Aleksey Brodovich. 13.5 points

Nastya Smirnova

The turn of the century marked 101 anniversary of Alexey Brodovich — major designer of the 20th century, who worked in advertising, poster, photography, furniture design, interior design, jewellry, magazine design, painting, book design, for 24 years was an art director of a fashion magazine. But, interestingly enough, Brodovich who is idolised in the American professional graphic design scene is not known to the general public. The thing is that Brodovich all his life intentionally stayed in the shadows. Fame of a high-class designer was not for him. What he really wanted was to be a provocateur and creator of innovative ideas.

Born near St. Petersburg in 1898, Brodovich fled the Bolsheviks in 1920 with his family and future wife and settled in Paris. Brodovich's design career flourished in 1924 after his poster design for Le Bal Banal, a benefit dance for poor artists, was selected over many other artists including Pablo Picasso. Soon he was in great demand, designing fabric, jewellry, restaurant decor, posters and department store advertisements. Invited to the United States in 1930 to start an advertising art department at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, Brodovich began his teaching career while completing numerous freelance assignments. In 1934, Carmel Snow, the new editor of Harper's Bazaar, saw his design work and immediately hired him to be its art director. It was the beginning of a 24-year tenure that would revolutionise both fashion and magazine design.

By the 1950s, Brodovich had perfected his style of combining text and photography with copious amounts of white space. Despite his easily recognisable work, Brodovich did not formulate a theory of design. „There is no recipe for good layout,“ he said. „What must be maintained is a feeling of change and contrast.A layout man should be simple with good photographs. He should perform acrobatics when the pictures are bad.“

Henry Wolf, Brodovich's successor at Harper's Bazaar, commented on his unique approach to magazine layout. „Oh, of course he was a good innate sense of elegance about space,“ Wolf said. „But his layouts were done only as approximations. He stood in the middle of the room and, with a scissor, cut out photostats which he taped to a piece of paper. Others later straightened them. It was communicating an idea, a mood, a criticism that he was precise and masterful.“

Besides his achievements at Bazaar, Brodovich's legacy as a publication designer included the influential but shortlived Portfolio. Only three issues were published in 1950 and 1951. An innovative quarterly aimed at the design profession, Portfolio contained vividly illustrated features on Alexander Calder, Charles Eames, Paul Rand, Saul Steinberg and others. It also contained the work of pioneering photographers, many of whom were Brodovich's students. As art editor, Brodovich helped determine the magazine's contents, and created its distinct design with the help of elaborate devices such as diecuts, transparent pages and multipage foldouts. Those three issues are considered by many to be the pinnacle of Brodovich's design.

He continued to teach throughout his career. His Design Laboratory, which he began in 1941 at the New School for Social Research in New York, focused on illustration, graphic design and photography. As a teacher, Brodovich was considered harsh in his criticism but inspiring, and his student list reads like a who's who of visual communication, including photographers Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Art Kane and Hiro, and art directors Bob Gage, Helmut Krone and Steve Frankfurt.

Today Brodovich's layouts continue to inspire with their energetic vitality and immediacy. His dedication to education directly influenced a generation of visual communicators and indirectly everyone else. Irving Penn said, „All designers, all photographers, all art directors, whether they know it or not,are students of Alexey Brodovich.“ Written by Patrick Coyne