Reasons for Visiting the US

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 also visiting 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 nutshell: if one looks at Central-European printed matter of that time, like posters, it becomes clear that designers dealt mostly with an exaggeration of physical realities, in which material qualities are 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 example, 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 another 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, NJ, 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 generously introduced me 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, and that influenced me greatly, was 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 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 advertising, 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, and 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, that encourages us to commit ourselves to larger and more important issues than the “award circus.”

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 having a very shallow reservoir of words, which allowed me to communicate efficiently in pidgin English/German in the everyday design office environment, but it was 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.)

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 changed in the late sixties with the studios of Frank Glickman (whom Jack Dickerson made very successful), Michael Sands, Emily Hiestand, Gil Fishman, Coco Rayns, Logovitz & Moore, and a few others.