
In addition to teaching on campus, Professor Rand also instructed students in graphic design through Yale's summer program in Brissago, Switzerland, and was a guest professor at Cooper Union and other schools around the country.
His many honors include being inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame of the New York Art Director's Club and receiving gold medals from the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Type Directors Club. He also was awarded the first Florence Prize for Visual Communication by the Universita Internazionale Dell'Arte in Florence, Italy, an award that has been described as the "Nobel Prize for advertising."
After his retirement from Yale, Professor Rand continued to work from his studio in Weston, Connecticut, and wrote three memoirs, "Paul Rand: A Designer's Art" 1985 , "Design, Form and Chaos" 1994 and "From Lascaux to Brooklyn" 1996 .
His work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Library of Congress, Zurich's Kunstgewerbeschule Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. Professor Rand is survived by his wife, Marion Swannie Rand; a daughter from a previous marriage, Catherine Rand of Cincinnati; and two grandsons, also of Cincinnati.