Artist of the day: Artist of the day, December 26, John Massey, American graphic designer

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Artist of the day, December 26, John Massey, American graphic designer

John Massey (1931) played a principal role in bringing European Modernism to Chicago. Through his work for Container Corporation of America from1957 to 1983, and as founder of the Center for Advanced Research in Design (CARD), he consulted with some of America's largest and most forward-thinking companies on the role of design and its impact.

Born in Chicago, Massey graduated with a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His early exposure to the young, Basel based Armin Hofmann and Zurich-based Josef Miiller-Brockmann, whom he met as a student intern at the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1953, deeply influenced his minimalist modern designs and approach to geometry, abstraction, scale, asymmetry, texture, white space, and the restrained use of modern, sans serif typography.

Equally inspired by the masters of modern art, Massey produced work that combined mathematics and play. It was both practical and artful. "Massey thinks as artist and designer simultaneously," wrote Victor Margolin. Massey's first job out of school in 1956 was at the University of Illinois Press, where he worked under the direction of Ralph Eckerstrom, cofounder of Unimark International. Eckerstrom became director of design at Container Corporation of America, and he invited Massey to join him there in 1957. After Eckerstrom's departure in 1964, Massey assumed the position of director of design, advertising, and public relations. As a designer and manager at Container Corporation of America, he helped guide decision making related to the impact of design on advertising, policy, marketing, management, and communications. In Print magazine, Massey stated, "Graphic design is in a position to influence industry in greater depth than ever before ... . It is necessary that people concerned with design do not concern themselves solely with the organization, placement of elements and color within the confines of two dimensions .... Increasing the designer's responsibilities is the only way that he can be in a position to evaluate the purposes and objectives of everything he works on. This kind of approach, I believe will help reduce the superficial and trite solutions that are often
superimposed unthinkingly in many printed messages and will contribute to a greater efficiency in communication between product and consumer."

Prior to 1964, Massey ran his own design firm in Chicago in addition to his work for Container Corporation of America; when he took over for Eckerstrom, the corporation bought Massey's practice, which became a separate corporate division called the Center for Advanced Research in Design. Commissions included an iconic cultural program for the city of Chicago, beginning in 1967, for which Massey designed bold abstract and geometric graphics in primary colors for banners and posters. He had been impressed by the public graphics he spotted in Zurich (and other cities), and he conceived the idea of a "planned civic graphics program" for Chicago. The program would be "a graphic expression of the city as a place of cultural and human enrichment." Massey also worked for Inland Steel, the Atlantic Richfield Company, and Herman Miller Furniture, and he made a significant contribution with his 1974 graphic system for the U.S. Department of Labor, including a recognizable logo mark, visual identity, and the Graphic Communication Standards Manual; this was part of Richard Nixon's Federal Design Improvement Program, directed and coordinated by the National Endowment for the Arts. Massey made bureaucratic life a little bit better by providing the Labor Department with a high-quality graphic scheme that set the standard for future publication designs. In 1983, Massey left Container Corporation of America and started a practice under his own name, doing extensive work especially for Herman Miller.

© 2017. All images copyright of respective artist John Massey.