Rediscovering Rand: Turning a Personal Project into Something More
Danny Lewandowski
As a designer, the two biggest lessons I could ever learn came from completely different sources. The first was a small sign taped to the window of the cashier’s booth at the top of the Empire State Building in New York City. It simply read:
You don’t ask, you don’t get.
I have no idea why that was there, but it changed my personal and professional life forever by helping me to fight past my natural introversion and fear of speaking up, asking questions, and getting involved. The second came from one of our field’s most celebrated practitioners: Paul Rand. He was paraphrasing Mies van der Rohe, but one of his most enduring quotes has become a personal mantra:
“Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.”
I believe that anyone involved in any creative endeavor, when first starting out, has an innocent fascination with everything because it’s new. We imitate, reproduce, repeat, steal, examine, search, struggle . . . and try to be original to stand out and find our place and purpose in our life and career. But being “good” by Rand’s standards is hard enough to achieve and trying to be “original” will merely come off as flashy, pretentious, and self-serving.
I’ve always been a fan of his work with his witty compositions, exquisite forms, and brilliant identity solutions, but the more I learned from him the more I realized that design does not just inform your work, but everything around you if you’re paying attention. It took me a long time to realize this and wish someone had told me sooner—it would’ve saved me a ton of headaches.
I graduated from Texas State Technical College in 1995 and again from the Portfolio Center in Atlanta, GA in 1998. The nineties were an amazing decade of change and evolution for our field. Photoshop 3 introduced layers, experimental fonts were created by foundries like House Industries and Emigré, David Carson challenged everything we knew about layout and readability, and the Internet was a new and dreaded frontier. I became a sponge and tried to learn everything I could about my tools and techniques without much regard to what I was doing with them.
By 2005, while working in Connecticut on a large airline account (whose name is synonymous with the Greek alphabet), my own thoughts on design began to evolve. It became less about what something looked like and more about how my part fit into the bigger picture. This is a critical step in your own evolution. Once you get past a certain level of learning your tools and worrying about the “how” of doing something and worry more about the “why” you’re doing them, your world grows exponentially to another level. You’re able to critique and refine elements on both a micro and macro level to a new degree. It also refueled that fire to keep learning and educating myself more on this new direction.
So I went looking for inspiration and leadership and sadly I found that our field drifted away from serious design criticism and philosophy and was mostly focused on its tools. We had lost our thought leaders—where was our Jan Tschichold? Our Laszlo Moholy-Nagy? Our Alvin Lustig?
I found myself drawn back to Paul Rand’s seminal book A Designer’s Art. I was never an avid reader of design or art philosophy because of its difficult language, but Rand’s style was different. His short essays on complex topics like aesthetics, form, function, typography, and humor were so accessible and clearly written. His skills as a writer were just as strong as his artistic skills and set him apart from his peers, and is unfortunately a fact overlooked by many. He defined design as:
“The synthesis of form and content.”
That simple statement redefined for me what it meant to be a designer. Everything I thought I knew about design expanded and opened my eyes to a deeper level of our craft. His writing paired with his work was exactly what I was looking for and needed. He gave my work a sense of purpose and direction that I was never able to find from anyone or anything before. I was hooked and determined to learn more.
Frustrated to discover that there were no online resources about Mr. Rand, this was the perfect opportunity to turn a now serious interest into a personal project. Since I had decided to focus my career on digital design, the obvious outlet was a website. With a clear goal in mind I dove headfirst back into learning about technologies and techniques I was never exposed to before. The website became my personal playground to experiment without the restrictions of a client, a boss, or agency politics. I was now able to pair my tools more intelligently with my new definition of design and try to do something “good.”
When taking on a subject as huge as Rand for a personal project like this, fear and uncertainty are an obvious deterrent. Will I get in trouble for putting this together? Am I good enough? Will people like it? I thought back to the Empire State sign and just went for it. Now that’s not to say that you still don’t have to be smart and make sure you’re covered, but if you’re doing it for genuine, good-hearted reasons and people feel that, they’ll likely support you. In my case, I finally got the courage to call Mrs. Rand to talk about the project with her. She was elated and gave her blessing—”whatever you can get your mitts on” was how she put it. Then it was game on with no looking back.
Throughout the years I’ve had the opportunity to meet like-minded “Randophiles” which evolved into curating a major exhibition about him in Atlanta. Running from October 2013 through January 2014, Paul Rand: Defining Design took the unusual approach of pairing his work with his writing rather than the standard client or time-based presentation. This was a chance for people to read the same text that inspired me and help them find their own definition of design. A number of events and tours were hosted, but none were as special as when Steven Heller visited and gave two lectures to over 650 people combined. It was an immensely successful exhibit for the museum and personally my proudest project to ever work on . . . and it all started from the simplest of ideas.
So as cliché as it always sounds, if you’ve got an idea or passion for something, then pursue it! You never know where it may lead, who you’ll meet, or what you’ll learn. Education continues far beyond the classroom and designers should always continue to pursue what interests them, whether it’s related to their field or not. It will keep you fresh, interested, and hopefully bring some peace and happiness to all areas of your life.
To close with one last thought from Rand, in the film Conversations with Paul Rand by Preston McClanahan he was speaking to a group of students and said:
“When you say ‘design’ or any word like ‘form,’ ‘design,’ ‘aesthetics’ everybody has a definition which doesn’t correspond to yours, so in effect nobody knows what you’re talking about.
You have to define your terms. It’ll make you much happier. It’s like an epiphany, a light that suddenly lights up.”