About U.S.^215
Lester Beall, Brownjohn Chermayeff Geismar, Herb Lubalin, Gene FedericoIn 1955 Aaron Burns ( 1922 – 1991 ) was the
Composing Room’s type director and quality-
control expert, responsible for facilitating the
difficult hot metal settings demanded by agency
art directors. Burns, who later cofounded the
International Typeface Company, was also “a
seeker-outer of people who were cutting edge,”
recalled Ivan Chermayeff. This was more than the
typical designer and supplier relationship; Burns
developed formative outlets and forums for graphic
designers to express themselves through
typography. Under his direction the term cutting
edgehad at times a very literal meaning. This was
the period when the constraints of hot metal
composition made it difficult to achieve such now
common effects as tight spacing, touching, or
overlapping without the designer cutting with a
razor blade, repositioning the proofs, and then
making an engraving of the mechanical. Burns
explored any reasonable ways to push the limits of
typography. One of his most satisfying attempts
was a series of four sixteen-page booklets produced
in 1960 titled About U.S., which gave four American
designers an opportunity to wed type and images
without any conceptual constraints and push the
edges of production in any way possible.
The four booklets (written by Percy
Seitlin) were: Lester Beall’s The Age of the Auto,
where type was laboriously composed in long, thin,
and contoured lines to suggest the path (or tire
tracks) of an automobile ride; Herb Lubalin’s Come
Home to Jazz,a pictorial jam of jazz instruments
photographed in high contrast with drop-out type in different sizes and
weights running in and out of the images, suggesting the discordance of
the music itself; Brownjohn Chermayeff Geismar’s That New York,which
flirted with typographic abstraction against a New York cityscape; and