Things I learned from Paul Rand: 25 – Typography
Although Paul Rand emphasized big ideas, he was also quite particular about details, especially in fine typography. Many of the concerns he had are things I haven’t encountered before or after I worked for him.
From Lascaux to Brooklyn
Since I’m personally quite familiar with this book, I will mostly use pages from From Lascaux to Brooklyn to illustrate Paul’s typographic style and particular mandates he had.
Hanging Punctuations and Capital Letters
It is really rare to see Paul Rand’s work using justified text. By the time I knew him, he avoided it like a plague. He preferred flush left, ragged right layouts, especially in long copy formats.
Although it is pretty standard to see designers prefer hanging punctuation marks (like quotations) when using flush left. However, Paul also wanted the cross bar of capital-T always hanging outside, which was less common.
But visually cleaner and sharper.
You can see the same type of obsession from some of his well-known work, such as this poster he designed for International Design Conference. Especially here, the capital-T is severely pushed to the left.
Rhythmic Rags
Paul and I spent hours and hours going over the shape of the rags. He really wanted the right side of his text to have a rhythmic and even texture throughout the book. He even rewrote some of the copies just so that the shape of the rag became something he liked better.
He would create holes in his text that could easily fit another word or two. But empty spaces were just as important, if not more than the printed characters.
Hyphens
Continuing with the obsession of a rhythmic rag, Paul didn’t mind a very liberal use of hyphens, in order to achieve these shapes he was happy with. You would sometimes encounter a whole bunch of hyphens in one paragraph, which he didn’t seem to mind. At least he usually avoided having two hyphens in-a-row, but every other line was fine.
Old Style Numbers
Paul preferred the more classical old style numbers, with ascenders and descenders. I think it’s because old style numbers created more even texture throughout, without having taller numbers jump out at the readers, visually.
Even in a poster with short copies, he used old style numbers at times.
Space before Punctuation
This is another one of those details I seldomly see used, but Paul liked to put noticeable spaces around many punctuations. Colons and semi-colons always had a space before them. The long m-dash had spaces before and after it. Question marks and exclamation marks also came with an extra space before them. As well as parenthesis.
I think Paul found extra breathing spaces more appealing.
For example, there’s an obvious space before the colon on the jacket of his famous book.
Orphans
While many details most designers never think about that are mentioned above, he sometimes ignored the details many designers would be appalled with. For example, orphans. Paul didn’t mind leaving one word on its own, as long as it wasn’t at the beginning of a page (which would’ve been a widow).
But looking at them now, it seems to me that orphans actually works with his exaggerated rags. If it was a justified text, for example, these orphans would’ve looked like red herrings.
Oxford Commas
This is not just a typographic detail, perhaps more of a grammatical preference, but Paul used what is called the Oxford comma. One of Paul’s “bibles” was William Strunk’s The Elements of Style, which preached the use of Oxford commas, along with many other stylistic dogmas.
His writing style used a lot of commas to begin with. But this preference even increased the number of commas you’d see in his books. Paul’s wife Marion was always tasked to help proof-read his writings, and on a number of occasions, I saw warning Paul he was using maybe too many commas again, which made it difficult for some people to read through.
Thin Slash
Paul seemed to hate the default slashes, and preferred a much thinner version to replace them. He could see the standard slash from a mile away, and if I forgot to replace it, it could have ruined both of our day.
This preference of a thin slash can be seen in places like his famous work for IBM. Here is a logo he did for their operating system when he used to work there.
Throughout my career, I’ve heard some designers say a number of times, “God is in the details.” Although I never heard Paul mention something like that. My impression is, that these details were one important component of overall aesthetics, something that just had to be right, in order to give an idea a suitable and appropriate form. But it wasn’t the leading factor that made a designer or a design good. Because, no matter how great the details were, what good was it if there wasn’t a good idea behind them?
Nevertheless, Paul Rand definitely had his own style, even in fine typography.