Reasons for Visiting the USA

Working for Chemie Grünenthal GmbH, the design staff had to respond to the advertising campaigns for medications that were produced on the premises under licenses for American Cyanamid, Lederle, and others. These corporations asked us to use their promotional materials for the European market. A very distinct problem emerged; physicians in Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy, to whom these mailings and ads were directed, failed to understand the American use of metaphors for the construction of their messages. I made the proposal to study the use of metaphors in American advertising for one year at Rhode Island School of Design, while visiting also the design offices at Ciba-Geigy in Summit, New Jersey, being advised by Jack Marmeras and their New York advertising agency of Sudler & Hennessey.

The problem in a capsule, if one looks at Central-European printed matter of that time, like posters, it becomes clear that designers dealt mostly with an over-exaggeration of physical realities, in which the material qualities are further enhanced through super realism – it is not just what it is, it is more than what it is. (The Knoll chair is shown in spectacular simplicity – warts and all.)

Quite differently, New York agencies would rely on conceptual metaphors – something else that feels as if one had experienced something like this before. For examples, in marketing a mood changing medication, American Cyanamid selected a photograph of a typical New York intersection at rush hour, blurred and with accentuated hustle and bustle, while the name of the product was stenciled in large white gothic letters, as safety zone of zebra stripes, onto the pedestrian side walk. In an other example, they showed the outline of the same letters inscribed in the sand of a beach, suggesting leisure, absence of pressure. (In this vein, the Knoll chair would be shown by Woody Pirtle as “hot seat”, ”hot pepper”.) Since then “language” has become one of my major foci.

At RISD, I was strongly supported by two professors, Professor James Pfeufer, Chair of the Graphic Design Program, and Alexander Nesbitt, at that time, the premier authority on the history of movable type and letterform.

Professor Pfeufer made all the contacts with Ciba-Geigy. He funded several trips to Summit, N.J. to visit the pharmaceutical house. He introduced me to James Marmaras and Jim Vogelman, who were responsible for the corporate typographic and graphic identity.  Pfeufer also introduced me to Herbert Lubalin at Sudler & Hennessey, Ciba-Geigy’s advertising agency. Professor Pfeufer also sponsored me for permanent residence visa. He was extremely kind to me.

I never took courses with Professor Alexander Nesbitt, but from the very first day he took great interests in me. He helped me find accommodations with Anna-Louise Scott, a genealogist, who introduced me generously to the colonial history of New England. Professor Nesbitt made the RISD typeshop available to me, where I learned to enjoy the free application of typography, unfettered by modernist dogma.

We stayed in touch over many years. The most important part that influenced me greatly, were his interests in linguistics. He made it quite clear to me that typography and in fact all of culture is embedded in linguistics. Through him, I became greatly interested in the work of the American linguists: Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Benjamin Whorf of MIT and later Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Each exploration expanded the horizons, from Ray Birdwhistell’s anthropological founding of “Kinesics” (study of facial expression, gestures, posture and gait, and visible arm and body movements) to Ernst Cassirer (“Philosophy of the Symbolic”; or “Language and Myth”) and his associate  Susanne K. Langer (“Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art”), and many others. If I credit anybody for the roots of the  intellectual contents of my teaching, I would name Alexander Nesbitt. Although my physical design work is stylistically lumped together with  Modernism, the contents of the assignments was to challenge any dogma, especially the form concentration without concern for context and contents by the Bauhaus and other design schools, especially MIT’s György Kepes, who claimed that “form” communicates more accurately and efficiently than the word. He never could or did substantiate this claim in front of any language forum.

