Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, October 19, 2021: Robert Runyan, an American graphic designer (#1395)

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Artist of the Day, October 19, 2021: Robert Runyan, an American graphic designer (#1395)

Robert Runyan (1925-2001) was an influential Graphic Designer who pioneered the creation of innovative annual reports and visual corporate communications. Robert is best known for creating the ‘Stars in Motion’ logo for the 1984 Olympics.

A Nebraska native educated at the Art Center College of Design and the former Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, Runyan was a stickler for professionalism and had no qualms about establishing his control with clients. If a chief executive chose to hire his own brother-in-law as a photographer and his uncle as a printer, he snapped, the client deserved the likely poor result and should find himself another designer.

Robert Runyan set annual reports on a more attractive and readable course in the 1960s when he took over the task for Litton Industries. Disdaining the usual dull financial and statistical reviews, Runyan created what became the perfect model of a report touting the best elements of a company, illustrated by informative, artistic graphics.

Robert created a format that combined magazine editorial pacing and the typographic and pictorial aesthetic of an art book, as a tool to build faith and confidence among the company employees and stockholders, as well as represent the company’s corporate message.

Robert’s approach to creating annual reports remains the industry standard in today’s graphic design field.

He was one of only four designers selected as a Hallmark Fellow at the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1987.

He founded Robert Miles Runyan & Associates in 1956, which was renamed Runyan Hinsche Associates in 1991.

The firm’s work was widely acclaimed, once receiving over 50 awards within a single year.

Robert has worked on logos, identities and packaging for companies such as Transamerica, Times Mirror, Mattel, Unibanco of Mexico, Rockwell International and more, often going to work in a cowboy shirt, jeans, and lizard-skin Western boots.

The commercial graphics artist also was popular in Japan, where he created logos for such businesses as Obunsha Publishing Co. and Mitsui Comtek. A retrospective of his work was exhibited in Tokyo in 1981.

His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

As colorful as his work, Runyan even advocated Olympic inclusion of his favorite sport--kite flying. That did not happen in 1984, or as yet, but Runyan himself traveled to Tahiti, Acapulco and elsewhere to fly his kites--including a 208-foot-long Chinese dragon model, a connected group of 27 stunt kites he could snap into formation with the tug of a line, and one with a 25-foot wingspan trailing 17 feet of tail with the power to lift a small child off the ground.

Inadvertently, Runyan also sparked an architectural trend in Manhattan Beach a couple of decades ago when he converted what he described as “the hokiest one-story typical plaster box that you could imagine” into a two-story, antique-filled Victorian showplace a block from the surf.
“I had no intention of starting a trend,” the designing homeowner told The Times a few years after he did just that. “What I had in mind was satisfying my own aesthetic desires. But I think look great and I’m greatly encouraged to see it happen.”

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