Paul Rand was a pioneering graphic designer who is considered the father of modern graphic design. In the 1950s, he began creating design systems and establishing the importance of corporate identity. Rand created the first modern design system for IBM, establishing the concept of a unified visual identity across all company communications. His work defining the roles of logos, branding, and visual identity systems shaped modern business and established graphic design as an important profession.

1. THE HISTORY OF CORPORATE IDENTITY
In 1996, Graphic Design Legend Paul Rand declared “the
greatest living graphic designer”—it was yet another
‘feather in the cap’ for him, and one of many during a long
and colorful career that would make any present day
designer envious. But more so when the acclamation
comes from a visionary like Steve Jobs. In fact, it was Paul
Rand’s dedication to treating design as a function of
business that helped Steve Jobs’ Apple to become the
design-leading powerhouse that it is today.
In 1986, Rand was hired to create a logo for Jobs,
reportedly for a fee of $100,000. But long before that—back
in the 1950s—he had already begun to pave the way for
design systems, and the notion of corporate identity.
Many consider Rand to be the father of modern graphic
design—the man who introduced the idea that commercial
art could, and should, have both a strong visual appeal
and an important functional role in the world of modern
business.
In any case, his influence on design, starting in the 1930s,
forever changed the world of modern business.

2. This is how he did it.
A Young Start
Rand was born Peretz Rosenbaum, in Brooklyn, New York,
in 1914. As a young boy, he exercised his creativity by
painting signs for his father’s grocery store but his
curiosity, and his developing interest in art, soon expanded
far beyond grocery signs. His traditional Orthodox Jewish
upbringing forbade the creation of certain images that
could be interpreted as idolatry. He persisted, however, and
found influence in European design magazines while
further developing his own style by sketching in secret.
In his late teens, despite his father’s wishes, Rand attended
school at the Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of
Design in New York City. Although these institutions were
(and still are) leaders in design education in the US, Rand
was dissatisfied with their idealisms and approach to
modern design. Instead, he decided to educate himself by
focusing on developments in communication arts that were
coming out of Europe at the time.
“European designers at that time were ideologically aligned
to some sort of an idea,” explains Alexander Tochilovsky,
design curator at The Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design
& Typography at The Cooper Union in New York City.

3. “They had an ideal in mind, like the Bauhaus, and the
Russian constructivists. There’s a philosophical
underpinning to the work they were doing, so the
formalism was an extension of the stuff they were
exploring. It was new, it was effective, and Paul Rand and
other American designers saw that it was different; it was
nice, it was changed visually. It was not old-fashioned; it
was very progressive. It was modern. It fit what was
happening in the arts. It was revolutionary.”
Rand was one of the first American graphic designers to
apply European idealism to American consumerism. In the
early 1930s. he quickly made a name for himself, designing
product spreads and magazine covers—many of which
employed his particularly modern method of grabbing a
reader’s attention: putting eye-grabbing visuals first and
explanatory copy second.
“As a designer, Rand had a different skill set from that of
advertising copywriters,” explains Tochilovsky. “He could
see the bigger picture because he really was putting the
whole thing together visually. The communication of
advertising is first visual and then linguistic or verbal. You
see it first, and then you read it. So if it doesn’t make you
interested in seeing it, or if you don’t have the desire to
keep looking at it, you’re not going to get to the level of the
text. It was common sense to him, but nobody else was
really doing it.”

4. By 1935, Rand was already considered to be one of the
most forward-thinking designers of his generation. But, at
the age of 21, he had to take on his first serious project in
brand identity—his own.
Many innovative businesses today accept—and even
celebrate—designers who have different origins,
backgrounds, and perspectives. Acceptance was not the
reality for an Orthodox Jew living in post-World War I
America, however. As a result, Rand legally changed his
name from Peretz Rosenbaum to ‘Paul Rand’—a name
chosen partly for its potential for a well-balanced graphical
symbol when he signed his work.
In 1937, aged 23, Rand went from creating magazine
spreads on a freelance basis, to the distinguished position
of Art Director at Esquire Magazine. At the age where
today’s designers are fresh out of design school and just
getting traction within the industry, Rand was already at
the top of his field—effectively carrying a torch into new
territory, and leading the way into the future of graphic
design.
The Ad Man
Like many creatives at the time, Rand gradually moved into
New York’s cutthroat world of advertising on Madison
Avenue. In 1941, as a 27-year-old with nearly a half-decade

5. of art direction experience behind him, he was formally
offered the role of Chief Art Director at the newly-formed ad
agency William H. Weintraub & Co.
With a penchant for strong and balanced visual
communication, Rand took an approach to advertising that
was radically different from anything that had gone before.
Rather than shrouding an advertisement in copy and
placing it with a generic image, he chose to celebrate white
space and treat each advertisement as its own unique piece
of art—much like his magazine covers.
“Rand truly understood that the aesthetic draws attention,”
says Tochilovsky. “It allows for information to come
through in an interesting way that is not bogged down by
overloaded and overused imagery. That’s what was
happening in advertising, left and right–cliché after cliché.
It doesn’t even matter what the text is. When the visuals
are constantly saturated with the aspirational lifestyle
thing, companies have a hard time cutting through the
noise. He saw the potential of the new aesthetic to cut
through all that. It was more effective in terms of getting
the message across; to them, it was a no-brainer. It was
just so much better than what was being done previously.”
By bringing visual intelligence and wit to advertising, Rand
effectively helped establish the importance of the Art
Director’s role as we know it today. His influence spread far
and wide, and it was only a matter of time before the

