Paul Rand - A Designer's Art

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I'm a huge fan of Paul Rand's work. I own quite a lot of his books and cover designs, so I figured I'd start with this one.

A Designer's Art is a collection of Paul Rand's writings about design, taken from a sample of his books and articles written between 1946 to 1984. It's a great introduction to his thinking about graphic design, and I own two versions of this book: The first edition hardcover from 1985, and the first edition paperback from the same year.

The book is filled with examples of his work, including logo designs, book covers, magazine designs, and his children's books. A common thread in most of the texts is Rand's notion of design as the foundation for all art forms, and how good design must come from applying the right form to your unique content. Although Rand's graphic style is very playful and colorful, many of the texts (Design and the Play Instinct, The Meaning of Repetition, etc) have an interesting functional tone, pointing towards the works of Josef Müller-Brockmann and Karl Gerstner.

I use many of these texts as short introductions to the field of graphic design for my graduate students, and the entire book (excluding Rand's obvious disdain for anything computational) has held up pretty well over the years. Oh, and I'm lucky to own the original litography of one of the examples, an illustration from Paul and Ann Rand's book Listen! Listen! from 1969.