Unfortunately, RISD at that time had no faculty-experts in US Linguistic Use of Metaphors in Avertising, the area of my research. I was left to my own devices and used my free time to explore classical typography with the help of John Ettlinger, curator at the Ann Mary Brown Memorial Library, which held a special collection of exquisite incunabula. From that time on, I have always believed that the work of Aldus Manutius deserves to be historically enshrined. I consider him one of the early designers, a great role model for any practitioner. He spoke several ancient languages, and because of this he surrounded himself with visionaries of his time. He was an extremely hard worker, allowed no idle chit-chat; visitors had to participate actively in the production of his books, either as translators or cranking the press or inking the type, pulling the impressions. The upshot of his efforts was the rebirth of knowledge embedded in many Greek and Hebrew texts; epics, poetry, history, customs, philosophical beliefs, which without his energy and committed efforts would have been lost for all of the following generations and humanity, maybe forever.

In view of his cultural contributions, I never considered my design experience important enough to warrant a historical account, even though I have always loved designing, and had great success, and hope to continue to design until the very end of my days.

But just perusing the technical complexity imbedded in the amazingly detailed tabular work in Johannes Kepler’s “Tabulae Rudolphinae” or in his early application of Euclid’s principles to his study of the spheres in “Harmonice Mundi” will make anybody humble. It is this perseverance in spite of all the technical problems of his times, which encourage us to commit ourselves to larger and more important issues than the “award circus”.

Reach, McClinton and Humphreys 60-61

After the RISD year, I landed an assistant art director’s job with Reach, McClinton and Humphreys, an advertising agency in Boston, working under Horace Gray and Warren Manning, art directors, hoping to expand my understanding of the regional use of metaphors in advertising, especially direct mail advertising.

I worked on accounts like EG+G, Edgerton, Germershausen and Grier; Acushnet Golf Balls; Raleigh Bycicles; using strobe photographs provided by Harold E. Edgerton and his collaborator Gjon Mili. Mili was an Albanian emigrant to the United States. He attended MIT, where he worked closely with Professor Harold Edgerton in the development of strobe photography and stop-action techniques. It is my belief that later the design for EG+G contributed considerably to my appointment at MIT.

Reach, McClinton and Humphrey concentrated very much on newspaper and journal advertising. Direct mail advertising played a very tertiary role, and I was not able to continue my investigation.

Reasons for Extending the Stay in the USA

As it turned out, one year was much too short for understanding the eloquent use of metaphors, especially because of my personal language handicap of owning just a very narrow reservoir of words, which allowed me to communicate efficiently in English/German pidgin in the everyday design office environment, but it was way short of understanding colloquialisms and especially puns, the very important form of word play suggesting and exploiting multiple meanings of words. There was more need to understand.

Suddenly, I had been in this country longer than I had been at Grünenthal Grünenthal GmbH. Top management had always been very supportive, and I was treated very well, but because of the company’s Thalidomide scandal, in which management did not own up to their responsibilities to prevent the staggering number of births of deformed children, I decided not to return. I had financed my stay in the US, and therefore did not feel any obligations toward a group of administrators who behaved recklessly and against all human ethics. (By the way, the company is still not responding in adequate proportion to the plight of these children, now grown to aging adults, and troubled by their severe handicaps.)

Forming the Boston Office

Through Warren Manning, art director at Reach, McClinton and Humphrey, I became aware of the fact that Leverett A. Peters was looking for partners to open up a competitive design studio, specializing in the design of collateral material. Peters had also approached Clifton Hadfield, a Boston illustrator. We three formed the initial design studio of Leverett A. Peters and Associates with Leverett Peters as business manager and salesman; Clifton Hadfield as illustrator; and I became the Associate responsible for graphic design for the first year of the studio’s existence. The configuration made a lot of sense to me. My language reservoir was still very small and I did not know the history of Boston studios or the major players and design buyers as Peters did.

Also, I grew up in a time when design studios did not want to sever relationships with illustration. Whatever assignments came to the door had to be skillfully  managed and produced. Clifton Hadfield was very talented.

