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From IBM's 1965 annual report, designed by Paul Rand.

#ibm #design #paul rand #history #retro aesthetic

On Sharing Appreciation for Good Design

I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole this week. It started when @commodorez shared the image above.

I'm a sucker for good design (having studied it for my bachelor's degree) and this is a beautiful bit of illustration. It looks like it's from a catalog or something of the sort, but the actual source was unknown. I would love to know where it came from and hopefully find a higher resolution copy of it.

Reverse image search led me to a Ukrainian language page talking about color using IBM as an example. But the machine translation had some issues and I failed to see the connection to the old computers shown nor I could not determine the image source from the page. The only other relevant result was an article about "Silicon City", an exhibit by the New York Historical Society ten years ago. The page did not actually seem to have the image in question, but it did give me something to go off of. Searching for the exhibition, I was able to find this image that showed it included a reproduction, but I could not read the info card.

Eventually I found a blog post from Adafruit recounting a visit to the exhibition which had a much higher resolution photo of the exhibit — enough that I could just make out the text; something about IBM and "Color in the Workplace". Which is indeed the title of the document, so finding the source was easy from there. It was a marketing publication for IBM designed by none other than Paul Rand.

It is absolutely lovely. The styling, the clean illustration, the colors. And the rest of the document is no less beautiful.

The name Paul Rand seemed familiar, but I couldn't immediately recall why. I never have had much memory for names & history. It didn't take long scrolling though his website to remember though. There are few designers so prolific, whose work is so iconic and recognizable to the general public.

But among retrocomputing enthusiasts, such as myself, there is perhaps one favorite piece of artwork Paul Rand created for IBM:

That was a fun rabbit hole to go down. Paul Rand's career spanned more than six decades and his work managed to capture (or perhaps even define) the look and feel of each one. I'll definitely be spending more time reviewing his vast body of work as I start in on branding and theming design for VCF Southwest 2027.

#graphic design #Paul Rand #IBM #“Color in the Workplace”#illustration