Nothing embodies the calm authority of American industry like Paul Rand’s logo for IBM. Designed in 1956, at a time when International Business Machines was still using vacuum tubes in its vast room-filling computers, it remains in use, continuing to give the massive company a lustre of quiet, competent efficiency and no-nonsense directness. It is the anti-Apple, in other words.
Rand – who had already effectively re-branded himself from Peretz Rosenbaum to better appeal to Madison Avenue’s prejudices – was unashamedly inspired by the European avant-garde, in art and commerce. After honing his skills as a magazine art director, he turned to corporate identity. In IBM, he struck commercial gold.
Founded in 1911 as a maker of record-keeping systems, the company became International Business Machines in 1924, building a global empire based on the technology of the punch-card, then as one of the pioneering manufacturers of electromechanical, then vacuum tube and then transistorised computers from the 1940s onwards. In 1964, it introduced System/360, a family of modular computers with multiple applications that could be scaled up and down as required. Shaped with austere futurism by industrial designer Eliot Noyes, they were the perfect foil for Rand’s logo.
The simple three letter device gave the industrial monolith a coherence across a dizzying range and scale of products, capable of coping with everything from a business card to a business park entrance. Rand modified it in 1960 and again in 1972 to create the familiar striped logotype (with two weights of stripe, depending on the scale of use).
Distinctive, bold and graphic, it was an appropriately serious signifier for the world’s largest computer maker. In many respects, IBM was a pioneering collaborator with high design; the company also worked with notable designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi and George Nelson, as well as architects as diverse as Denys Lasdun and Eero Saarinen. Navigate to its website today, and Rand’s work is still at the top of the page.