6. world’s leading corporations picked up his idealism and his
understanding of the role of design as a functional tool in
modern business.
Good Design is Good Business
By the 1950s, International Business Machines
Corporation (IBM) had established itself as one of the
leading data processing companies in the world. IBM’s
president, Thomas Watson Jr., was one of the earliest
believers in the role of design as a functional tool in the
modern business landscape. He ordered a complete
overhaul of IBM’s graphic communications system and
quite specifically, chose Paul Rand to do it.
Over the next decade, Rand created what was perhaps the
first design system for a corporate identity.
Starting with the redesign of the IBM logo—a years-long
process of strategic incremental changes—Rand created a
central design language that informed all applications of
the IBM identity across the entire company. By
incorporating horizontal stripes into the logotype, he was
both able to unify the letter and give the otherwise
monolithic company a more ‘human’ dimension. The result
was to be the basis for a new graphic standards system,
implemented in everything from letterheads and package
designs to showroom interiors and company offices.

7. The design system was so thorough, in fact, that it would
later influence Unimark’s 1970 New York City Transit
Authority Graphics Standards Manual for the New York
City subway system, and Danne & Blackburn’s 1975
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Graphics
Standards Manual for NASA.
Today we take for granted the importance of corporate
identity and brand cohesiveness. Before Rand’s overhaul of
the IBM logo and the company’s entire design system, the
concept was nearly non-existent. But it wasn’t just Rand’s
skill in design that led to his success in implementing a
modern design system; it was also in his ability to sell non-
designers on the functional role that design plays in the
corporate identity. In many ways, it was Rand’s ability to
communicate the importance of design in presentations
that opened up the role of the graphic designer, from the
1960s until today.
“The fact that he could meet with the CEOs of these
companies, and convince them about good design, had an
insane impact on the rest of the corporate world and the
emergence of the field of graphic design,” explains
Tochilovsky. “Executives from other corporations were
looking at IBM and saying, ‘Those graphic designers did
that. We need a hotshot designer to do the same thing for
us, because, look, it looks good.’ It was drawing attention.
People saw the value that that had. It definitely redefined

8. things. It also made it a lot easier for designers to do what
they did. I think, in that canon, Rand is right up front.”
With the success of IBM’s design overhaul, it wasn’t long
before other major corporate clients were knocking on
Rand’s door. By the mid-1960s, using a refined graphic
style stripped of unnecessary ornamentation, he revamped
the corporate identities of Westinghouse, UPS, ABC, and a
slew of other rising corporations. Many of those designs
were so timeless, in fact, that they still exist in some form
or another as he first interpreted them in the 1960s.
“Most of these logos are so on point,” says Tochilovsky.
“Even with various updates over the years, many of them
still retain his original touch. The recent upgrade to the
UPS logo, for example, still retains some of the quality that
he injected into it, like the brown color. That’s an insane
move to make, to make it brown. It’s the most
unsophisticated move, but it’s totally perfect. It redefined
the brand, and still defines the brand. Shipping, brown…
you know it’s UPS. That level of precision is pretty spot on,
and really gutsy, too. That’s going out on a limb to say:
‘Let’s not make it blue, let’s not make it something that’s a
neutral thing. No, we’re going to make it defining, but it’s
going to be brown.’”
Ultimately, it didn’t really matter what, or for whom, Rand
was designing. His ability to exercise simplicity and
restraint, and to arrive at extremely effective logo designs

9. and design systems became the new standard for making
corporations more personable. Today, it’s an absolute
necessity.
A Living Legend
While many designers tend to fade out and lose touch in
their later years, Rand continued to become ever more
popular as the years went on—commanding a rumored
$100,000 per single logo design during the 1980s and early
1990s. Among the most notable of his clients during this
time was Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer.
In 1985, after resigning from the company he founded (but
later returned to), Jobs went on to start NeXT Computer, in
an effort to corner the educational sector with a
revolutionary workstation. The field of graphic designers
had grown substantially by this time but, to develop the
identity of his new company, Jobs wanted one designer,
and one designer only: Paul Rand.
“(Paul Rand) is one of the most professional people I’ve ever
worked with,” explains Jobs in a 1993 interview. “I asked
him if he would come up with a few options. He said, ‘No, I
will solve the problem for you, and you will pay me. You
don’t have to use the solution; if you want options, go talk
to other people. But I’ll solve the problem for you.’ It was
very refreshing to work with somebody like that.”

10. Whether by accident or through the workings of a higher
being, the meeting between these two legends had a
massive impact on the future of design as we know it
today, and played a part in the story of one of the world’s
most valuable companies, so deeply rooted in cohesive
brand identity and user interactions.
But perhaps more important is Rand’s influence on the
future of graphic design: the future of visual harmony.
“Other people came before him, at the turn of the century,
for sure,” adds Tochilovsky. “But Paul Rand was one of the
first to define everything that came after. To me, he is the
pioneering, defining, quintessential American graphic
designer. I think, without him, a lot of this other work
would have happened but would have been harder. He had
a huge impact on the role of design in industry—something
that significantly paved the way for all graphic designers
today.”