It is time for design historians worth their salt, to untangle the amazing myths that obscure a very simple reality, behind which many American designers have been hiding, to shield themselves from exposure to something that is not as glamorous as has been portrayed by their professional design media. For instance, historians have to set the record of Unimark International straight, once and for all, and also soon and before key people, who know the real truth, will dissolve into their own destiny. There just may not be as much room on the Unimark bandwagon for seven founders as some claim, not even six. Nobody has ever exposed the power struggle within the group of founders. Queries: who were the real founders; who were the other key people who had to supervise and implement the narrowly selected aesthetic framework; who were the late-comers and also-rans.

Larry (Laurence) Klein, my direct neighbor on Asbury Avenue in Evanston, IL,  would always make distinctions between those designers that talk design and designers that “do” design. Mr. Klein, was never very happy when he talked about Unimark. He claimed that he was one of the four original founders of Unimark in 1965, and had no recollection of more than the original four. Klein had invested heavily in funding the financial base of the new company. He would question that there were seven founders, maybe seven hangers-on. There are so many unsubstantiated claims. He left Unimark already in 1966 to reestablish his own business.

Larry Klein also knew but nothing about Katherine McCoy, who in her resume claimed and still claims to have worked at Unimark in 1967. But then McCoy also claims to have worked with Muriel Cooper at the MIT Press. In a telephone conversation on May 21, 2014 with Allan Davis, the founder of Omnigraphis,  he had no recall of McCoy’s working relationship. McCoy was a junior designer and not responsible for the liaison between his office and the MIT Press. He doubts that there was a deep working relationship between her and Cooper, because it was Cooper’s style to only deal directly with him, rather than his employees. He remembers also that McCoy was much more engaged, during the short time she was employed by this office, with projects for Gillette rather than MIT Press. Thomas Briggs a longtime colleague and collaborator with Cooper and a later partner in Omnigraphics, as well as Laurie Rosser, Muriel Cooper’s assistant, had no recall about the suggested working liaison between the two women.

Although it is true, that most likely McCoy worked at Omnigraphics on some book covers for the MIT Press, because Omnigraphics’ design style fit MIT Press goals, I doubt that she had a close working relationship with Muriel. At this point, I would like to see proof of her “extensive” design work for the Press; actual design work, not design direction or design talk. Design direction was Muriel’s responsibility. One or two covers don’t make a close working relationship with a design director, who at that time is wielding enormous clout. The clout is so strong, that the whole Basel entourage: Gerstner, Müller-Brockmann, Weingart, Hoffmann and Van Arx, at different times visit  the MIT Publications Office, nearly annually and by mistake, hoping that we would publish their accounts. They confused the MIT Office of Publications with the MIT Press, as also have many design historians, tell tailing about their shoddy research. If I would put all these names into my resume, like Katherine McCoy does, I would have a resume so deep, nobody would have boots high enough to wade through it.

The real facts are, that in the late fifties and all the way through the sixties, the design community in the Boston area stayed very, very small, while the advertising community was extraordinarily large and perceived itself on the top of the heap. Advertising designers and advertising art directors were very specialized, totally absorbed by newspaper, magazine and TV advertising. Advertising agencies during the fifties and sixties would not deal with collateral materials, like brochures, house organs or corporate identities. They farmed these projects out to the small “commercial art” studios. Later, because studios started to specialize, projects like institutional/corporate identities and annual reports, became the major stay for graphic design studios. Even Jay Doblin, design’s marketing guru, at a presentation to Ginn Publishing said, that “corporate identities mean little, have no particular positive or negative consequences, but they pay for a lot of bills and allow designers to live a fairly good life”.

The isolation through the advertising industry was not only true of “commercial artists” but also of “graphic designers”. Both groups were chafing under the nomenclature of “commercial art” and competed for attention from middle management. Only after Marketing became the center of American Consumer Communication, does “Corporate Identity” get reeled back into Advertising and becomes a major activity of agencies, under the new nomenclature of “Branding” with the help of marketing departments and research teams, focusing on product names and identities within the framework of “Branding”.

Advertising art and graphic design ignored and still do the long tradition of book design in Boston and New York; the work of designers like William Addison Dwiggins. This was made even more difficult by designers like Lou Danziger, who taught one of the first American History of Design courses at Harvard, not as part of the regular course program but during the university’s summer sessions. Danziger, decided to clean up the history not as a true history, but as a reflection of his personal preferences: “Design history should never be taught by historians, but by practicing colleagues”. He focused mostly, and so did almost all the other design historians that followed his example, on what could be called the imports from Europe, linked to Bauhaus, Ulm and Basel, while ignoring the very healthy and striving advertising and book design industries. There was very little “American Design History” to design history in those days. Unfortunately, history is what it is; not what a single person would like it to be.

