2004 AIGA MEDAL
Alex Steinweiss, art director for Columbia Records during the
1940s, revolutionized the way records were packaged and marketed.
His genre-defining work in the visual expression of music
transformed both the design and the music industries.
Steinweiss was born in 1917 into a music-loving home in
Brooklyn, New York. In 1930, Steinweiss entered Abraham Lincoln High
School. His skills in art brought him to the attention of the
visual arts teacher Leon Friend. Friend encouraged the talents of a
select group of students known as the “Art Squad” that included,
among others, Gene Federico, Seymour Chwast, and William Taubin.
They designed school publications, posters and signs, and were
encouraged to submit their work to as many publications and
competitions as possible. Steinweiss's work was showcased in PM
Magazine when he was just 17.
Steinweiss won a scholarship to Parsons School of Design in
1934, became an assistant to the newly arrived Austrian designer
Joseph Binder in 1937 and, in 1939, at the age of 23, he became the
first art director of the recently formed Columbia Records.
At this time, 78-r.p.m. shellac-coated records were packaged as
sets of three or four records in separate sleeves bound between
plain pasteboard covers. They were stamped only with the title of
the work and the name of the recording artist and displayed on
shelves with just the spines showing. Steinweiss recognized an
opportunity to use the packaging in more creative ways to reflect
the music it contained and to improve sales. He went on to design
upward of 850 album covers.
His first cover was for a 1939 collection of songs by Rodgers
and Hart. A theater marquee with the composers' names spelled out
in lights pivots on the central red axis of the encased record. His
references were the French and German posters he had seen in
Friend's class, but in the covers that he went on to design he
developed a unique signature style that used geometric patterns,
folk art symbolism, and a curly hand-drawn lettering (that became
copyrighted as Steinweiss Scrawl).
During WWII Steinweiss took a job with the U.S. Navy designing
cautionary posters and displays. He continued to work for Columbia
Records by night, and after the war, as a consultant.
By the early 1950s Steinweiss had added to his list of clients
National Distillery, Schenley Distributors, White Laboratories,
PRINT and Fortune. In 1974 Steinweiss and his wife moved to
Sarasota, Florida, where he continued to paint and design posters for
community and cultural events. He passed away on July 17, 2011.
—
“His images are lively, playful, boundlessly inventive and seem
almost to throb with the spirit and emotion of the classical music
he loved.”
—Rick Poynor, review of For the Record: The Life and Work of Alex Steinweiss, Financial Times
Weekend Magazine
“He is an alert, energetic, twentieth century personality. He is
charged with ambition—an ambition that is controlled and directed
by a cool logical mind, and which has an enormous capacity for work
at its service. Add to that an innate talent for design and you
have a combination that almost assures success. That success is
abundant and has come early, but to Steinweiss it is a
by-product.”
—Henry C. Pitz, The American Artist
Resources
New York Times obituary, July 19, 2011
AlexSteinweiss.com
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