Before Class, Chapter 20

"Good Design is good business" became the motto of the graphic design community during the 1950s. With the end of War II, efforts were put into the economy in buying and selling and big corporations were started up. By 1950, the visual identity system went way beyond a basic trademark.  They unified all communications from some organization to a consistent design system.

The first to start this was the Behren's AEG logo and the Olivetti's Corporation. In 1936, Giovanni Pintori was hired at the Olivetti Corporation and created an identity based on the general promotional appearance instead of an actual trademark. Pintori's abstract images suggested the purpose of the product that was being advertised.

CBS: Columbia Broadcasting System of New York. CBS succeded due to two things: the president, Frank Stanton, understood the potential of corporate affairs with art and design; and William Golden was the art director. It was William Golden who created the CBS eye logo which was aired on November 16, 1951. Around the early 1950s, the corporate world started hiring their own advertising staff, not from the outside. This allowed them to keep a unified system from broadcast, to posters and more. Golden was also the one that said the verb" design" was the something made to be communicated to someone and said the designer's main job was to accurately communicate the message.

Georg Olden was hired in 1945 as an on-air visual designer for television. He was the first to see the limitations of black and white and was able to design graphics from the center out, using simple symbolic imagery. He was the first African American graphic designer and was able to do so before the civil rights movement in the US.

When Golden died at 48, Lou Dorfsman became the new creative director in 1964 and vice-president in 1968. He designed the new CBS headquarters building in 1966, including all aspects of the building's typography including things like clocks, elevator buttons, exit signs, and inspection certificates. However, when new owners arrived in the 1980s, the design philosophy changed and Dorfsman resigned.

In 1954, Patrick McGinnis  launched his corporate design program. He gave the old slab-serif type a more modern look based on mathematical harmony with his New Haven Railroad trademark design. Marcel Breuer was commissioned to design the trains and used the same color schemes as the new logo and looked like the Russian Constructivist style.

Paul Rand became involved in trademark designs and visual identification systems in the 1950s. He designed the rebus IBM logo and added the stripes to the main logo. In 1965, Rand also did a redesign of the ABC logo.

The Chase bank logo was a prototype ID system. While other companies evaluated their corporate image, the Chase image was an additional character in the inventory of symbolic forms. Popular names like Unimark and Unigrid and the Federal Government also launched their design programs. Uniformed pictographic signs also became a huge thing with international things such as the Olympic games and all the international travel.

The last bit is about the MTV logo, and its many designs. During the early years, the logo would appear as a ten-second network id at the top of each our, and each time it aired it would be different.