Unfortunately, I have always made snap decisions, never weighing financial security in favor over personal integrity. Driving home from a day of pure misery at WGBH, I made the decision to quit the next morning, and did. Without discussing or weighing circumstance or ramification, I had my wife’s approval. My family had come through WW II with extremely little, so I knew instinctively that I could survive by collapsing my lifestyle to fit any circumstance. At WGBH, there seemed to be this arrogant aura of “Quit?! You can’t! There is really nothing after WGBH,” something I never could believe, and leaving turned into a career changer with many unanticipated reward.

However, after my sudden departure from WGBH, I had to immediately establish connections with the job market, which at that time presented a picture that was fairly bleak. The dark cloud had a silver lining; two designers in Boston whom I regarded highly, let me know, that the Harvard Business Review was looking for a design consultant. Richard F. Bartlett, a well established design authority in the publishing industry, with a great reputation for impeccable integrity and Carl Zahn, who had been something like an unofficial mentor to me, not only contacted me but also made a strong case for my design credentials with Ralph Lewis, editor of HBR.

Richard F. Bartlett had taught at the Museum School, Radcliff and Simmons and been art/design/typography director at D.C. Heath, Beacon Press, and Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Carl Zahn, was the highly respected director of publications at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I met him at MIT, where, as a close friend of the office, he guided Muriel Cooper, Jackie Casey and Ralph Coburn through the pragmatics of the technical printing production jungle.

The original HBR prototype for letterpress technology was designed by Bradbury Thompson, whose skills I highly respected. It had worn thin mostly by negligence and lack of understanding of its integral strength. There had been several editors in chief, and with the changing times, technologies and aesthetics many overriding editorial decisions had eroded the basic integrity and logic of the Thompson’s typographic program for the journal.

Of the many, over fourteen years of my involvement with the journal, I worked with three editors in chief: Ralph Lewis, Kenneth R. Andrews and Ted Levitt. I appreciated mostly working with

Kenneth R. Andrews, editor, and his editorial staff. Andrews, allowed the updating and modernization of the visual aesthetics; Ralph Lewis, who had been on corporate boards of Hollywood studios, tried to solve everything through making power decisions, which frequently were ill advised, while Ted Levitt’s ego, interjected itself in areas in which he overrode everything through his marketing bias, which often required an antithesis to high quality graphic and typographic styling.

Andrews preferred an academic look, while Levitt wanted it to reflect a broad public taste, which was difficult for me, because I believe that sometimes the scientific formality provides a certain neutral ground. Popular is just that, eliciting responses of cathexis – gut responses – without deep concentration of mental energy, logic or cognition, and that to an unhealthy high degree: All is in the perception of the beholder: “I like it!” “I don’t like it!”, who when asked: “Why?”, responds: “I don’t know. I just do!” In this process, the learning curve is quite flat. It does not energize a person to go beyond what they have experienced in their social and economic straight jackets. A formal aesthetic requires that every reader has to overcome all kinds of restricting biases. It is like learning a whole new language.

Although I worked closely with all editors and their assistants, my daily interactions were with G. Scott Hutchison, executive editor, Virginia B. Fales, managing editor, Catherine-Mary Donovan, production manager and Jane Gebhart, assistant production manager. They were the guardians of a very complex HBR editorial style; a combination and high breed between the venerated Chicago Manual of Style, a style guide for the correct use of American English, published and continuously updated since 1906, and the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, a grammar and style guide for editors and writers. These style rules were carefully tapered for HBR and very closely followed.

At MIT I experienced very high levels of wordsmithing by the editorial staff, from which I formed the attitude that quality of thought requires equal quality in crafting the right narrative response, and then producing it through high aesthetics in quality icons and typography. It seems odd to me when I see a beautifully executed design in which the grammatical quality is absence or even worse, where the content is banal.

Maybe, because in many ways I am an English language autodidact, having learned most of it through observations in daily life experiences, rather than formally, I very much appreciate the amazing editing skills. Outside of my experience in designing projects for the universities, like Brandeis, Harvard or MIT, I found little sense of grammatical language quality in advertising, in regular publishing, even at WGBH, where one rather gave in to lower levels of language use.

During the years at HBR, technologies shifted from letterpress to offset, from foundry type and hot metal to photo generated letterforms and finally to digital typography. Each shift required to redress the production processes, creating new editing, proofing and production cycles. The whole staff had be introduced to the advantages, disadvantages and limitations of each process.

Over the fourteen years I designed four prototypes in relationship to, at that time, contemporary production concerns.

The first one was to keep the spirit of Bradbury Thompson’s design alive, to bring back some of his restrictions, expand certain freedoms as he might have perceived them for further evolving his style program. But the latter created limitations to the integrity of his vision, especially in relationship in shifting to contemporary type and print production processes. His was built on the integrity of foundry type and hot metal typography. Trump Mediaeval became HBR’s identity, which was copied by Harvard and Harvard lookalikes.

My favorite was rejected by Ted Levitt. He never explained his reasons.