Discussion Point 2 - Xuan

Paul Rand 
Paul Rand is an American graphic designer. Having involved in media promotion, cover design and advertising, Rand is most known for his contribution in corporate identification. 

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, typographer and designer influenced by the Bauhaus movement, described Rand as 'an idealist and a realist using the language of the poet and the businessman. He thinks in terms of need and function. He is able to analyse his problems, but his fantasy in boundless'.

Rand believed that brand identity is crucial- even more than billboard advertising. He once said, 'a logo is more important in a certain sense than a painting because a zillion people see the logo and it affects what they do, it affects their taste, it affects the appearance of where they live, it affects everything'.


Drawing from this design philosophy, Rand were able to create simple and modern logos for big organisations- where many of them are still in use.

Notable designs by Rand

Rand also encouraged fellow graphic designers to stand behind their ideas and solution and defend themselves as being the right one. This is evident in his working experience with Steve Jobs when he was hired to design a brand identity for Jobs' company NeXT.

Jobs described Rand as 'the greatest living graphic designer' before the death of the designer. Rand's confidence and ability to communicate with his client taught Jobs a lesson- to carefully chose designers and gave them power to make decisions. 

Matthew Carter

'Type is a beautiful group of letter, not a group of beautiful letters'

As more and more people read on screen rather than in print, creating typefaces for screen gets a bit tricky. Matthew Carter is arguably the pioneer in creating typefaces specifically for on-screen usage.

Approached by Microsoft in the 1990s, Carter created Verdana and Georgia, albeit the initial refusal. Computer users read on screen but little print things out- hence Carter approached the project with a different perspective. He started designing with bit-maps, because bit-maps shows how a font will look on screen, and with lots of space for improvement.

The final result sees Verdana as a sans serif font, with a generous amount of width and spacing, and a notable contrast in weight. The reason is that so the letters does not touch each others. The font is also quite bold, but they never stick together, even in 4 pt. 

the Verdana font family