Paul Rand

Paul Rand: Modernist Design illuminates Rand's role as a major figure at the epicenter of twentieth-century art and design. This book is a compendium of essays, tributes, interviews, dialogues, photographic reproductions, contextual timeline, extensive bibliography, and impressions of Rand's impact on modern communication practice and theory. We know Paul Rand through the advertising, editorial, publishing, institutional, identity, corporate, and intellectual legacy he left behind. For him, modernism was a way of life and a belief form, not a style. Like the European proponents, he understood the tenets of modernism as those which could be employed to better human experience in the modern world. He gave life to his art, definition to graphic design, and a reputation to a discipline in need of the evocation of enduring quality. Rand's contemporaries, students, and friends knew a man of even more extraordinarily cultivated and diverse talents and interests. He was an early voice in proposing the essence of modernist theories in visual communication. Rand was both ruthlessly pragmatic and a visionary. Paul Rand: Modernist Design adds to the growing literature on Paul Rand, helping to place him in the proper context within a century of innovative art, design, architecture, science, and technology.