Herb Lubalin, born in New York in 1918, was known as an instigator. He was seventeen when he began attending The Cooper Union and immediately found a fondness for fonts. He called himself out as being “terrible, because I don’t follow the rules.” His design approaches possessed a living, breathing presence. He was truly a type designer force to be reckoned with. He designed lettering, logotypes, typography, packaging, posters, magazines, and annual reports. He reimagined The Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1961. The Americana artist, Norman Rockwell, painted a cover depicting Lubalin as redesigning the Post, for its rebirth. What a creative way to introduce the new look.
I love Lubalin’s understated sensibility by shortening the name to simply “Post,” now much larger and easier to stand out at the newsstand. He diminished the words “The Saturday Evening” shrinking and placing them inside the O. It reminds me of the first exhibition checklist I ever designed as an intern at Georgia Museum of Art. Honoring Art and Margo Rosenbaum, titled simply “ShOut!” where I gave the O its own voice. I fully appreciate his fondness for playful, stylish combinations. His masterful ligatures were visually captivating and found their homes all amongst the 1960’s zeitgeist. His curves breathed with a soul.
In 1964 he collaborated with Coca-Cola and designed the playful branding for their new beverage, Sprite. In a rare move he spoke out against the company as serving up products that promoted “tooth decay, nausea, and mutated offspring” in Fact magazine. Oddly enough, Coca-Cola continued working with him. His involvement with Fact and two other standout magazines cemented his design sensibilities as ushering in a new era of graphic design. No longer type and image. Now, type treated as its own image of expression.
Regardless of being born color blind, Herb Lubalin’s handiwork was everywhere from newsstands to grocery stores during the 1960s and 1970s. His unique typographic stylings were unmistakably his own. Lubalin designed the logo mastheads for Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde magazines. He worked alongside his editor and publisher Ralph Ginzburg. Erosbroached the topics of eroticism and after only four issues placed Ginzburg in jail for publishing “obscene material” according to the status quo. Ironically Eros won more awards in 1963 among the thousands of other magazines produced that year.
By standing out against the norm of the times its reputation led to Fact in 1964 and Avant Garde in 1968. They didn’t have long runs, but they made a significant impact on the culture and face of graphic design. I love the fact that Avant Garde magazine had a square format yet was nowhere near a square’s magazine. Square formats give structure that sometimes needs to be shaken and distressed by elements breaking its restrictive bounds. I also incorporated square formats into a handful of my exhibition checklists and hardcover texts during my nearly two decades with Georgia Museum of Art and also for The Weather Channel global weather calendar design. I’d break the design’s grid system by allowing the typography to get cut off at the edges of the page.
I also appreciate the investigative, detective-style mission of Fact calling out brands like Coca-Cola for their true missions to sell their goods to Americans regardless of how additive and dangerous their product recipes reveal. Yet among the three I have to admit Eros caught my attention due to its risqué nature and my fondness for the unfettered human form. The fact that Ginzburg served jail time and was given the most attention for its design accomplishments just sweetens the magazine’s legacy. Plus the Post redesign’s Norman Rockwell cover illustration was such a classy move. Hats off to you gentlemen.
Lubalin’s swashbuckling, hand-lettered sensibilities garnered him a reputation as a graphic design rebel with a real cause noting that “Sometimes you sacrifice legibility to increase impact.” This perspective is so true. If we, as designers, can captivate our audience by allowing them to linger for just another moment or two, we have the power to plant these brands into their subconscious. When not given careful enough attention, this concept may backfire as it has more often in recent times especially among automotive logo design.
I do wonder what he would think about the redesigned KIA logo. While it does possess a unique, everlasting quality, it reads as a K and a backwards N. Even Google searches for “what is the KN car?” spread like wildfire when it was introduced to the public. Legibility, when handled carefully, leads to longevity and brand recognition. The gift of timelessness in communication and brand recognition has the capacity to grant a brand immortality.
Lubalin famously observed that “You can do a good ad without good typography, but you can’t do a great ad without good typography.” He fully believed that “Typography can be as exciting as illustration and photography.” He proved this in every hand-lettered ligature lockup masthead he designed. His iconic style stood out against the rest of the graphic design cultural landscape influencing future designers to bend and more importantly, break the rules. This concept remained the most enigmatic lesson I learned at SCAD and UGA’s Graphic Design School. We learn the rules so it becomes quite clear how easily it is to break them. They have no power or influence over the design that freely flows from the immense minds our collective imaginations.
Lubalin’s first typeface he designed in collaboration with John Pistilli, called Pistilli Roman. In 1970 Lubalin co-founded ITC, International Typeface Corporation, and U&lc, Upper and lowercase magazine with prolific graphic designer Aaron Burns. Lubalin co-designed ITC Avant Garde, a further progression of his masthead logotype for Avant Garde magazine, with Tom Carnase. Lubalin also co-designed ITC Serif Gothic with Tony Di Spigna. Lubalin designed ITC Lubalin Graph, a slab version of Avant Garde Gothic. It was drawn by Tony Di Spigna and Joe Sundwall. Ed Benguiat rendered the oblique versions. A bold version was created for three episodes of the Public Broadcasting Service support of their 1974–1975 U&lc promotional campaign.
Among his hundreds of designs his “Seventy-two” holiday card design is one I cherish the most. Elegant simplicity in form, function, and format. This 9x9 square ambigram holiday card was designed by Lubalin and Tom Carnese. It was sent out to clients of Lubalin, Smith, and Carnese celebrating the 1971 holidays. As I’ve mentioned before seventy-two is my lucky number. I was born in 1972 as well. My Vinson logotype also has two dots and seven parts purely by chance. My “Celebrating 27 Years of Crop Marks and Keyframes” graphic also revealed two occurrences of the same number when I finished the design. Does this seem a bit spooky? Nah.
Another thing I noticed about Herb Lubalin was his birth and death dates are mirrored. Born in 1918 and passed away in 1981. It’s little accents like this that mark many an artist’s lifetime legacy. It’s quite clear now that his color blindness may have guided his genius. He fully understood the Yin & Yang language of light and dark spaces. I did the same in AP Art.
During my senior year in high school I took AP Art with “stencils across all media” as my concentration. This process gradually trained my eyes how to see the positive and negative spaces simultaneously. The interplay of black and white and positive and negative pairings.
“The better people communicate, the greater will be the need for better typography — expressive typography.”
— Herb Lubalin, Graphic Designer, Typographer, Type Designer, Letterer