Wit: Yes Please

My first blog entry, wow. Rather than continue to stress any further about making "the first one, a good one", I'm just going to choose something I love. That is, 'witty thinking in graphic design', as exemplified by a bible of a book - A Smile in the Mind, and more specifically Paul Rand (1914-1996), a hugely influential American designer.

In said book, Rand says: "I have two goals. The first is that everything I do as a designer must have an idea: it cannot just look nice. The second is, it has to look nice." Just brilliant. He goes on to talk more about the way he went about using humour in design, which I won't regurgitate here, but for this one piece of work (pictured).

Rand comments: "A well known example is my identity for United Parcels Service: to take an escutcheon - a medieval symbol which inevitably seems pompous today - then stick a package on top of it, that is funny". He designed his UPS logo in 1961.

Unfortunately UPS have since ditched the Rand design, in favour of relative eye candy. It retains some elements but not the whole story, so the idea is lost. Wit in design - more please, not less.