After the first very successful year, on the basis of Leverett A. Peters’ business plan the staff was expanded way beyond any feasible financial reality: a secretary; a salesman on salary, not commission, who brought in  few or no new clients, a traffic manager, a well educated designer who was to police the flow of projects to assure accuracy, fidelity, delivery dates and adhesion to budget concerns, and two inexperienced junior designers, who had to be trained. There were not enough projects to support the exorbitant increase in unnecessary overhead. Office space was also doubled.

Accounts were Badger Industries; Cornell University Press; Deck House, Inc.; Simmons College; Harvard University; Stanmar Leisure Homes; Oxford Paper Company (photographs by Herbert Matter), WGBH Boston, Henry Sawyer Printers, Daniel Printing and others.

The business management style of Leverett A. Peters became the bone of contention for my leaving. Clifton Hadfield had already severed his relationship with us on the same grounds. Mr. Peters had the bad habit of making arrangements with clients for pay in advance of completion of many projects. Sometimes the moneys were already spent before a project had completed its cycle. Therefore no moneys could be expected to come in. To have cash at hand, Peters would collect social secure fees from the staff, but would not forward those to the IRS, leaving everyone vulnerable.

The demise of the studio had a lot to do with creating a deficit without ever having the ability to recover. A few years after I left, the studio dissolved. It is my guess, because Peters was considered a very ethical person, suppliers gave him room, as he always wanting to eliminate his debt, but the early deficit was moved forward every year without ever creating any solvency. There is one rule for life, one does not spend money one does not have!

A large portion of studio projects for our office was generated by the book publishing industry and its art directors, editors and art buyers. At the beginning, our studio benefitted strongly from designing dust jackets, covers for paperbacks, front matter and full guts for hard cover books for several Boston publishers. It kept our studio and the association with Leverett A. Peters busy and alive. Usually, the budgets were small; around $200, $250 – $300 tops (half for the purchase of type-house services; half for the design of three comprehensive layouts and in addition the finished camera copy for the selected solution. It behooved, studio managers to write contracts rather for series of cover assignments than compete for single cover designs. The budgets allowed for little research. We were lucky, the Boston Public Library was across the street and one of our luxury assets. Later on, in the evolution and expansion of the office, the sales staff had to bring in larger projects, and the design for the book trade faded into the background, unless contracts could be secured for either whole series of covers or full book prototypes.

In the early history of the evolution of Graphic Design in Boston, there were very few design studios. The majority of commercial artists were freelancers working by themselves. Some of the assignments did not come from the publishers but from large printing production companies that serviced the publishing industries. Frequently, as part of large printing contracts, the printer was required to supply also the design services, especially for the front matter. By farming the creative design portion out to different freelancers or the emerging studios, this disjointed process created mediocre treatments of the typography for dust jackets, hard-covers and the typography for the major text matter. To have better oversight and control of the quality of the total project, it was better to work with publishers. During that time, publishers had to be introduced to modular typography and establishing typographic programs for series as well as structural and proportional consistencies.

The State of Graphic Design in Boston 1960s

During the early sixties, there were very few “graphic design studios” in Boston: Polaroid with Paul F. Giambarba and later with Bill Field; or the design staff at Arthur D. Little; or Carl Zahn at Boston’s MFA; Herman & Lees,  or Omnigraphics with Alan Davis (one of the most competent designers, steeped very early in modular typography, having worked for Jim Vogelman and Jack Marmaras at Ciba: or the MIT Office of Publications was slowly emerging…at least the typical Boston advertising and book publishing communities were not yet aware of any European style design or modular typography, nor was it interested. The largest, Bill Gunn Studios through David Lizotte and Robert Cipriani was an all-around supplier of high graphics, but also served the advertising industry with illustration and advertising art. Actually, even a decade later, graduates from Basel could not find assignments (Jack Dickerson) in Boston, and although well-trained had to compete against large numbers of low level commercial artists. That changes in the late sixties with the studios of Frank Glickman (whom Jack Dickerson made very successful), Michael Sands, Emily Hiestand, Gil Fishman, Coco Raynes, Logovitz & Moore and a few others.