This essay was written in 2010. I had just turned the sexagenarian corner, which I believed was a milestone. It was and it wasn’t. If only I could be 60 again. The 15 years that have elapsed were too short; I’ve long been concerned about getting older, but now I’m obsessed over the prospect of sliding through the next five years toward my next millstone—80! So, I thought that I would revisit this paean to my then–80-year-old colleagues, mentors and friends who were still active enough to take a pulse, so to speak.
Recently I turned 60, which is the new 50. However, at 50 I often felt more like 60, and now at 60, I look a lot like 40 but sometimes my body feels around 80, which is the new 70. Age is relative—aging is biological.
My aging made me think about even older graphic designers who have crossed into the 80s yet are as productive as ever. Unlike other arts, where genius usually presents at an early age, graphic design is like the proverbial fine wine: Over time it achieves maturity—some of the time.
In 2011 a handful of celebrated designers and illustrators who were born in 1931 turned 80. They joined a smaller group of flourishing octogenarians who are as vital, influential, and inspirational as they were back in their youth. Eighty may not be the new 70, but if Seymour Chwast, Tom Geismar, Bob Gill, Peter Knapp, George Lois, Deborah Sussman, Tomi Ungerer and Massimo Vignelli* (plus Ivan Chermayeff and Jan Van Toorn, born in 1932), Milton Glaser and Ed Sorel (each born in 1929) are any proof, 80 is just another calendar year in the continuum of fruitful professional and artistic design lives.
Talent doesn’t come with an out-of-date stamp. Each of the “new 80-year-olds” create art, illustration, typography and design that rejects the stereotype of diminished capacity. If anything, their work is often more engaging, since long ago they went through the novelty stage of their careers. Free of the requisite need to be fashionable, they concentrate on design and illustration purity—and they are having fun. There is no mandatory retirement for graphic designers.
The question of aging, notes Jan Van Toorn, one of the Netherland’s most critical design thinkers, practitioners and educators, “brought to my mind the answer Dutch author and literary critic Jeanne Van Schaik-Willing [1895–1984] gave to the same questions in an interview at the age of 85. … She talked about the successive and partly parallel or overlapping ‘plateaus’ she explored during her life—each time eager to examine a new field when she reached the horizon or edge of a former one. Looking at my own development, this metaphor was very insightful over the years. It made me understand how the ‘findings’ at the several plateaus—according to changing circumstances and acquired insights—keep you going, broaden and inspire your ideas and actions as a human being and professional.
How did this current batch of 80-year-olds transcend time and fashion? Obsolescence is like quicksand; once a designer falls in it is extremely difficult to get free. So presumably equal parts talent, persistence, and ego increase the odds of professional survival.
Paul Rand, who was 86 when he died of cancer in 1996, worked energetically to the end. He literally designed a logo in his hospital bed. His late work was arguably as relevant as it was in the 1950s when he typified American Midcentury Modern graphic design. His three autobiographical monographs, published while in his late 70s and early 80s, codified his life’s work but also had relevance for a younger generation. As a devout Modernist he intuitively rejected design that was sentimental.
Not every designer can claim continued relevance, regardless of age. When Alex Steinweiss (1917–2011), the pioneer of American record cover design, turned fifty, he voluntarily opted out of graphic design, famously proclaiming that he was surrounded by “guys in fringed jackets” who wanted to choose their own designers. During the ’60s rock era, Steinweiss’s album covers, while beautiful, did not keep up with the demands of the zeitgeist. Only decades later, in his late 70s and 80s, was he resurrected as a historically important figure. Others, with less historical bona fides, became obsolete in a field that largely values fashionable approaches.
When I decided to write this article I immediately contacted Seymour Chwast, co-founder with Milton Glaser of Push Pin Studios and currently sole proprietor of same. We have worked together on many projects for more than two decades and he’s always approached them with the same high fructose energy as a kid playing sports. There is nothing 80 about him—seasoned maybe—but not old. Twenty years my senior, he’s also my best friend. Yet his response to my idea was skeptical:
“What are you going to do for us? Get us more interesting work?”
