INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Volume 1, Number 2, April 1954

Jane Fisk Mitarachi (editor) INDUSTRIAL DESIGN 2. NYC: Whitney Publications, Inc., 1954. Original Edition (Volume 1, Number 2, April 1954). A near-fine original magazine: faint ghost of a handwritten date on cover, otherwise immaculate. Cover and editorial design by Alvin Lustig. Very Scarce in any condition--when was the last time you saw one of these great magazines for sale? An amazing magazine that has more information per column inch than any other vintage publication I have seen.

9 x 12 magazine with 136 pages and illustrated throughout and printed on different stocks, including one fold-out page and an amazing variety of editorial content. here is what the publishers wanted this magazine to accomplish: "A bi-monthly review of form and technique in designing for industry. Published for active industrial designers and the design executives throughout industry who are concerned with product design, development and marketing."

This magazine stands as one of the high points of Alvin Lustig's career. Lustig served as Art Director for the first three issues of this magazine. His cover and interior layouts rate as some of the strongest work of his career. Lustig is known for his expertise in virtually all the design disciplines, which he seamlessly integrated into his life. He designed record albums, magazines (notably the format and some covers of Industrial Design), advertisements, commercial catalogs, annual reports and office spaces and textiles.

This magazine celebrates all the best of modern American industrial design. Includes many examples of furniture, ceramics, housewares, appliances, automobiles, buildings, radios, projectors, televisions, and many other objects designed for the burgeoning postwar middle class.

Contents include:

• Design as Communication by George Nelson
• Shapes of Identifiers by Ladislav Sutnar
• The Black Box by John Pile
• The Designer's Stake in the Changing American Market by Stanley Wellisz
• What is happening to the Office? by Eric Larrabee
• Plastics on the Table
• A Talkwith Mr. Stuart of Martin-Senour
• Cars 1954
• Designs from Abroad
• With Nothing But Wood: Japanese Architecture
• Design Review: Good Design
• Inventions and Instruments
• Appliances
• Technics

Issue Highlights: Good Design: a two-page review of the 1953 show held at the Museum of Modern Art and the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. 10 contemporary household items are featured in b/w photos, including Gio Ponti's stainless flatware.

Ladislav Sutnar: a 6-page article Shapes of Identifiers that was designed by Sutnar. An excellent piece of work, in terms of both form and content, naturally!

George Nelson: authored a 5-page article entitled Design as Communication.

Office Furniture : ten pages by Eric Larrabee that features furniture by George Nelson/herman Miller, Knoll Associates, Jens Risom, and Donald Deskey for Globe Wernicke.

Herman Miller: the inside back cover is a two-color full-page add for the herman miller Furniture Company designed by Irving Harper (the George Nelson Associate who is credited with the majority of the nelson Howard Miller Clock designs). The ad features both Nelson's and Charles Eames' furniture.

Plastics on the Table: a 10-page article on advances in plastics technology and how these advances are manifesting themselves on consumers dining room tables. Included are b/w images of many Russel Wright designs, both prototypes and production models.

Morton Godsholl: gets some well-deserved praise for his art-direction of the Martin-Senour Paint Company. Goldsholl has always been one of my favorite graphic designers, and his work has been criminally overlooked by design historians, possibly because he was based in Chicago instead of NYC.

In Design Literacy (Second Edition, Allworth Press), Steven Heller wrote an essay describing the historical significance of Alvin Lustig's short tenure as Industrial Design's Art Director: łA design icon doesn't come along every day. To be so considered it must not only transcend its function and stand the test of time, but also must represent the time in which it was produced. The cover of Industrial Design, Vol. 1 No.1, February 1954, was not just the emblem of a new publishing venture, but a testament to one man's modernism; one of the last works created by Alvin Lustig (1915-1955), who suffered an untimely death from diabetes in 1955 at the age of forty-five."

"Despite failing vision, Lustig was deeply involved in the design of the first two and nominally with the third issues of the magazine as art editor, art director, and art consultant, respectively. He saw his role as the framer of ideas that were visual in nature. Although he never had the chance to develop his basic design concepts further, he left behind a modern design icon -- the cover -- and a format that continued to define the magazine for years after."

"Industrial Design was the brainchild of publisher Charles Whitney, who also published the successful Interiors. In 1953 he was convinced by his friend and advisor George Nelson that the time was right to introduce a specialized periodical devoted to practitioners of this burgeoning field. Interiors was already featuring its own industrial design column that had evolved into a discrete section, which Whitney realized had commercial potential as a spinoff. Interiors was also so beautifully designed that Industrial Design could have no less the visual panache of a coffee table book/magazine, replete with foldouts and slipsheets, not unlike the legendary design magazine Portfolio, published between 1949 and 1951. To accomplish this an eminent art director was sought. This was the age of great magazine art directors -- including Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Liberman, Otto Storch, Cipe Pineles, and Alan Hurlburt -- and Whitney fervently believed that a magazine's design would be the deciding factor in its success. Hence Lustig was entrusted with considerable authority to design the magazine as he saw fit."

"On the editorial side, however, Whitney decided to take a calculated risk by promoting two young Interiors associate editors to co-editors of Industrial Design. Jane Fisk (now Jane Thompson of the architectural firm Thompson & Wood in Cambridge) and Deborah Allen may have been inexperienced in the field of industrial design but nevertheless had a clear plan to introduce a distinctly journalistic sensibility into professional publishing that emphasized criticism and analysis rather than the puff pieces common to the genre. As it turned out, this became a point of philosophical contention between the designer and editors."

"If they had a choice the editors would have preferred an art director who, as Thompson explained, "would have been in the trenches with us," a team player with journalistic instincts rather than a distant presence with a formalist sensibility. Because Lustig designed the initial dummy and subsequent two issues in his own studio and returned with the completed layouts to the editorial offices he had made certain assumptions about the presentation of content that were often inconsistent with the editors' vision. "We did not want the words to be gray space, we wanted them to have meaning," recalled Thompson about wanting more spontaneous design responses to the material. But instead of being journalistically intuitive, Lustig imposed his formal preconceptions, and designed the magazine as he would a book."

"Blocks of text type were indeed used as gray matter to frame an abundance of precisely silhouetted photographs. But if there was a problem it was more in the editors' minds than Lustig's design. While it was not as journalistically paced as say, a Life magazine, it was respectfully, indeed elegantly neutral allowing, for a wide range of material to be presented without interference. Moreover, it was what Whitney wanted, so the editors reconciled themselves to building the magazine's editorial reputation through informative features written by authors not previously associated with trade publishing."

"Thompson nevertheless hated the first cover with its tight grid and silouetted photographs. Instead she wanted to disrupt the design purity with a few well composed coverlines. She further favored a conceptual method of intersecting photography, resulting in an editorial idea, not a pure design. Lustig thought coverlines would sully the design and intersecting ideas would be too contrived. Years later, Thompson grudgingly admitted that maybe Lustig's judgment was wiser: "He wanted to make a strong simple statement, which he believed (perhaps erroneously since Industrial Design did not have to compete on the newsstand) had to stand up against the covers of the elegant fashion magazines." Lustig's design set the standard for future covers, and his successor, Martin Rosensweig, continued to produce covers for a few years afterward that more rigidly adhered to the same formal practices."

"Despite these creative tensions, the early issues of Industrial Design reveal a shift in the nature of professional publishing from a trade to cultural orientation that was in no small way underscored by Lustig's classically modern design."

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