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1987 AIGA MEDAL
Good design has been an anomaly in American advertising ever since the turn of the
century when copywriters were given total rein over image makers.
Unlike European advertising of the same period when the foremost
artist/designers were made culture heroes, it was virtually
inconceivable that an American art director could be more than just
a layout person. This changed in the 1930s when the advertising
pioneer Ernest Elmo Caulkins, realizing the strength of word and
picture, devised the forerunner of the creative team. By 1939, when
Gene Federico, a twenty-one-year-old Pratt Institute graduate with
a special interest in typography, entered the profession, a few
exceptional designers had already begun to change the look and
content of some mainstream advertising, paving the way for a
distinctly American modern style.
By the late 1940s, after an apprenticeship at an ad agency, a
tour of duty in the Army and an unexceptional stint as a magazine
art associate, Federico realized that graphic design was his
passion and advertising his métier. Soon he became one of America's
premiere advertising art directors and designers, bridging the
often wide gap between the two jobs. His selection as the 1987 AIGA
Medalist is important for two reasons: It honors someone who, for
over four decades, has responsibly stretched the boundaries of
advertising design with typographic elegance and conceptual acuity,
and, as a principal of Lord Geller Federico Einstein, continues to
contribute to an American graphic design vocabulary.
Born on February 6, 1918, in New York's Greenwich Village,
Federico was the middle child with two sisters. When the family
moved to the Bronx, he attended P.S. 89 which, in keeping with a
venerable New York City public school tradition, sponsored a number
of poster competitions for city agencies and events. Federico's
earliest advertisement was a poster painted in tempera for the
ASPCA. When the family moved to Coney Island a few years later, he
enrolled in Abraham Lincoln High School. This was the home of the
legendary Art Squad led by Leon Friend, who taught
intensive classes in commercial design and illustration for over
fifty years. As an Art Squad member Federico was exposed
to the work of the leading European advertising artists. One
inspiration was an arresting, Cubist-inspired poster by A.M.
Cassandre promoting the S.S. Amsterdam. Awed by its stark
geometry and subtle hues, he modeled his own early poster style on
Cassandre's use of bold lettering and dominant painted image.
Though he designed pages for school publications, Federico explains
that “it was the direct message of a poster that propelled me into
advertising.”
Brooklyn's Pratt Institute was the next stage in his education.
In its voluminous library, Federico pored though the current
European design magazines and American design annuals soaking up
the influence of Cassandre, Lester Beall and Paul Rand (the latter,
only a few years older than Federico, was already making
significant inroads into advertising design). At Pratt
form became an enduring watchword, which Federico says is
the basis of “a work so powerful that it is hard to find any
weakness in it.”
Tom Benrimo, a popular advertising designer and illustrator at
the time, was a formidable teacher who recommended that Federico
take a job with his client, the Abbott Kimball Company, a small
advertising agency in New York. One of Federico's first
professional assignments was a clever conceptual piece entitled
“Brains and Luck,” a brochure promoting the agency that was
accepted into the 1939 New York Art Director's show. Concurrently,
he took a few weeknight classes at the Art Students League in
Manhattan under the tutelage of Howard Trafton. One Lesson was on
the effects of dumb light in which Federico recalls “you
just hang a naked lit bulb to see its effects on a model.” Another
was Trafton's analysis of African sculpture, “his emphasis on
distortion and negative space explained the root of all graphic
experience.” On those seemingly endless, noisy subway rides back to
his home in Brooklyn he would often discuss the evening's lessons
with Norman Geller, a younger classmate, who years later would
become his business partner.
In 1941, seduced by a job offer in the ad department at
Bamberger's Department Store, he decided to migrate to Newark, New
Jersey. There he could do good work, double his salary and most
important, live away from home for the first time. Four months
later, Uncle Sam offered a less comfortable home away from home.
From April 1941 to November 1945 Federico was a GI first stationed
in the United States and then sent to North Africa and Europe,
where he served in a camouflage unit. Field work allowed the
occasional respite to design manuals, posters, paint a mural for an
officer's club and, in Oran, organize an enlisted man's art show.
Federico returned from the war to the job at Abbott Kimball, where
he stayed less than a year.