Before I had a chance to respond, he added, “Who wants to hire someone who might die before the job is finished?”
He was joking. He is more or less in denial about this milestone, and it suits him. Chwast gets to his studio at 7 a.m. every weekday and draws, conceives, and draws more and more. On weekends he makes metal sculptures on satiric themes. He’s done this for decades. The only thing that’s changed over the years, and this is true for many others: He has trimmed down his staff and overhead considerably. Why carry a heavy weight, when it’s much more fun to just do the work.
Other designers, however, more readily accept their new chronological designation. Deborah Sussman, known for creating the California Postmodern style through her firm Sussman Preja’s design for the 1984 Summer Olympics, says, “It took me by surprise. I always thought I was exempt.” Massimo Vignelli, who celebrated his 80th birthday with the opening of an impressive gallery and archive space bearing his name—the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)—says more fatalistically, “Without any doubt, it is a landmark. Mortality is becoming more familiar than ever, but at the same time is voided of fear. I have done whatever I wanted to do, more or less, and whenever I will have to go, I guess I am ready.” And George Lois, who held the title of “Mad Ave’s Wunderkind” well beyond the usual burn-out period in advertising, says that 80 “means that I’m getting closer to 85, the age when I was always afraid I might have to stop playing basketball with all the young studs at the Y.”
In our aging and ageist society, 50 had long been a line in the sand—a kind of beginning of the end—the tunnel at the end of the light. Not anymore. Owing to extended longevity and economic instability, retirement ages have been indefinitely postponed in many professions—today a work-till-you-drop ethic prevails.
Designers retire when they choose to, not when a corporation or government agency says they must. Barring catastrophic illness, talent is ongoing. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it forever. “I never thought of retiring,” Vignelli admits, “therefore I thought that I will keep working until I die, if I am lucky. I may become unable, or clients will stop to come, in that case I will prefer to die.”
Apparently, there is a fountain of youth. “Work has been the blood of my life,” says Sussman, “but priorities are changing. I’ve become more distanced from micromanaging. I am thinking more.” Lois echoes the work sentiment in his familiarly boisterous way: “I’d go out of my mind without having to solve a communication problem every day of my life. I’ll die either at the computer designing with my son Luke, or on the basketball court with all my pals—with no regrets.” He rattles off a long list of current projects including an ad campaign of Superfocus eyeglasses, an ad campaign for Physician, Heal Thyself, the branding and ad campaign for Nail Your Mortgage, a revolutionary process to nail down affordable, transparent mortgages in these tough economic times, “and a couple of others I can’t talk about yet.” And yes, he still plays hard-contact pick-up basketball games at least once a week.
Tom Geismar, who for 50 years has shared the marquee of Chermayeff & Geismar and has designed some of the most recognizable logos in America, says, “As long as you are able to work every day, and, importantly, enjoy it, why not keep doing it? My observation is that most people who stop working, and have nothing as demanding to replace it, rather quickly fall apart.” Geismar is working on about five different projects, which he adds, “is about normal.” Likewise, for Vignelli, being prodigious goes without saying; he’s recently been working on several books, some packaging, some silverware, new re-edition of plasticware, the Vignelli workshops at RIT, and writing about design. What he calls “the usual.”
Chwast’s latest work is The Odyssey by Homer, “a graphic novel, written before I was born,” he snickers. “Doing graphic novels has given me great satisfaction. Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were a lot of fun to do. My 32-page picture books are tougher because every word and image are critical. I seem to make kids happy in spite of my indifference to their taste and needs.”
I asked Bob Gill, cofounder in 1960 of Fletcher Forbes Gill (the forerunner of Pentagram), designer of films, musical events (“Beatlemania”), commercials and author of 19 books, including the forthcoming omnibus Bob Gill, so far, if turning 80 has special significance. I should have anticipated that his answer, from the title of his book, would be “No!” Undeterred, I asked whether he ever imagined he would still be working this long. “I have no memory of ever thinking ahead professionally,” he claims. “I went to Europe on a whim and stayed 15 years. I returned to New York also on a whim, and I’m still designing, teaching and thinking about books because there’s nothing I’d rather do.” Then he adds with a touch of pride, “and I still encourage my students to think independently, instead of regurgitating what the culture decrees to be ‘trendy.’”
