- Every once in a while I'll see a design solution and think
that is really clever.
It's often a solution I wish I'd found,
and I have a mixed sense of delight and envy.
Often these are ideas told with a fused metaphor.
This is a combination of two symbols
that tell a bigger story
and force the viewer to unravel the puzzle.
Let's take this cover
from the 1949 Museum of Modern Art exhibition,
Modern Art in Your Life by Paul Rand.
Rand's job was to communicate how modern art of the time
influenced daily life with product, graphics
and industrial design.
Rather than showing some people sitting in a living room
with a Jackson Pollock painting,
Rand uses a painter's palette and paintbrush
as symbols for art.
By adding a fork next to the palette,
the composition becomes a dinner place setting.
Rand's genius is to use brushstrokes to make the forms,
reinforcing the art reference.
Another Paul Rand example
is this cover for the UCLA Extension Winter Catalog.
To communicate winter in Los Angeles,
Rand uses an orange as a city symbol,
and snow to represent winter.
But that isn't actually an orange or snow.
By using cut paper, Rand suggests these
and lets the viewer put the puzzle together.
Seeing an actual orange with melting snow
would distract us from the message.
As we would consider, Is that an orange or a grapefruit?
What's up with the ice?
William Golden, who designed the CBS eye symbol,
uses the symbol of a rooster to communicate morning,
as roosters like to crow and wake everyone up at sunrise.
He uses a television antenna to talk about TV.
By combining the two into a weather vane,
we can read morning and television.
One of the true masters of the fuse metaphor
is Lou Danziger.
For an exhibition of American painting,
Danziger deftly applies a photograph of a paintbrush
and the gesture of the American flag.
The success is the simplicity of means
he uses with the form.
There is no background to distract the viewer.
The black and white brush set aside questions such as,
What's that purple spot on the metal?
And the brush stroke gesture
of the flag with no stars and only four stripes,
reinforces the subject, painting.
Another Danziger solution is for an exhibition of paintings
from the New York School.
Danziger photographed a simple black and white image
of paint tubes.
He added images of windows, and created a New York skyline,
reading painting in New York.
That the skyline is not exactly New York's is not important.
We know a skyline communicates a city.
And the words New York
are directly above the tallest paint tube.
One of the joys of deciphering a fuse metaphor
is the recognition that one is clever.
Painting and a flag?
Oh, American painting.
I'm smart.
The solution allows the audience to experience delight,
and will have more long lasting memory of the message.