Federico's pre- and postwar design was exhibited in 1946 at the
prestigious A-D Gallery in a show entitled “The Four Veterans.”
Will Burtin, then art director of Fortune magazine,
impressed by what he saw, asked the young designer to become his
art associate. “I thought that I should try editorial,” he
painfully recalls, “but I hated it. I loved Will, but I couldn't
follow the way he designed. So completely analytical, he could take
the most complex subject and then build it into a dramatic
structure. It was brilliant, but it wasn't my kind of design.”
Federico resigned after 10 months, and took a temporary job
supervising layout at Architectural Forum where, admitting
to his preference for the single image and a definite problem with
achieving kinetic flow through pictures, he did merely a so-so job.
At this point, he decided to freelance.
For a year and a half Federico struggled while his wife, Helen,
worked as an assistant to Paul Rand. “With Helen's salary, we were
able to manage,” he says. Rand suggested that Federico take a job
at Grey Advertising where he met Bill Bernbach, Phyllis Robinson,
Ned Doyle and Bob Gage. They left shortly to open an agency with
Mac Dane, called Doyle Dane Bernbach. Three years later, Gage
invited Federico to join the new firm, and he was given the
Woman's Day magazine account. This resulted in a series of
ads that revealed Federico's deft pictographic sensibility.
Though some advertising designers, like Rand and Beall, signed
their already distinctive work, Federico's signature was found in
the construction of the typographical image. “Lester Beall opened
my eyes to the idea that type could be used to emphasize the
message,” says Federico talking about his roots. “One of his ads
had the great line, 'To hell with eventually. Let's concentrate on
now.' The 'e' in 'eventually' was very large and 'now' was the same
size. The simple manipulation of these letter forms allowed the
viewer to immediately comprehend the message.” Federico's method is
also based on the integration of text and image and so he has
always worked intimately with a copywriter. He says, “I too look
for those simple elements in copy.” And warns that “when the
designer doesn't read the copy to catch the sound of the words, he
runs the risk of misusing the typography. If the rhythm of the
words is disregarded, the copy is likely to be laid out
incorrectly.” Federico's best-known ad for Woman's Day
typifies this rhythmic sensitivity. It has the catch-line “Going
Out,” and shows a photo of a woman riding a bicycle with wheels
made from the two lowercase Futura 'o's in the headline. The aim of
this ad was to persuade potential advertisers that three
million-plus devoted readers went out of their way to buy this
check-out counter magazine. The ads apparently did well for the
client, but more importantly proved the power of persuasive visual
simplicity in a field that often errs on the side of
overstatement.
Federico's advertising approach is more related to attitude than
style. Despite Lou Dorfsman's assertion that Federico is the prince
of Light Line Gothic (admittedly on of his favorite typefaces), few
of his ads conform to a single formula or evoke stylistic déjà
vu. Nevertheless, one trait is dominant: his love of and skill
with type. This talent matured during the mid-1950s. He fondly
remembers, “It was then that Aaron Burns (who was working at the
Composing Room) introduced me to a range of new typefaces. He would
get so excited about new developments, and we would have fun
working together.” This was more than the typical designer and
supplier relationship; Burns also developed formative outlets for
Federico and others to experiment with expressive typography. One
was a series of four sixteen-page booklets (written by Percy
Seitlin) that allowed designers total freedom to interpret a
specific subject with type, photography and illustration. Herb
Lubalin did one on jazz, Lester Beall did cars, Brownjohn
Chermeyeff and Geismar did New York City and Federico did Love
of Apples. “I wanted to try something where I used metal type
in extreme ways without having to cut it-without cutting up proofs
or playing with stats,” explains Federico about this masterpiece of
descriptive typography. “For some time, I had known that if you
stacked Title Gothics they would have a different look than
traditional types. So the whole book was based on that simple
idea.” But the aesthetics of type were not his only concern, as he
says, “The message of the book was that nature's beauty is being
radically altered. There's a line that reads 'When we, in business,
industrial America began to get smart about apples, we packaged
them and packaged them and packaged them until the apple itself
became a package.' I illustrated that point with a photograph of an
apple with a string tied around it.” In another designer's hands,
this subtle environmental critique might have become a screaming
polemic, yet Federico's elegant touch transformed these few pages
into memorable visual poetry. One could say the same for a great
deal of his advertising.
