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2009 AIGA MEDAL
An unwritten rule in design is to never judge designers by the
work they do for themselves. Released from a client's demands, they
become over-oxygenated. No one is hanging around shaking a head or
wagging a finger. They go crazy with the freedom.
Thousands of misconceived designer business cards have entered
the world this way, and more than a few designer monographs. But
freedom in the right hands can yield treasures. Take the invitation
Carin Goldberg designed in 2003 for a New Year's party at her home.
Clumsily hand-lettered with crossed-out words, the messy-looking
piece doesn't just name a time and place but tells the story of
Goldberg's life from the point of meeting her husband, the
architect James Biber, through the birth of their son, Julian, to
their relocation to a Brooklyn townhouse that finally gave them
space to be properly, expansively social.
What this invitation says about Goldberg is that she is warm,
charming, family oriented and house-proud. She goes out of her way
to design with words even when she doesn't have to, and she uses
them killingly. This is someone who reproduced the addresses, in
label-maker type, of every residence she ever occupied to create a
collage in the shape of a key for the inaugural cover of a New
York Times real-estate supplement. Someone who summed up Thomas
Hardy's entire career in a New York Times Book Review
illustration with just two dates and three overlapping job titles:
Poet, Novelist, Architect.
What the New Year's invitation does not say about Goldberg is
that she's a meticulous and elegant craftsperson, too; while
working at CBS Television and Records in the late 1970s, she
learned to wield an X-Acto blade like a scalpel so she could kern
9-point type with a brain surgeon's precision. Her literary
endeavors range from reviews to book covers—hundreds of
expressive, witty jewels designed for nearly every publishing
company in existence, from glamour houses like Simon &
Schuster, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Hyperion and Doubleday to
modest university presses. She has a heart of gold but also a will
of tungsten. She's a cultural omnivore—equally at home with high
art and pop music—although two names she never wants to hear again
are James Joyce and Madonna (more about that later).
“I struggle with the desire to be a populist and an elitist, an
intellect and an entertainer,” she confided to Sean Adams in a 2007
interview for STEP magazine. She doesn't take
anything—skill, determination, luck, genes, friends or the battles
women have waged to acquire their own multiple, overlapping job
titles (designer, wife, mother)—for granted.
Goldberg was born in New York in 1953, the daughter of a
nature-loving clothier father and a housewife with a lively
aesthetic streak. (She remembers her mother wrapping a gift for a
grade-school teacher in kraft paper and fresh lilacs.) Her father,
the rare Brooklyn Jew to graduate from Penn State University with a
degree in forestry, reluctantly entered his father's business
selling evening gowns. In the early 1960s, not long after he moved
the family from the well-heeled suburb of Glen Cove, Long Island,
to Strathmore-at-Matawan, a New Jersey housing development built by
William Levitt of Levittown fame, the business went bankrupt, as
corsages gave way to flower power.
She enrolled at Cooper Union to study painting and graduated in
1975 with two invaluable resources for a design career. One was
Marilyn Hoffner, the school's director of alumni relations. Hoffner
urged Goldberg to call the Cooper alumnus Lou Dorfsman at CBS,
though Carin had nothing remotely approaching a design portfolio.
Dorfsman had been sketching logos for the Museum of Broadcasting
and told Goldberg to “work 'em up.” “I didn't know what he meant,”
she recalls. She was left to work at a desk on a nearly empty
office floor where, “by a stroke of luck,” a freelance
hand-letterer with “hands of gold” showed her how to draw
ligatures, use a stat machine and master the ruling pen. Goldberg
worked day and night for more than a week and ended with a stack of
logotypes of every conceivable configuration. When she presented
them to Dorfsman, he grunted his approval and led her to the
bustling art department to begin her job as a junior designer. “It
was like entering Grand Central Station after being holed up in
bunker,” she says. “I passed the test and was escorted to Oz.”
Goldberg's second resource was more than just that: Gene Greif,
a Cooper Union classmate who was also a visionary force—“We were
each other's muse,” she says. After she got bored of laboring over
CBS ads for TV Guide and did a brief, misjudged stint at a
pharmaceutical agency, she joined Greif at CBS Records, where he
was working with Paula Scher, Henrietta Condak and John Berg on
album packages, and where Goldberg began designing advertising.
Several years later—after Goldberg had held jobs at Atlantic
Records, in CBS's classical division and at Mademoiselle
magazine—she and Greif shared a series of Manhattan studio spaces.
By that time, Greif had switched to illustrating, and the two
collaborated on a number of projects, including the celebrated
cover for Raymond Carver's Where Water Comes Together with Other
Water (1986). “The years when I was working with Gene—from
around 1982 to 1991—were probably the most creatively satisfying
and fertile of my life,” Goldberg says.
She opened her own studio in 1982 and was in business less than
a year when she was commissioned by Warner Bros. Records to design
the debut album for a young singer called Madonna. She has never
stopped fielding questions about it. Even more notorious was her
1986 cover for an edition of James Joyce's Ulysses.
Instructed by Vintage Books' art director Judith Loeser to pay
tribute to E. McKnight Kauffer's 1949 Random House cover of
Ulysses by emphasizing the “U” in the title, Goldberg took
inspiration from a 1928 exhibition poster by the German designer
Paul Renner. She set the headline on a diagonal in Renner's Futura
Bold and filled the bowl of the “U” in yellow.
Ulysses placed Goldberg firmly in the 1980s culture wars,
at least those being fought over appropriation. In his 1989 essay
“The Women Who Saved New York!” Philip Meggs praised the foursome
of Goldberg, Paula Scher, Louise Fili and Lorraine Louie for
enlivening contemporary design with neglected historical styles,
going so far as to credit them with “saving” New York from being
overshadowed by burgeoning design movements in Dallas, Minneapolis
and San Francisco. At the same time, Goldberg was vilified for
senselessly pilfering the past. Tibor Kalman—in “Good History/Bad
History,” a 1991 Print magazine essay co-written with J.
Abbott Miller and Karrie Jacobs—charged Goldberg with practicing
“jive modernism.” Fourteen years later, no less than John Updike
weighed in on the fracas in a New Yorker magazine review of
By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design, which
presented Goldberg's Ulysses design along with previous
editions. (Updike found Goldberg's typography “bold and
festive.”)
Goldberg is as good a performer as any, but she'd rather bundle
up her extroverted energies and invest them into her creations.
“The only work I ever wanted to do is visible work,” she says.
“Record covers, book jackets, magazines . . . because a record store or
a magazine stand is like having a gallery space.”
Since 1983, Goldberg's most comfortable stage has been the
classroom; she's taught graphic design at the School of Visual Arts
to thousands of aspiring professionals. Women's lib
notwithstanding, her female students are hardly beyond struggle,
she points out. The sexism of CBS's record department in the late
1970s, when drug-fueled hedonism was confused with liberation, has
been muffled. But the majority of women still must work punishing
hours to be first-rate professionals, spouses and parents.
Goldberg's unwillingness to shrug off such constraints led Meggs
to write a postscript to his manuscript for “The Women Who Saved
New York!” It began: “After completing my two-hour interview with
Carin Goldberg, in connection with this article, I told her I had
run out of questions. She looked me squarely in the eye and said,
'Don't you have any questions about the fact that this article is
about women?'” Twenty years later, she remains unmoved by arguments
that gender is irrelevant to one's professional identity. “Family
and money dictate the life of the woman designer,” she says firmly.
“And yes, there is very much such a thing as a woman designer. I
don't see anything wrong with that. In fact, I embrace it.”
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