Paul Rand and IBM

As we move closer to our “Era of Stasis” as I will consider it from my last post, America became more and more driven into capitalist ventures. More and More companies have cropped up for different needs. Computers have made a huge stamp on the world’s history with the creation of Apple and Microsoft. The world is becoming much more technological with the introduction of Adobe who created Photoshop and Illustrator to help design new graphics in a more technological way. Of course with all these new inventions and companies inventing them, those companies will contract designers to create company logos for them. Here I will continue on my essay about Paul Rand and his creation of the IBM logo.

After helping the country revolutionize their graphic interests and design styles, Rand went on to focus on trademark logos in the 1950’s. He noticed that in order to be functional a company logo must be reduced to basic shapes that work no matter what color or size they are made. One must be able to immediately tell what the company’s logo is. His most famous logo was designed from Georg Trump’s typeface called City Medium for the company International Business Machines or IBM. This typeface held great response as the square negative space of the B showed the geometric and industrial feel that machines put off. Some years later he updated the logo by introducing horizontal lines that were to portray scan lines but also unify all three letters. About ten years after that he went on to create the “Eye Bee M” Logo using a simple human eye and a bee as the logos for the I and B. This design was used for his booklet called The IBM Logo: Its Use in Company Identification which showed that he had many more ideas if the IBM logo needed to be scrapped.