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2003 AIGA MEDAL
“I feel as if I'm shining shoes.” B. Martin Pedersen, owner,
publisher and creative director of the design profession's most
beloved publishing house, Graphis Inc., is sitting in his
impeccably neat office above Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. The items on
his expansive black desk are a testament to his preoccupation with
the economics of his business: binder files containing reports from
book distributors, a calculator and a laptop displaying an Excel
accounting spreadsheet. “This business is very sensitive to the
economy,” he says. “I have almost folded the operation on two
occasions.” A glass cabinet that runs along one wall holds copies
of the 150 books and annuals he has produced since he bought the
company from its founder, Walter Herdeg, in 1986.
Shoe shining seems a strangely pedestrian choice of analogy for
such a globally revered graphic design dignitary—Pedersen was
elected into the Art Directors Hall of Fame in 1997, is a member of
AGI and has a 4-decade-long career spangled with more than 300
industry awards. Yet shoe shining is just one of many services,
crafts and trades that he evokes with the utmost sincerity when
describing both his design and business philosophy—boat building,
construction work and package tying are among the others. Pedersen
does not subscribe to the secluded and tortured artist school of
graphic design. Instead, his approach is rooted in relationships,
high standards and long hours.
“My father taught me about hard work,” says Pedersen. “He and
his partner could frame a house in two days,” he says, leaning over
his desk. “You know how they did it? It was systems management. I
learned how to lay out the two-by-fours here, the four-by-sixes
there, in the shape of a frame, so. They taught me to care about
the details. When the job was finished I had to clean up. The first
time I swept up and I thought I'd finished, it was pointed out to
me that the last stage of the process was with a brush and piece of
cardboard to pick up the sawdust that was left in the corners. They
did everything with purpose and quality.” Pedersen relates this
episode with obvious relish. “I believe in the process of
apprenticeship.”
Jack Summerford, of Summerford Design Inc., attests to his
ethic: “The guy is not human. He can work all night and hop a plane
to Europe the next morning. He has run marathons, sailed ships in
rough seas and he returns his phone calls.” And designer and
educator Lou Danziger portrays Pedersen the perfectionist: “I
admire his consistent dedication to quality whether in his work as
a designer or as a publisher. There never seems to be any evidence
of compromise anywhere.”
Does this pursuit of precision cause him problems
professionally? “Constantly,” he replies gravely, before his face
crinkles into a warm, seductive smile. Far from being incidental to
his work as a designer, Pedersen's Nordic good looks—he is a tall,
slim 66-year-old with groomed white hair, a clean-shaven
open-seeming face and pale blue eyes—and his earnest affability
are, in fact, integral parts of his ethos and, by extension, his
design. Massimo Vignelli says of Pedersen, “His elegance, his
handsomeness, his manners, are so distinctive and so suave that one
is always spellbound in front of him, taken by his voice and the
way he tells stories. His work is like him: perfect, pleasant,
incisive.”
Pedersen sends out congratulatory letters and thankyou notes the
old-fashioned way, on paper, and signed with a blue ink Lamy pen.
When people call him, he makes them feel as if theirs is the call
he has been hoping for all day. He is a loyal friend and remembers
favors bestowed upon him with unfading gratitude. He gives
illustrators false deadlines so that, once he sees they've cracked
the assignment, he can bestow the gift of extra time. All this
warmth is infectious. When I remark that he's a man who truly
understands human nature, he laughs. “Yes, but it didn't happen
overnight.”
Bjarne Martin Pedersen grew up in rural southwest Norway. During
the war, the Germans, who were occupying Norway, built an airfield
a runway's length from the Pedersens' farm. He remembers seeing the
British bomber planes as they attacked that airfield—the impact of
each bomb “like a punch in the chest”—and then, after curfew,
playing in the broken-down planes. The Pedersens moved to Brooklyn
in 1948. Bjarne was 12 years old, “skinny as a rail” and couldn't
speak a word of English. No one could pronounce his first name, so
he edited it down to a more manageable “B,” and channeled his
shyness and insecurity into his studies. He was especially good at
mathematics and sciences, and won a place at the esteemed Brooklyn
Tech, whose alumni of note include Harvey Lichtenstein, president
of Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Leonard Riggio, founder and CEO
of Barnes & Noble. He intended to be a civil engineer but after
a short stint with American Bridge, the company responsible for the
construction of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, he became
disillusioned by the lack of hands-on craft involved in the
job.
