1998 AIGA MEDAL
William Golden
applied new ideas, forms, and methods to the world of advertising
and promotional graphics. The body of his work endures as a
milestone in the history of graphic design. Providing a map of
uncharted territory, Golden's program of promotional advertising
and identity design for CBS was innovative and set a standard of
excellence which has endured over the years. He was among a
distinguished group of pioneers in the post-World War II era who
gave shape to the emerging field of graphic design.
The primary responsibility of the designer is the communication
of the client's message. Golden understood this goal and made it
his first priority. He described the advertising designer as “part
small businessman and part artist.” On another occasion, he
asserted that the artist and the designer were “two completely
different things.”
“I think that all the trouble in this field comes from someone's
assumption that they are, maybe, the same person. I think the fine
artist makes a personal statement about his world and his reactions
to his world. He makes it to a limited audience or to a big
audience—but it's all his. The advertising designer has a
completely different function. He may be someone who thought he
wanted to be a painter—but wasn't. If (the designer) is honest
enough, he becomes a professional who can do something that is not
his own. I think the trouble comes when he tries to make it a work
of art, too. I think a lot of designers who are talented and
intelligent don't find this very satisfying. But they're not going
to find it more satisfying by pretending it's something it
isn't.”
The youngest of 12 children, Golden was born on the lower east
side of Manhattan on March 31, 1911. His formal schooling ended up
on graduation from the Vocational School for Boys where he studied
photoengraving and design. At 17, a tough and self-reliant young
man, he left home to work in a lithography and photoengraving firm
in Los Angeles. While there he also worked in the art department of
the Los Angeles Examiner. Following his return to New York
in the early 1930s, Golden worked as a promotional designer for
Hearst's Journal-American. Within a few years, he had
joined the staff of House and Garden, one of the Condé
Nast magazines. He learned much during his years of apprenticeship
under Dr. M.F. Agha, who, in Golden's words, “forced the people who
worked for him to try constantly to surpass themselves.” Golden
left Condé Nast in 1937 to join the promotion department at the
Columbia Broadcasting System. He was promoted to art director three
years later. In 1941 Golden took a leave of absence from CBS to
work for the Office of War Information in Washington. Later he
served in Europe as art director of army training manuals and was
discharged in 1946 with the rank of captain.
When Golden returned to CBS, television was the medium of the
hour. Golden became the chief architect for the bold new graphic
identity program for CBS. He selected Didot Bodoni as the typeface
to be used in all CBS corporate applications. The famous eye symbol
was developed to provide special identification for CBS Television.
Kurt Weihs, who was involved in the project, remembers that the eye
had its beginnings in an article in Portfolio about the
then relatively esoteric subject of Shaker design.
“Among the illustrations was an eye symbol. Golden picked it up
and used it for a CBS sales portfolio. Then he felt there was more
to it and used it in an ad. I redesigned the earlier versions, and
it became the mark for CBS Television. We had done eyes before.
Everybody had done eyes; but this one was something that really
worked. I felt that the eye could have become the corporate symbol.
We saw the eye as symbolizing CBS 'looking at the world.'”
The eye had its premiere on CBS television on November 19, 1951,
overlaid on a photograph of cloud-filled sky. The symbol was
quickly put to use in all aspects of identification for CBS
Television. Its ubiquity caused Golden some second thoughts: “It is
used so often that it sometimes seems like a Frankenstein's monster
to me, but I am grateful it is such a versatile thing that there
seems to be no end to the number of ways it can be used without
losing its identity.” Years after Golden's death, Lou Dorfsman, his
successor at CBS, offered this praise of this symbol and its
creator.
“Today as we watch the most transforming medium of our time,
there is a Golden graphic message seen daily by more people than
have seen a single mark of modern man. It is that majestically
simple CBS eye, as beautifully appropriate when he deigned it in
1951 as it is today. If I can interpret it in the special ironic
way of Bill Golden, it is there to watch over our professional
successes as well as spot our transgressions.”
Golden carried forward the work Agha and Brodovitch had done in
demonstrating that the designer in a corporation must have a role
not only in the communication of ideas but in the generation of
ideas as well. He insisted on playing a part in corporate
policy-making.
This was supported by his working relationship with Frank
Stanton, president of CBS, which continued for 20 years. They were
close friends who shared a drive for excellence and a belief in the
efficacy of good visual form.
Under Golden's leadership, CBS Television was clearly in the
forefront of graphic design in the early 1950s. The art department,
recalls George Lois, was “an atelier; it was the place to be. All
the design had to be perfect: the thinking, the concepts, the
production. It was the only job in America? Bill protected the
place. We did thousands of jobs—ads, trailers, letterhead, charts
and folders. We did tons of work, and every job had to be
perfect.”
Golden was at his best when he was able to evolve the précis and
the concept for the advertising. He was a brilliant copywriter
with, as Will Burtin put it, “a sense for the explosive impact of
words.” Even though Golden was largely self-educated, his mind had
scope. “Bill had read enormously, and his thinking was clear and
bold,” recalled Ben Shahn. “The world of advertising and publicity
exercised no tyranny over him.” Golden made enthusiastic use of
European ideas in the areas of typography, photography, and layout.
Golden brought the world's top artists in as free-lancers to tell
the story of broadcasting at CBS in its advertisements and
publications.
In developing, directing and sustaining the visual program at
CBS, Golden set an entirely new standard for American design. All
the trade ads, promotional materials, reports and other corporate
design applications done at CBS during his tenure were of a
consistently high aesthetic quality. That this level of excellence
was taken for granted is especially impressive in view of Golden's
insistence that the work was based on business and marketing
objectives; in the visual problem-solving process, aesthetics were
clearly secondary. It was a case of the corporation's and the
designer's objectives being in harmony.
And finally, Golden himself had this to say of the nature of his
work: “The kind of effort that goes into graphic expression is
essentially lonely and intensive and produces, at its best, a
simple logical design. It is sometimes frustrating to find that
hardly anyone knows that it is a very complicated job to produce
something that is very simple.”
Golden's very strengths proved, in one important sense, his
greatest weakness. His drive for excellence and his natural
introversion took their toll on his health. The heart attack which
claimed his life at the age of forty-eight on October 23, 1959, was
shock to his family and colleagues. He left a void in the field of
graphic design.
One of Golden's colleagues John Cowden remembers those final
years. “Simply because Bill cared so much, fought so hard and
performed so well, he prevailed and was able to give CBS
advertising a distinction and quality second to none. Part of the
responsibility of being in advertising meant that the designer must
have the courage of his or her convictions? a bulldog tenacity for
the things he or she believed in? and the recognition that constant
vigilance is the price of freedom.” Golden leaves this challenge of
excellence as his legacy to those of us who follow.
Copyright 1989 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
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