After the stint with Doyle Dane Bernbach, he went to Douglas D.
Simon and then spent seven and a half years at Benton and Bowles.
There he says “practically nothing happened,” though he actually
created some memorable advertising for IBM's Office Products
Division, including those for the introduction of the early
electric and first Selectric typewriters. For the Selectric, the
first office machine to use a type element, Federico wrote a
slogan, “A new type of writer,” which, like some other excellent
ideas for IBM, went unused. One of his favorites, and therefore the
most frustrating rejection, is a 'knotted pencil,' a symbol to
announce IBM's new 'Stretch' computer, which at the time could
solve more problems than any other computer. With his
creative-teammate copywriter Bob Larimer, Federico devised the
archetype of one of today's favored visual cliches. Larimer has
recently written about it, saying, “When longer ago than we care to
admit we created an ad for IBM illustrated with a knotted pencil,
we thought the symbol was totally original. Since that distant day,
the knotted pencil has turned up repeatedly in art, advertising and
commercial illustration.” Despite the reasons for IBM's rejection
(and Federico never really found out why), it underscores the heart
of the advertising dilemma: How effectively does good design
contribute to selling an advertising concept? Federico says, “It
depends on who is doing the selling. If I were a salesman like
George Lois or Lou Dorfsman, I could sell almost anything. But you
don't always have such good fortune. Your work is presented by
account people who lack sufficient feeling for it.”
The need for more control over the quality and destiny of his
work motivated Federico to start his own agency. However, the
process was not rapid or easy. In the early 1960s at Benton and
Bowles, Federico ran an art group that included Emil Gargano, Roy
Grace and Dick Hess. There he met a copywriter named Dick Lord, who
left to become creative director of Warwick & Legler and
invited Federico to join him. Four years passed before taking up
the offer to become art supervisor. Eight months later in early
1967, citing general malaise, both Lord and Federico decided to
form a partnership called Lord Southard Federico. Southard, who was
brought in to lure accounts, soon left making it Lord Federico.
“That added a sort of regal sound to my name,” muses Federico. One
day on the street, he ran into Norman Geller, his former classmate
and subway companion, who as a former art director turned business
wiz had done quite well with his own agency. Wanting to take on a
new challenge, he joined the fledgling firm. Soon the name of
copywriter, Arthur Einstein, was added to the shingle. With two
writers and two art people as principals, Lord Geller Federico
Einstein was built on a solid creative foundation. At first
business was slow, but in time the firm acquired some fashion,
beauty and “nuts and bolt” accounts. One of Federico's most
pleasing assignments is for Napier Jewelry, which for eighteen
years he has done single-handedly, and whose basic format has not
changed since the first ad. Of the format, a close-up photograph of
the product on a model with the simple line, “Napier is? (with a
descriptive word),” Federico says, “It's still fresh! And that to
me, is the best advertising.” In the early days of LGFE, he and
Lord collaborated on a delightful campaign of full-page newspaper
ads advertising The New Yorker using selected editorial
contents from the product, with only one small advertising line at
the bottom, “Yes, The New Yorker.” Its message is as naturally
timely and its design as fittingly timeless as the magazine
itself.
As the firm grew, so did Federico's reputation. “He was called
El Supremo,” says Sam Antupit, vice president of design at Harry N.
Abrams Inc. who as a student met Federico over thirty years ago.
“Gene was, and is, considered the art director's art director. Even
when he became a principal in a firm, he never renounced his
creative role. His was also the first name on the list of important
people to see when a young design student came to New York. And he
actually made time to see you too.”
With his mild, sometimes self-effacing manner, wry wit and
palpable concern for good design and its creators, Federico is a
bona fide elder statesman of this profession. What characterizes
this eminence? Attitude is key, and passion is paramount.
Respect, not only for his clients (“Finding the best solution for a
client's identity is not a matter or a means of self expression,”
he says) but deference for his audience dictates his practice. By
not underestimating the consumer's intelligence, and by recognizing
the constraints of this persuasive art, Federico continues to
expand advertising's boundaries and set its standards.
Copyright 1988 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
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