Since graphic design is an applied art, many of us can’t connect famous graphic designers and their work. Here’s your quick design history lesson about the most famous graphic designers of all time.
Pop culture, marketing, fine art, music and other disciplines influenced graphic design, but nothing influenced it more than some of the biggest graphic designers in history.
The 20th century reshaped the way we perceived visual arts and used them for marketing, advertising or promoting any idea, and the design industry took flight very quickly. Many famous graphic designers worked in the Mad Men-era of graphic design, pre-Photoshop and Illustrator, experimenting with what they have as physical objects.
So who are some famous graphic designers, and what are their best known for? Here’s a list of 10 names you definitely need to know about.
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Paul Rand
Paul Rand didn’t only have a stellar career as a graphic designer and art director, but shaped the way a corporate logo looks today. This creative genius was behind the IBM, ABC, Enron, Morningstar, UPS and many other logo designs, as well as the corporate identities that they use to this day. Rand famously developed the Next Computers brand identity for $100.000 for Steve Jobs, who was then fired from Apple Computers, without even letting the client adjust or brainstorm on the idea.
Rand also designed widely used typefaces like Helvetica. He was a professor emeritus of graphic design at Yale University.
He is also known for being one of the early adopters of the Swiss style of design in the United States, especially in commercially successful industries and businesses’ corporate designs. He was dedicated to the modernist school of thought, looking up to artists such as Paul Sezanne, Pablo Picasso and Jan Tschichold, famously saying that “the problem of the artist is to defamiliarize the ordinary”.
In his 1999 biography of Paul Rand, the author Stephen Heller wrote that “he was the channel through which European modern art and design Russian Constructivism, Dutch De Stijl and the German Bauhaus was introduced to American commercial art.”
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Peter Saville
From the Burberry logo to one of the most beautiful album cover designs—Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures”, Peter Saville is a faomus graphic designer known for his role in spreading graphic design across mediums and closer to pop culture.
He co-founded Factory Records in 1978 with Alan Erasmus and Tony Wilson, and they went on to create hundreds of album covers. Apart from designing for cult bands like Joy Division and New Order, he has created album covers for David Byrne, Pulp, Brian Eno, King Crimson, Peter Gabriel and many others.
He is also famous for re-contextualizing and adapting other visual arts examples into his works, like using “Roses”, a painting by Henri Fantin-Latour combined with a color-coded alphabet to create New Order’s “Power, Corruption and Lies” album cover.
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Milton Glaser
Ever wondered what famous graphic designer created the I love NY logo?
We are all used to using the heart symbol instead of writing “love”, but before Milton Glaser’s “I Love New York” design, that was inconceivable. This famous graphic designer made his name designing popular logos, such as the DC Comics and Brooklyn Brewery, as well as creating eye-catching, psychedelic inspired poster designs like the famous ones with Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin.
He co-founded and wrote for the New York magazine in 1968, which still exists and comes out biweekly to this day.
Glaser has made some of his typography elements available for free by publishing the Glaser Stencil typeface in 1970.
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