Joseph Binder was born in Vienna in 1898. Trained as a lithographer and attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he won numerous poster competitions, including one for the American Red Cross, thus bringing his reductive modernist design sense stateside. Alongside follow AIGA Medalist, German designer Lucian Bernhart, Binder helped introduce architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s
Less is more approach to young American designers, including AIGA Medalists Lester Beall and Paul Rand.
Binder's design is about:
1. reduction of geometric forms,
2. abstraction means better communication
3. color contrasts,
4. the psychological impact of colors.
His clients
included American Railroads, American Airlines, A&P Iced
Coffee, Fortune and Graphis. In 1948 the U.S.
Navy made him their art director and designer.
or Binder's design for this 1939's New York's World's Fair:
In the 1960s Binder turned away from commercial graphic work
and renewed his explorations in graphic works of art in the
abstract style. His non-objective art was shown in international
exhibitions such as in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the
Museum of Applied Art (MAK) in Vienna.