One summer when Pedersen was working at a yacht club in
Larchmont, New York, he met an executive from the Benton &
Bowles advertising agency. Pleased with the meticulous work young
Pedersen had done on his boat, the executive offered him a job in
the mailroom at the renowned agency. Pedersen's beautifully
constructed packages (he learned the art from watching the wrappers
at Bloomingdale's during his lunch hours) attracted the attention
of the art directors and soon he was promoted to doing paste-up
presentations for the likes of Gene Federico. “You know the scene
in Saturday Night Fever, when Travolta looks longingly across the
river at Manhattan? Well I had felt the same way, but now I was
here—at number 666 Fifth Avenue—and loving it,” says Pedersen. “I
was absorbing the advertising annuals and going to the School of
Visual Arts at night. Why at night? Because that's when the pros
taught.”
By the time he set up his own design company, at the age of 30,
Pedersen had served on a destroyer escort in the Cuban missile
crisis and on a destroyer in the Berlin crisis, worked as a ski
instructor in Vermont, attempted to be a painter with the requisite
air mattress and garret apartment, taken positions at major design
and advertising studios, worked in the famously Helvetica- and
gridpurveying design department at Geigy Pharmaceuticals, and had
been corporate design director of American Airlines. He insists
that earning his Coast Guard license for 200-ton sail, steam or
motor vessels, as well as his pilot's license with an instrument
rating—aside from providing him with different perspectives of the
world, quite literally—was actually part of his backup plan in
case no one called the newly inaugurated Pedersen Design Inc.
The phone did ring of course, as the work printed on these pages
attests. Pedersen's love of boats and his frustration with the poor
visual quality of boating magazines led him in 1976 to initiate his
own subscriber-supported image-rich publication called Nautical
Quarterly. With only a shoestring budget to work with, Pedersen
improvised using press type in 72-point Aachen Bold for the
headlines that he would then photostat to whatever size was needed.
He asked photographers to consider the boats as works of sculpture.
He then exploited contrasts of scale, form and detail between the
images on spreads and between the Quarterly's cover image and the
image on its hard slipcase. The resulting publication delighted
subscribers and astounded the design community.
In 1977, Pedersen entered a unique and decade-long partnership
with Vance Jonson in Connecticut, and Kit and Linda Hinrichs, who
worked in San Francisco. When, in 1978, Neil Shakery added an
ampersand and his name to the masthead, Jonson, Pedersen, Hinrichs
& Shakery, Inc., with its 33 characters, became, as their
cheeky announcement put it, the “biggest name in design.” This
bicoastal alliance—each of them running their own business
independently but collaborating on certain projects—swept up every
accolade in the industry in the late '70s and early '80s. Then one
evening at an Art Directors Club award ceremony, they received
fewer awards than usual, Pedersen remembers. “Graphic design is
about style or fashion and there comes a point when you no longer
have the contemporary look.”
Unlike many designers who regard the client as the enemy, intent
only on quashing their vision, Pedersen relishes collaboration with
people he respects. “I have problems with people who say, 'My
client just doesn't understand what I've done,'” he says. “It's a
fallacy to believe that just because we work in the arts, we're the
only ones who are creative. There are clients who, in my opinion,
are far more creative than many people in this community. For
example, once a designer develops a look or a style and applies it
to every job, that's no longer creative; it's just process.”
Having served on a number of “highly political” juries over the
years, Pedersen is glad that he has continued in Herdeg's footsteps
as the sole arbiter of quality at Graphis. With the design of the
annuals, however, he takes a backseat. “The Graphis books present
the work and my design has no place on those pages,” Pedersen
affirms. “The quality of the annuals is the work presented; it has
nothing to do with my formatting.”
Of the role of Graphis today, he says he is “continuously
surprised at the extraordinary, creative achievements in graphic
design, advertising, illustration and photography. Graphis is here
to make sure that these individuals are published and that their
work will become an inspiration to both the professional and
business communities.”
Pedersen, who began his career inspired by an Art Directors Club
annual that someone in the Benton & Bowles art department gave
him, continues to believe in the importance of professional
measuring sticks such as design competitions and annuals. “Awards
provide a gauge,” he says. “They are also pats on the back. It is
such a difficult industry to achieve good work in; anyone who has
managed deserves to be lauded.” As a synopsis of the reasons for
the design community's celebration of Marty Pedersen via the 2003
AIGA Medal, Jack Summerford's comment is apt in its plain-speak:
“He is a great designer who now publishes other people's great
design.”
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