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How to pronounce roger fry in English?

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Hi, this is Hong Kong Design Book Club, and I am Soyeon.
Welcome to our design book review episode no.6.
Today we are going to review Thoughts on Design by Paul Rand.
This one is a very simple and short, 95-page book with a lot of graphic work examples so
you can probably finish the book in one hour.
Let’s look into who Paul Rand is, and his representative works, how he stands in the
history of graphic design, and his design philosophy heavily influenced by John Dewey
and Roger Fry.
Paul Rand is one of the most iconic graphic designers who lived in the 20th century.
He started his graphic design career in media promotion and publishing in the 1930s, became
very successful art director on groundbreaking ad campaigns, later design logos for some
of the most well-established corporations such as IBM, ABC, Ford, Enron, UPS etc.
This book is an essay originally written in 1947 when he was 33 years old, revised in
1970, published by Chronicle Books.
Like the title, it’s genuinely about Paul Rand’s thoughts on all kinds of designs
including print, advertisement, and industrial.
The most important concept of this book is “functional-aesthetic perfection” which
means the perfect balance between beauty and utility.
Living in the era of mobile devices and web usabilities, we all know the importance of
functional aspects.
We all know how frustrating when the beautiful app is not working properly.
But it was the 1940s, he was living in the era of Madison avenue, experiencing the rise
of consumer advertising.
Long-time ago, design was mere decoration.
If you look at the Rococo style furniture, the aesthetics do nothing with opening the
drawer or sitting on it.
But throughout the industrial revolution, technological advancement, modernism, and
capitalism, visual communication between the designer and the spectator became more important.
He says “Graphic design is not good design, if it does not cooperate as an instrument
in the service of communication” “Visual communications of any kind, whether persuasive
or informative, from billboards to birth announcements, should be seen as the embodiment of form and
function: the integration of the beautiful and the useful.”
We can find John Dewey’s influence here, he was an American philosopher who was a progressive
voice of pragmatism and liberalism.
He wrote about many topics including art, wrote “Art as Experience” in 1934.
Paul Rand is quoting John Dewey’s comment on the relationship between fine art and useful
of technological art, says “That many, perhaps most, of the articles and utensils made at
present for use are not genuinely esthetic happens, unfortunately, to be true.
But it is true for reasons that are foreign to the relation of the ‘beautiful’ and
‘useful’ as such.
Wherever conditions are such as to prevent the act of production from being and experience
in which the whole creature is alive and in which he possesses his living through enjoyment,
the product will lack something of being esthetic.
No matter how useful it is for special and limited ends, it will not be useful in the
ultimate degree - that of contributing directly and liberally to an expanding and enriched
life.”
I find this is fascinating, we user experience designers in 21st century try to understand
people’s emotions, how they react to our services and products under their circumstances,
what’s the whole experience like, what are their pain points and high points and sorts,
and the very concept was already written down in 1934.
So aesthetic and utility are 2 essential aspects of design, and when those 2 are mutually generative
it can eventually create enjoyment in people’s lives, and that was the ultimate goal that
Paul Rand tried to achieve through his works.
Paul Rand is also influenced by Roger Fry, a British painter and critic.
He was a formalist who claims that the most important aspect of a work of art is its form
– the way it is made and its purely visual aspects – rather than its narrative content
or its relationship to the visible world.
He is also known as a representative of post-impressionism, a member of Bloomsbury club, a friend of Virginia
Woolf who wrote his biography.
In this book, there are at least 3 parts that Paul Rand is quoting Roger Fry.
Where he writes about the role of humor, he is quoting Roger Fry quoting Plato, stressing
the effects of entertainment and amusement.
He also uses Roger Fry’s comment and essay on explaining how imaginative integration
works, and how to use an asymmetric balance to acquire esthetic satisfaction.
The main topics that he writes in this book are symbol, humor, photogram, typography,
etc.
It’s simply entertaining, just looking at his graphic works, well corresponding to the
topics.
I have 2 reservations on this book.
There are some universal design principles we can make use, but overall I feel like most
of the contents are about printings and advertisement, some of his writings might be outdated, and
as a modern designer who is living in a digital era, it was a little hard to connect.
He also kept referring graphic designers as male, keep saying “he”, “him”, “himself”,
some might say “Jeez, that was 70 years ago, and that was totally normal back then”
but still, female graphic designers and copywriters like Cipe Pineles, Fleur Cowles existed in
that era, we know Peggy Olson is not totally fictional and I think he could be more considerate
when using pronouns.
It’s not very pleasant experience that the book you just read is proactively marginalising
people like myself.
It is also known that he was being hostile towards the people who wanted to accept more
diversity at Yale university back in the 90s.
Paul Rand is definitely one of the most important graphic designers from the previous century,
but everyone from this century doesn’t have to love everything about him, and honestly,
I don’t either.
That’s it for today.
Enjoy our other book reviews such as The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
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See you next time!