Eros and Avant Garde^101
Herb LubalinFew graphic designers embody the aesthetics of their
times as totally as Herb Lubalin ( 1918 – 1981 ). From
the late 1950 s to the early 1970 s he was American
typography. He built a bridge between modernism
and eclecticism, joining rational and emotional
methodologies in the service of commerce. His
conceptual typography made letters speak and words
emote. He was a pioneer of photo-typography and
promoted the practice of smashing and overlapping
letters. He liberated white space from the orthodox
moderns by refusing to follow the edict that “less is
more.” He experimented in the marketplace, not the
academy, and once his radical approaches to type and
page design surfaced in design annuals and shows
they were thoroughly accepted and ultimately
turned into fashion.
“We’ve been conditioned to read the
way Gutenberg set his type, and for five
hundred years people have been reading
widely-spaced words on horizontal lines
Gutenberg spaced far apart.... We read
words, not characters, and pushing letters
closer or tightening space between lines
doesn’t destroy legibility; it merely changes
reading habits,” Lubalin once wrote. He based
his own approach upon the ideas of earlier
twentieth-century type/image-makers, such as
Kurt Schwitters and Lazar El Lissitzky, and
then further married type and image into a single composition. Lubalin’s
work was very much of his time, and his understanding of the impact of the
new technologies on contemporary perception was visionary. In 1959 he
argued before an assembly of typographers that television had begun to have
an influence on the way that type was read, and likened this kinetic quality
to the speed with which type shoots by on advertising on the sides of buses.
He reasoned that in this environment smashing letter forms together and
including images in a rebus-like manner made type easier to decipher.