In Design history the major problem lies in the fact, that American design historians are not trained as scholars or researchers of facts. They rather are reporters of anecdotes, that often cannot be verified. Much what is written about individual designers for occasions like AIGA award ceremonies is rarely critical and is mostly written by associates and friends. So, there is a lot of misinformation floating about. To that add the unfortunate fact, that most American design historians, like P. Meggs, are not competent in other languages. They neither speak Italian, French or German and therefore had and still have to rely, which they do heavily, on the accounts of writers for the English speaking professional media, stuff that fills a lot of pages, but rarely is tested for accuracy of dates and true contributions.

At some point, somebody has to look at the interests of designers in mythology. The early designers and architects were totally uncomfortable with their identities and tried to change them in ways to signal separations form the general public (Corbusier; Ludwig Mies to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, etc., etc.) The Bauhaus published under the nomenclature of advanced printing technology (Offset) which was not available at that time. Kepes published a series of books, that in design circles are known as the “Kepes Books” giving the impression, that he authored the contents when he only wrote the introductions. In 1965-66, Kepes edited a set of six anthologies, published as a series called the “Vision and Value Series”. Each volume contained more than 200 pages of essays by some of the most prominent artists, designers, architects and scientists of the time. The breadth of the volumes is reflected in their titles: The Education of Vision; Structure in Art and Science; The Nature and Art of Motion; Module, Symmetry, Proportion, Rhythm; Sign, Image, Symbol; and The Man-Made Object. Cibyl Moholy-Nagy openly claimed that he had appropriated much from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s writings and research, especially from “Vision in Motion” (1947). Isn’t it interesting, that a review of claims of originality or plagiarism have not yet been launched?

Let’s face it, the only true reason for knowing the schools of the Bauhaus, Basel and Ulm in such details, is the fact that they launched amazing publication campaigns. That does not mean that the publications covered the true everyday reality or chronological timeframes. These institutions were very selective, showing only the best over decades, which not necessarily reflected a much more mundane and every-day student experience. The envious bystanders would not ever deal with the flaws. They dealt with the ideal and that which is out of reach. There was no failure at the Bauhaus, Basel or Ulm.

The American design historian of the fifties and sixties tried to cope with the amazing influx of central European design concepts. Just to give an example; Meggs never understood, that the MIT design culture was not founded by an American designer, but by a wordsmith, an editor, namely John I. Mattill, whose early vision of a Modernist approach to campus graphics and identities set the stage for the evolution of the publications arm of MIT. He imported for several summers, to supplement staff members on leave or sabbatical, long before I was hired, designers from Europe to design a long list of summer session announcements for the university. He also was very active on the CASE Council for Advancement and Support of Education, the result of a merger between the American Alumni Council and the American College Public Relations Association.

I got to know some but not all of them. There was George Adams (previously named Georg Teltscher), a former Bauhaus student, who, of course, brought with him the Bauhaus mystique. By introducing the MIT design staff to the Bauhaus, he transmitted some of the superb teaching techniques and theories. In addition, there was he, whom we irreverently called the “Bauhaus Kepes” (or Little Moholy or Moholy’s Vision) across the street In his Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and Walter Gropius’ TAC, the Architects Collaborative office, was just a stone-throw across Cambridge. The mystique had feet, faces and voices. Kurt Kranz, a former Bauhaus student in Dessau, was a major contributor to the curriculum at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center in the late sixties – also just down the street. Everyone was aware of

the dissemination of Bauhaus concepts and ideas.

There is also another twist in American design history. As head of the school, Gropius underlined his philosophical framework for the Bauhaus, by selecting the crafts and shunning relationships with the art academy, claiming that the academy was dilettantish. When he and some of his faculty come to the US, Mies van der Rohe and Moholy Nagy end up appropriately at the Illinois Institute of Technology, a technical university, while all others end up at ivy-league schools, the American academies – Gropius and Breuer at Harvard, and Albers after some struggle at Black Mountain, ends up at Yale. None of the design historians have addressed this major change from one philosophy overnight to another.

There is no question that MIT chafed under this rebuke, but Kepes brought later many of the Bauhaus people like Richard Filipowski, a graduate of the Institute of Design in Chicago, who joined MIT in 1952 as an associate professor and was the first to introduce the teaching methods of the Bauhaus design philosophy to MIT students. Kepes came to the United States in 1937 as head of the Light and Color Department of the Institute of Design in Chicago, then known as the New Bauhaus. He joined MIT in 1946 as associate professor of visual design, becoming a full professor in 1949. He was appointed Institute Professor in 1970. Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) in 1967 and served as its director until 1972.

In the MIT Publications Office there was Paul Talmann (1932-9187), a wonderful Swiss Minimalist who worked with kinetic sculptures and modular paintings and constructions that could be arranged by a willing audience. Paul Talmann designed the same summer session programs as we all did. But Paul also influenced Ralph Coburn’s work, that can be seen in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Also, Ralph worked side by side with Ellsworth Kelly. He and Ellsworth had been friends and had amazing exchanges on visual and aesthetic sensibilities and attitudes, which one cannot trace back to design, but distinctly to minimal art.

