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 […]
Biography
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 […]
Life in the 1960’s
Reasons for Visiting the USA Working for Chemie Grünenthal GmbH, the design staff had to respond to the advertising campaigns for medications that were produced on the premises under licenses for American Cyanamid, Lederle, and others. These corporations asked us to use their promotional materials for the European market. A very distinct problem emerged; physicians […]
Reasons for Visiting the USA
Working for Chemie Grünenthal GmbH, the design staff had to respond to the advertising campaigns for medications that were produced on the premises under licenses for American Cyanamid, Lederle, and others. These corporations asked us to use their promotional materials for the European market. A very distinct problem emerged; physicians in Germany, Switzerland, France and […]
Profile: Kunstschule Alsterdamm, Hamburg
Kunstschule Alsterdamm, one of the first new schools in Germany after WW II, established primarily as a concentration for the training professional graphic designers, was founded in 1946 by Gerd F. Setzke, a graphic designer, in Hamburg. Its first location was on Alsterdamm Boulevard, which was later renamed Ballindamm, named after Albert Ballin, a German […]