. . . avanti, avanti, avanti, you avant garde architect . . . have gall, guts, audacity, cheek, . . . jaunt gallantly onward . . . just don’t gallivant from gala to gala . . . don’t lose, but guard your integrity . . . because in your exuberance wanting to be the center […]
Year: 2019
My WGBH Experience
In the early seventies (1970), Hartford Gunn resigned as general manager of WGBH to assume the presidency of the newly formed Public Broadcasting Service in Washington. Stan Calderwood, former chairman of the board, Polaroid Corporation, having just been appointed President of the WGBH Educational Foundation, invited me to make an elaborate design presentation of concepts […]
MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts MIT’s publishing operations were first formally instituted by the creation of an imprint called “Technology Press” in 1932. This imprint was founded by James R. Killian, Jr., at the time editor of MIT’s Technology Review alumni magazine. He […]
MIT Office of Publications Legacy
The authorship of many documents designed by the staff of the MIT Office of Publication have never been verified or corrected. So one will find resumes by Muriel, Jackie and Ralph that are erroneous. The reason for this is that they were copied over and over again by many publications who never checked in with […]
More Thoughts on MIT
I would question the scholarship. This must have been concocted by a “design historian”, but not by a researcher or scholar trained in the discipline of art history. From my vantage point, theres is no way in which Muriel Cooper would have been in the position of appointing/hiring Jackie Casey. I agree, that Muriel was […]
The Harvard Business Review
Unfortunately, I have always made snap decisions, never weighing financial security in favor over personal integrity. Driving home from a day of pure misery at WGBH, I made the decision to quit the next morning, and did. Without discussing or weighing circumstance or ramification, I had my wife’s approval. My family had come through WW […]
1970’s, Harvard Business Review, Edward Tufte
In the early 1970s, the editors of the Harvard Business Review, received a critical letter from Edward Tufte, scolding its design director – me – as basically incompetent in designing intelligent diagrams for the journal’s audience. He introduced himself as an expert and included his book as example of good design. It was the first […]
Alexander Nesbitt
Alexander Nesbitt, calligrapher, historian of typography, and teacher, was born 1901 in Patterson, New Jersey. He worked for many years in New York City as a graphic designer and teacher. In 1950, he published “History and Technique of Lettering,” which became a classic in the field. Later, he taught at the Rhode Island School of […]
My Birthplace
I was born in the village of Plagwitz, close to Löwenberg, in Germany, now Lwówek Śląski in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship in Poland. Members of my family were evacuated in February of 1945 to escape the onslaught of Russian troops, ending up and finding refuge with in-laws at the Dutch/German border. The Löwenberg area became […]
Looking for Belonging
Being Abandoned – Being at Home Christmas 1944 is the moment which signals the beginning of my growing sense of abandonment. It is the last holiday, which my parents, sister and I would spend together. Right thereafter, my father, as general practitioner in medicine, was called to the “Volkssturm”, a German national militia established during […]