Malcolm Grear says that the toughest person to please in any logo design project should be the designer who creates the mark.
"It is challenging because the work must be memorable, as timeless as possible. I never want to be in the vogue. I want to set the standard and not follow others," he says.
Even so, Grear, a designer and design instructor for 45 years, is never completely satisfied with his work, despite all of the awards and recognition he has received and despite the fact that some logos he designed 20 years ago-such as Danny Ferrington, Sonesta International Hotels, Veterans Administration, US Department of Health and Human Services, Presbyterian Church (USA), Gannon and Scott, Twins Foundation-are still in use today. "I have never done one that I am completely proud of," he says. "If I ever was completely happy with a design, I would quit and go pump gas or something. But you want to get as close you can get."
Grear's studio, Malcolm Grear Designers of Providence, Rhode Island, has created many high-profile logos for clients including the Metropolitan Opera, the Guggenheim Museum, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Emory University, the Mayo Clinic, the Veteran's Administration, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Hallmark Cards, the 1996 Centennial Olympics in Atlanta, Ga., and many more. He believes his small office-only 10 people-is selected over enormous firms so often because clients recognize that they respect design over trend or vogue.
This predisposition toward combining timelessness with practicality, creating clean lines that still have a sense of life, may have come from his upbringing. He grew up in a rural Kentucky farming community where people made do with what they had: Novelty was not an option. He joined the Navy after high school and was trained as an aviation metal smith, which would eventually help him at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He enrolled in a wide array of art and design classes, and upon graduation in 1958, he returned home to Kentucky to become a designer. In 1960, he began teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he taught until 1997 when he became professor emeritus; since then he occasionally teaches a graduate class.
"I don't-indeed can't- teach students to be designers," Malcolm has been quoted as saying. "But I can and do teach attitudes and strategies that help them become designers."
Becoming a designer is as much about being an artist as it is about playing the politician and peacemaker. The identity he created for the Presbyterian Church required him to be all three, plus much more. The Northern and Southern branches of the church came together, not altogether amicably, for the first time in 122 years.
"It was one of the most sophisticated groups of people I ever presented to-museum directors, sculptors, engineers and many more people. And I presented to the general assembly, about 2,500 people in a civic center," he recalls. His job was not just to create an identity, but also to unite disparate groups, physically and spiritually.
The final result was very well received, both by the client and the design community. Built from objects that seem at first simply geometric, the church's logo reveals its contents in degrees. It is not static. It continues to offer information and almost breathe as it is examined.
It also contains what Malcolm calls "the visual switch," created by the interplay of counterforms and various line weights. "If a logo has some activity in it, it stays alive. There are certain images that you want to be flat, but not very many. This heartbeat in a logo is not necessary, but it makes a design unforgettable."
His studio's designs for the Catholic News Service and Wineburg Glass demonstrate this life. "The 'N' is formed by an early Catholic symbol, and once you see it, you never forget it," Malcolm says. "I call that a heartbeat."
Design, like music, language, mathematics, art, [and] science and the rest, is part of the structure of the mind," the designer wrote. "Done by nature with blind but dazzling elegance and by us with human purpose, design is no mere cultural confection: It is in us."
©2007 Logolounge Inc.