Things I learned from Paul Rand: 2 – Always Tweaking
I ended up spending the largest amount of time with Paul, working on his last book, “From Lascaux to Brooklyn.” It was a daily one-on-one grind, where he was sitting behind me, barking orders, while I furiously clicked away on Power Mac 8500.
Never Finished
Thanks to his wife and love of his life, Marion, it was a 9-to-5 routine every day. If it was up to Paul, I’m sure we would’ve worked late every night, but Marion made sure I was out of their house before their dinner time.
Still, every day was an adventure. Paul’s powerful enthusiasm and drive never looked like it came from an 80-year-old man. He was constantly coming up with new ideas: new topics to include in his book, different ways to tell the same story, brand new layout approaches.
But most of all, the thing I’ll never forget, is that nothing seemed to ever be the “final.” He was constantly “tweaking” everything: copies, layouts, the order of the pages, … really everything and anything he could think of. It was a common occurrence, where we would work on a layout for hours until he was finally happy. Only to find out next morning he worked late that same day to come up with another idea.
Direction Magazine
Early in his career, Paul became famous for the magazine cover designs for Direction Magazine (1935-1945). They’ve been published over and over again including his Paul’s own books throughout the years. I was already familiar with most of them by the time I was working for him.
One day, when I was working on the layouts in Direction Magazine section of his book, Paul casually suggested me to do what was unthinkable to me at the time. He told me to move the element in the middle of the layout down lower.
I myself have seen this layout already in his published books, “Thoughts on Design” and “A Designer’s Art.” Not to mention other design history books I had already studied at my design school. I remember resisting, saying something like, “We can’t do that! We can’t change history!”
But he insisted, “It’s better this way, so change it!”
Just the way he worked
Over time, it slowly sunk into me, that this was just the way he worked. I started to notice many other known work by him that seemed to go through transitions over time.
For example, here is an ingenious design Paul came up with for The Art Director’s Club. Notice the difference in the blue chin area in the version he published in his book just few years later. He was very particular about his colors, and I can only imagine how the original blue bugged the crap out of him until he fixed it.
This tendency also showed up in real life. Paul was known to visit somebody’s house, soon become annoyed with the furniture layout, then make the person move all the furniture around until it was to Paul’s liking. His OCD never seemed to go dormant.
If there is heaven, I would like to imagine that he is up there causing quite a stir, tirelessly making everybody run around to update and upgrade the environment.