No matter how serious the intent of any design project, a designer must inevitably begin with the freedom of unfettered exploration; let’s call that play. Play is a key element of surprise, and audiences love surprises. When it comes to graphic design, in particular, play underpins and increases its significance as mass communication and popular culture. “Without play, there would be no Picasso,” Paul Rand, the influential American advertising, poster and logo designer, said in a 1990 interview (with me) about what he dubbed “The Play Instinct.” “Without play, there is no experimentation.” [1] He added that without experimentation there is no “quest for answers.” Whether working in painting or typography, an artist must continually search for answers to a wide range of problems, including how to have an intimate connection with the receiver of the message: the audience. Synonymous with exploration and invention, play is the power that facilitates this desired relationship between maker and user in surprising and memorable ways.
Rand (1914–1996) was a passionate and joyous member of the generation of postwar Modern designers who elevated graphic design from a methodical service to an expressively methodical art. From the mid-1940s through the 1960s, the Modernists imbued advertising and products, periodicals and books with a je ne c’est quoi, a personal flair that provided the eye- and mind-grabbing powers of attraction—the force to pull audiences directly into a message. Though sometimes seen as a slave to a product message, graphic design is more than routinized hawking and selling through of predictable typefaces and staid images. There has long been an element of wit and humor in graphic design; it dates back to before the turn of the 20th century, when the discipline began as an adjunct to printing. It was sporadic until the early to mid-20th century, when Modernism brought to the fore the work of many more dedicated professional designers who believed graphic design’s mission was to make the world both a better and happier place. Play has played no small role in this goal. Rand’s essay “Design and the Play Instinct” asserted that the “best Renaissance teachers, instead of beating their pupils, spurred them on by a number of appeals to the play-principle. They made games out of the chore of learning difficult subjects.” [2]
Any graphic designer who says that play is not an essential aspect of the design process is telling a big fat lie. How can anyone so involved in the analog or digital practice of cutting, pasting and composing letters, pictures, shapes and patterns reject play as a fundamental behavior? Certainly, designers want to be taken seriously by business and the public, but pointing out that design involves play is not intended to belittle the creative conceiver/producer of printed material that surrounds us every day in every corner of our material world. Graphic design is not a rote activity made on a production line but a series of trials and errors derived from playful investigation.
Bringing order to chaos is, strictly speaking, the definition of design. But the truth is that without play design is a tight blueprint. Of course, blueprints, templates, schematics and other guidelines are necessary when designing corporate identities and branding systems. Yet before these graphic standards are carved into tablets, first comes play—a foray into the unknown and unbiased. Design begins as a tabula rasa.
Following rules rarely produces originality; experimentation is essential (even if it fails). Play enters unknown territory. “It is the driving force of the creative spirit,” Rand said, although he also said that “creative” is an abused word. “[It] is sensitive to change and the changeless. It focuses not only on what is right, but on what is exceptional.” [3]
Play is a gateway behavior. It defines children as children, but many adults engage in serious play too. Professionals in many fields—musicians, actors, artists and athletes—depend on play. Play and work only appear to be natural dichotomies. The virtuoso and maestro do not reach their levels of expertise through intuitive play alone—or do they? Tinkering, which is another form of play, leads to invention and revelation; in graphic design playing (in the form of sketching, cutting and pasting, rendering, iterating) is that essential first step toward decision-making. Playing yields the foundation of the idea, which is the crucial outcome of any playful experience.
“I use the term play,” Rand explained, “but I mean coping with the problems of form and content, weighing relationships, establishing priorities. Every problem of form and content is different, which dictates that the rules of the game are different too.” That said, Rand and others do not engage in play “unwittingly.” It is endemic to the design process and whether it’s called play or some other term, “one just does it,” he said. [4]
A graphic designer, like any artist or craftsperson, is free to play indefinitely, but the process must have an endpoint. The role of what is imprecisely known as commercial art (as distinguished from fine art) is to convey and clarify information of various types, using image, typography and layout as the means. On this playing field the goal is an idea, and an idea is a combination of visuals and words that resonates with the receiver. Regardless of how artful the outcome is—how much stylish veneer is applied to the final result—graphic design’s purpose is to foster understanding. If in the end it is ignored, the design has failed.
It is said that play is a means to an end, the foundation for stronger concepts, never an end in itself. Yet even this rule has exceptions. There are designers, for instance, who may mistake play for something more deliberately formal or tried and true. “The visual message which professes to be profound or elegant often boomerangs as mere pretention,” Rand warned, noting that when play leads to self-consciousness, it is doomed. His rule of thumb was always simple: “I like things that are happy; I like things that will make the client smile.” [5] One role of design is to make its consumers feel better about what they consume.
Rand was one among many, but his work provides a valuable example of the “play instinct.” Sometimes play is on the surface. In Rand’s case, his advertisements and package designs for El Producto Cigars, the ones that integrate comic drawings with straightforward photographs of the product (the cigar), typify his approach. Sigmund Freud is quoted as observing that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” It is not clear that Freud did, in fact, utter these words, but it is a fact that after playing with a few unsatisfying ideas, Rand took the cigar photos and added cartoon drawings of arms, legs, shoes, hats, etc., that made each one into a particular character, representing all kinds of people, from clowns to laborers to gentlemen.
