Tuesday, April 4, 2023

the impactful design of Herb Lubalin (1950s)




Typography is the key in Herb Lubalin's design. "What I do is not really typography, which I think of as an essentially mechanical means of putting characters down on a page." Lubalin was a brilliant, iconoclastic advertising art director—in the 1940s with Reiss Advertising and then for twenty years with Sudler and Hennessey. Recipient of medal after medal, award after award, and in 1962 named Art Director of the Year by the National Society of Art Directors, he has also been a publication designer of great originality and distinction. He designed startling in the early 60s, intellectually and visually astringent Fact in the mid-60s, lush and luscious Avant Garde late in the same decade, and founded U & lc in 1973 and saw it flourish into the 80s But it is Lubalin and his typographics—words, letters, pieces of letters, additions to letters, connections and combinations, and virtuoso manipulation of letters—to which all must return. The "typographic impresario of our time," Dorfsman called him, a man who "profoundly influenced and changed our vision and perception of letter forms, words and language." (taken from AIGA).
what do we see here?

1- black & white printing on uncoated paper,
2- one or two typefaces
3- Lubalin payed a single artist to handle all illustrations, rather than dealing with multiple creators.
4- the result is a dynamic minimalism that emphasized the underlying sentiment of the magazine,
5- i.e., lubalin was a functionalist/conceptualist.