Then there is the amazing mystery woman that most Americans know so little about. During the time, when I was a design student in Hamburg in the early fifties, Walter Herdeg showed her work, featuring her with Karl Gerstner and others, as an up and coming Swiss designer. Thérèse Moll, a young Swiss designer, an assistant in Karl Gerstner’s Basel office, worked in the MIT Publications Office in 1958. She introduced the MIT Office of Publications staff to modular typography, but not Muriel Cooper, because Muriel was on a long leave. She picked up the concepts of modular typography much later, when she begins her work on the famous “Bauhaus Book” which becomes the cornerstone for her design efforts. Her work, before her assignment at the MIT Press is much more eclectic. Muriel is not a disciplined typographer. It is Carl Zahn who helps her over the hurdles.

Carl Zahn, a Boston designer, was a very close friend of Cooper, Casey and Coburn. He was the head of the design office at the Museum of Fine Arts. Carl was not only superbly educated, but had stretched his interests beyond the typical European design fad. He knew the people at the different type foundries of Haas, Bauer and Stempel. Hermann Zapf was a close, personal friend, and they shared issues of cultural history rather than surface trends. The MIT publications design staff, including me, consulted Carl Zahn for nearly everything – availability of type faces, ideal printing resources, paper pricing and quality color separations. Carl was another unsung design hero, who, because he had no need for notoriety, was overlooked. Meanwhile he was one of the best book designers ever, in Boston. He did not have to inflate his resume. His work spoke for him. I don’t remember many designers of the sixties, who were able to reprogram an odd typeface in the hot metal system, in such ways, so it was able to compete with newly cut faces…and that before the digital technology. When I traveled home in 1963, Carl gave me introductions to his friends at Stempel, Bauer, the Klingspor Museum and other places. Hermann Zapf spent a whole day with me showing me the steps between the conception of a type face and the arduous implementation process leading to print production. At that time, he was finishing up Optima and his wife Gudrun was still working on refining Diotima.

Another myth has to die. Before the dawn of digital typography, few professionals received a solid understanding of type. One of the exceptions was Yale, because of the very close connection between the design program and the Yale Press. Most other schools had very poor typography programs. Foundry type and the upkeep of a properly functioning typeshop was very expensive, manpower intensive and cumbersome. That is why very few graphic designers graduated with a functioning typography knowledge. During that time, students knew more about “Letterform” rendering short headlines to perfection with brush and pencil, but had little experience with larger blocks or columns of type—quite different from students nowadays. Neither Cooper (background in art education), Jackie (fashion illustration) nor Ralph (architecture) had been formally trained in typography. But on their desks were Müller-Brockmann’s books. The team learned typography on the hoof, by trial and error, and with hefty punishment for mistakes, when the budget was easily exhausted by careless decisions. Therese Moll was the office’s first real typographer.

When it comes to me, I was very lucky. In the same ways design programs in the US were soft on typography, so was my school in Hamburg. But I entered the design profession before offset printing, recalling that the first offset press was seen as a technical phenomenon in the middle fifties in Hamburg. I was hired by Chemie Grünenthal GmbH, a young pharmaceutical company attached to much older and much larger soap manufacturing company, Dalli. Dalli had its own well-furbished in-house typeshop with expert typesetters and a large letterpress printshop with print craftsmen. The staff had little patience with wasted efforts and so I was forced to learn all operations as quickly as possible, otherwise my job assignment would have been in jeopardy.

I learned modular typography through a very complex packaging system, that was based on the modular proportions of the various package sizes for ointments, pills, lozenges, powders, vaccination phials, bottles, cartons and bags for medication for men and beast; and French, English, Portuguese and German language. Each package was printed in a dark green (one color), and the stripe holding the corporate identity had to be considered in relationship to the individual product size, as well as the identity of the family of products. Although there seemed an explosion of products, sizes, and packages, the task was to reduce the overall inventory to a minimum. We did not use Müller-Brockmann’s “grid” dividing the plane into equal units. Instead, we used something close, but not as sophisticated as Karl Gerstner’s dynamic proportional programming, which in our case started  with the packaging and then was expanded to other printed material, but especially to the design of modular exhibition stands that could be downsized or up-scaled for the various pharmaceutical congresses all over Europe. For me, this became the beginning of seeing and responding to the visual world through proportion, not through the geometry of a grid. To set up a geometric formula takes little time and effort, because the intentions are to press everything into the modules. Dynamic proportional programming, when it considers all ingredients, text/images, is so much more time consuming. But it provides for a totally rewarding experience when the slowly evolving system accommodates every and all components without force.

I may have been ahead for a moment, having had to practice typography in the real world, rather than relying on theoretical interpretations, but both Casey and Coburn caught up quickly, and because of Coburn’s architecture background, his systems became more and more complex and lead to interesting conversations. Coburn argued with Müller-Brockmann. What I learned from Brockmann was his concern for the complexities created by the dynamics of diagonals and triangular shapes, for which he admired Mondrian. I agreed with Brockmann; I think Mondrian was the only one that I know, who was able to deal with corners and the strange intersections that diagonals create