Tomi Ungerer, satirist, illustrator, children’s book pioneer, and memoirist, who among other things altered the course of advertising illustration in New York in the ’60s with his “Expect the Unexpected” campaigns, says, “With 80 you don’t have much time left. And because I’ve trained myself all my life to have ideas, I am a slave now of too many ideas waiting in line, waiting to be used. I don’t think ever in my life I’ve had that many projects on my shelves. I’m very grateful to have the energy to do them.” Ungerer explains that his significant current pleasure “is the enjoyment to carry on with my thinking through collages and sculpture, and the missing volume in my autobiography of the New York years.”
Van Toorn says he looks forward to this age for the space it allows him to “have enough time for the practical implications of a dialogic approach of visual production, bearing in mind the critical social, cultural, and linguistic worlds I became increasingly familiar with. From the start I made some space for this in my so-called ‘laboratory work’ or found commissioners interested in a contrary view on communication design. Later on, being a part-time educator there was more time to seriously invest in the combination of the language use and the liberating aspects of a politically oriented design.”
Success obviously impacts longevity. The “new 80s” started their careers in a less competitive field. Their respective studios and firms emerged during a postwar economic boom, when corporate Modernism and cultural eclecticism were embraced as a means to further prosperity. Each of these designers made names for themselves in and out of the profession. “I feel that we in this age group were very fortunate to come into graphic design when we did,” notes Geismar. “In many ways it was a new field, pioneered by those a generation ahead of us, like Rand, Lustig, Beall, Lionni, Schleger, Burtin, et cetera. It was a time when the culture was ripe for new ideas. The 1960s was surely a time of great upheaval, but also one of great opportunity. It was when our approach to design was set, and it certainly continues to influence my attitude to design.”
Some of the “new 80s” retain the high-profile clients they’ve had for decades; others have found newer, younger clients who value their past accomplishments, like Steve Jobs when in 1986 he hired in Rand to design the NeXT logo. Age has its privileges, when truly smart clients realize that the store of knowledge and experience is a huge benefit.
With age comes confidence—a stimulant by any other name. “Sounds like bullshit, but every job I do, I think is my best work yet. I wouldn’t trade my career with anybody,” says Lois.
“I never really thought in terms of ‘a career,’” says Van Toorn. “Trained as a craftsman during the early ’50s and at the same time interested in cultural, social and political history, I had great difficulties to believe these worlds could ever meet. Later on I realized that our generation was very lucky to live in an era that gradually provided us with the desire to ‘unlearn’ and the critical answers and creative alterna- tives enabling us to break with the consensual thinking of the design industry.”
When asked the inevitable question—what would they do differently if they could—Ungerer spoke for his peers: “This is a question one shouldn’t ask. Since we are manipulated by destiny one follows what one has to do. It would be ungratefulness on my part to think I might have done anything else—I always learn from what I do, even if it was bad. I’ve been so spoiled by fate or destiny, as Edith Piaf sang, ‘Non, Je ne regrette rien (I don’t feel sorry about anything).’”
Vignelli shares Ungerer’s sentiments: “My career went beyond my imagination. I am quite satisfied with the impact our work and theories had on the USA in the last 50 years. That is my legacy.” Meanwhile Sussman muses, “life is really a series of moments which range from mountains to valleys and plateaus, via dreams, stairs, elevators, escalators, trails, air, and water, and friends and mentors.”
However, when asked if Chwast’s career went as planned, he paused for a moment and said, “No, I’m still waiting for the assignment that will be my breakthrough,” but adds with a grin, “As Paul Newman said in The Verdict, ‘This is the case. There is no other case.’”
Coda: Designers who passed since the essay was written
Massimo Vignelli 1931-2014
Deborah Sussman 1931-2014
Ivan Chermayeff 1932-2017
Tomi Ungerer 1931-2019
Milton Glaser 1929-2020
Jan van Toorn 1932-2020
Bob Gill 1931-2021
George Lois 1931-2022
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