Lou Dorfsman's Wall
I wanted to focus on a great graphic designer who really had an impact on the world of advertising and corporate identity, Lou Dorfsman. In particular, his extraordinary typographic wall.
Lou Dorfsman (1918–2008) spent more than 40 years at CBS, shaping the company's visual identity in everything from advertising and books to signage, interiors, letterheads and even the smallest details of the CBS building. I love that level of care – nothing seemed too small to matter.
The best example has to be Gastrotypographicalassemblage, created for the CBS cafeteria in 1966. At around 35 feet wide by 8.5 feet high, it was a giant three-dimensional celebration of food and type, made up of 1,650 wooden letters and 65 objects. Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase helped develop the composition and lettering from Dorfsman's original design.
The varied typefaces spell out the foods offered in the cafeteria, interspersed with wonderfully playful objects – plastic bagels, a wax sandwich, stacked tin cans, wooden feet crushing grapes and even a frying pan complete with plastic egg. It must have been quite something to sit beside while eating your lunch!
A typographic wall perhaps doesn't feel so unusual now, but this still seems wonderfully bold. And happily, the story has moved on since I originally wrote this post. CBS removed the wall in 1991, but craftsman Nick Fasciano rescued its nine panels. After years in storage it was painstakingly restored and, in 2014, found a new permanent home at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.
Two other pieces of Dorfsman's work I particularly like are the books he created for CBS. Field of Vision, from 1962, uses beautiful black-and-white photography to capture seven football games broadcast across America on a single afternoon. Then there is the book commemorating CBS's coverage of the 1969 moon landing, with a wonderful blind-embossed cover that resembles the cratered surface of the moon.
Dorfsman's design is beautifully bold, often monochrome, with striking photography and large-scale typography. The spreads engage and communicate. Perhaps that's it, perhaps that is what I take most from this great designer – his ability to communicate. Little advert or giant wall, his message was presented in a way you couldn't, and didn't want to, ignore.
For more on the restored wall, see the Culinary Institute of America and Alliance Graphique Internationale.
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