This did not distort or dismiss the product or make it cute, but retained its realism while adding personalities to the inanimate. Rand used these cleverly supplemented images to create a weekly serial or situational comedy starring the variously sized and shaped cigars interacting with one another. Although this was not a child-appropriate product, Rand’s lighthearted approach made the campaign into a comic fantasy world. Like the best children’s stories, he engaged the audience in a narrative that increased their anticipation for what came next. This approach extended from weekly newspaper advertisements to special holiday boxes and tins adorned with carnivalesque colors and patterns in the shape of cigars. The long-running campaign was a radical departure from stereotypical, formulaic cigar promotion laden with decorative Victorian typefaces and detailed chromolithographic art. This departure was influenced by Modern artists like Paul Klee and Joan Miró, who rejected conventionally accepted representational art in favor of a highly tuned and energized, if purposefully naive, abandon.
The common critique of Modern art during the 1950s and ’60s was “my 5-year-old could have done this.” Ha! Could a 5-year-old develop a series of playful scenarios that so captivated the consuming public? Although Rand and others of his ilk, designers like Bradbury Thompson (known for giving typefaces distinctive voices), Alvin Lustig, Saul Bass, Leo Lionni, Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser, Cipe Pineles, and more may have borrowed aspects of their art and design language from children—in truth, they may have never grown up—they still understood how to adapt, transform and ultimately use these aspects to make complex statements accessible. They understood that rather than blindly accepting the academic rigor of ultra-formal art and design, there were other more primal, expressive ways of making images and words jump off the page and into the hearts and minds of audiences.
“There is no creative aspect of graphic design more enjoyable than the indulgence of play,” Bradbury Thompson wrote in his monograph, “and there are no sources from which to learn more about ‘the art of play’ [he said about graphic design]. But one must first resolve to provide the time in which to have fun and to record the ideas that will come one’s way.” [6] Thompson’s own design demanded play, and in his own practice he allowed his children to help conceive layouts for his signature publication Westvaco Inspirations, which was devoted to showing other designers how a sense of serious tomfoolery could imbue the printed pages with what can best be described as youthful energy. “The play experience was as enriching for the designer as it was vital for the children, who often became collaborators in the process,” he added. [7]
Milton Glaser said that “Rand was not like other designers.” [8] His play was deliberate but never forced. “Every shape, every element, whether it was cut out of paper or drawn with pen and brush was perfectly executed.” Glaser implied that Rand’s technical skill and ecstatic spirit were in complete sync. This is exemplified by the series of posters Rand designed for Interfaith Day ceremonies, which instead of being predictably conservative announcements for the Interfaith Movement in New York were veritable rays of graphic sunlight. The posters he designed had all the necessary information—time, place, and date—but also were enlivened by abstract expressionist shapes and bright hues, as well as impressions of an angel tooting a horn and a candle lighting the darkness. While his typography was composed with care, his exuberant imagery conveyed a sense of optimism.
Even when Rand was directing design standards for major corporations like IBM, Westinghouse and UPS, he never stifled his instinct to make merry—to use playful tools, like rebuses and puzzles, to his advantage. The ribbon atop the UPS logo was done for the joy of it. The more consequential the job, the more unhitched he was to conventional practice.
Surprise is power. In a series of advertisements for The Architectural Forum, not known as a witty magazine, he created a menagerie of graphical animals—a seal balancing drafting tools, a parrot sitting on a hammer, a frog leaping from a box, a fish flying in air—made from geometric and amorphous shapes, brightly colored and radiant. They were unexpected, yet born of intention: the intention to capture the imagination, to announce that even in precisionist man-made architecture there is natural play.
I once believed Modernists marched lockstep to the rigors of the International Style, a Swiss-originated, Bauhaus-inspired view that design should be clear, simple and unambiguous. [9] From my near-sighted perspective, I saw this style as a rejection of play and improvisation. I was so wrong. Although there are decided similarities between works by and styles of, say, Rand, Lester Beall, Walter Allner and Herbert Bayer, among his contemporaries, there are significant differences in how they each played with the graphic elements and solved the design problems they were tasked to address. It was clear through the juxtaposition of pictures and words, the colors and overlays, geometries and abstractions, that each of these Modernists was playing a variant of visual jazz—and what is jazz but playful improvisation?
[1] Steven Heller, “Paul Rand: The Play Instinct,” Graphic Wit: The Art of Humor in Design, (Watson-Guptill, New York, 1991)
[2] Paul Rand, “Design and the Play Instinct,” Education of Vision, edited by Gyorgy Kepes (Publishing: 1965)
[3] Steven Heller, “Paul Rand: The Play Instinct,” Graphic Wit: The Art of Humor in Design, (Watson-Guptill, New York, 1991), 122-126
[4] Steven Heller, “Paul Rand: The Play Instinct,” Graphic Wit: The Art of Humor in Design, (Watson-Guptill, New York, 1991), 122-126
[5] Steven Heller, “Paul Rand: The Play Instinct,” Graphic Wit: The Art of Humor in Design, (Watson-Guptill, New York, 1991), 122-126
[6] Bradbury Thompson, Bradbury Thompson: The Art of Graphic Design (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1988), 52
[7] Thompson, Bradbury Thompson, 49
[8] CONVERSATION WITH STEVEN HELLER, 2016
[9] See Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio, The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design (New York: Abrams Books, 2017)
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