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thank god that steve heller is working right now to save his legacy and output in a book project he is in the process of completing right now. hooray for steve heller, patron saint of lost designers.

a number of years , steve hosted a series of conferences devoted to rediscovering ‘lost; design history. sadly, i can’t remember the name of the conference series (i think it might have been “modernism & eclecticism”). at any rate, during one of those conferences i was fortunately enough to see ivan chermayeff give a presentation about his work and a question & answer exchange with the participants. it was marvelous to watch him and actually take the measure of him. he’s a wonderful guy.

one of the things that came up during his exchange was the interesting (and seemingly unknown) fact that ivan apprenticed under alvin lustig when he was just starting out. ivan’s father was an extremely well known and successful and cultivated modernist architect, so getting a intro the biz through a designer as accomplished as lustig was not so big a deal to them. the way that ivan causally mentioned it and the way that the audience seemed to quietly gasp was extremely interesting.

even more startling to me, downright shocking even, was ivan’s little story about how he worked with lustig. it was fascinating. alvin would kick back and - in his mind’s eye - design the piece at hand. he would then dictate to the young ivan EXACTLY what it was to look like: “an 8 /2 x 11 sheet of white uncoated paper, start at the top, drop down 6 picas. indent 12 picas, flush left. use 10 on 12 futura gothic extended lower case….” lustig would work through the entire design and ivan simply recreated it! amazing, really.

the funny part of the story was when lustig started to work out the color in his mind. ivan said that alvin wasn’t such a great colorist. so, he would just change it and never tell him about it. he got away with that because, at this point in his career, ALVIN LUSTIG WAS COMPLETELY BLIND!

clunk.

ok, ok. that seems pretty weird, right? we all know that beethoven was deaf late in his career. we know that herb lubalin worked in b&w because he was color blind (a color blind designer is pretty mind boggling, too.) but a completely blind visual artist? amazing!

over the years i’ve encountered many “disabled” artists, sculptors with paralysis, painters with parkinson’s. i actually met a man who was the master sign painter - the sign painter that was the greatest in tacoma’s history, the guy who built the industry and established the standard of extremely high quality in the area. he was even the sign painter for the mob (locally very powerful.) the guy who is still, to this day revered by sign painters as the grand master of the ages. he was in his 80’s when i met him. he seemed to have had a stroke and was essentially paralyzed on one side. i asked about it later and found out he was hit by a train when he WAS 19! he spent his entire career as a one-armed sign painter!

i was in a record store in bellingham, washington about 30 years ago. it had a really cool logo hand painted in their picture window. being a young design student, i commented on how much i liked their window. the woman behind the counter beamed and said that it was done by a n artist with no hands and legs. he painted it with a brush stuck in his TEETH!!!

so, whenever i feel sorry for myself, start to complain about how tough it is to do this, how others are blessed with such talents and feel envious, all i have to do is think of old alvin lustig, design guru par excellence. blind as a bat. i feel much better about myself.

this is one of his great book cover/dust jackets. i assume he wasn’t yet blind when he did it. but, you never know.

by Art Chantry

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