J H I Blog

…passed away last weekend, but not before making an immense impact on the company he worked for, the creative industry he revolutionized, and me, when I was struggling to find my career and my path in life.

I sit here today with the full knowledge and appreciation that most of what I know as a designer and all that I aspire to be as a professional, I owe directly to Lou Dorfsman and my amazing and privileged years working near him in the design department at CBS.

I’ll never forget the first time he said hello to me.

As I remember him in 1982…

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: OCTOBER 25, 2008 (EDITED)

Lou Dorfsman, who for more than 40 years designed every aspect of the Columbia Broadcasting Company’s advertising and corporate identity, including the set of Walter Cronkite’s newsroom and the typographically elegant sign system for CBS’s New York headquarters, known as Black Rock, died on Wednesday in Roslyn, N.Y. He was 90.

The advertisement Mr. Dorfsman designed for a CBS News series on black history.

Mr. Dorfsman’s ad for a CBS News examination of the Warren Report findings.

Mr. Dorfsman’s work became a model for corporate communications, in the marketing discipline now called branding. In 1946, when he joined CBS as art director for its successful radio networks, the company was already a leader in both advertising and the relatively new field of corporate identity. Frank Stanton, then CBS’s president, understood the business value of sophisticated design and had earlier hired William Golden as the overall art director; in 1951 Golden designed the emblematic CBS eye, among the most identifiable logos in the world.

Mr. Dorfsman not only extended Golden’s aesthetic by combining conceptual clarity and provocative visual presentation, but developed his own signature style of graphic design.

Unlike so many product advertisements created by Madison Avenue, which in the 1940s and ’50s were visually mundane and text-heavy, Mr. Dorfsman’s designs featured clear typography, simple slogans and smart illustration. He also commissioned work from Feliks Topolski, a portraitist, and the printmaker and painter Ben Shahn, though Shahn was then under scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee for his affiliation with leftist groups and causes.

After Golden’s sudden death in 1959 at 48, Mr. Dorfsman was named creative director of CBS television, and in 1964 he became the director of design for the entire Columbia Broadcasting System. A few years later his title became senior vice president and creative director for marketing communications and design. He maintained tight creative control, which ensured design continuity from the CBS logo to its proprietary typeface, called CBS Didot. The cleverness and subtle beauty of his advertisements were credited with winning over many viewers to both news and entertainment programs on the network.

“He was the kingpin of the New York School of Design, a pluperfect, fearless, uncompromising perfectionist, and a father of corporate image in the world,” said George Lois, one of the leaders of advertising’s “creative revolution,” who also worked at CBS in the early ’50s and who regarded Mr. Dorfsman as a mentor.

At CBS, Mr. Dorfsman injected a rare social urgency into some of his best advertisements for the network’s public affairs programming. The full-page newspaper ad for “Of Black America,” the first network series on black history, showed a black man in black and white, with half his face painted with the stars and stripes of the United States flag, and with his eyes focused intently on the viewer; the image became a virtual emblem for race relations.

To promote “The Warren Report: A CBS News Inquiry in Four Parts,” the headline of the newspaper ad read: “This is the bullet that hit bothPresident Kennedy and Governor Connally. Or did it?” The photograph used in the full-page ad was an extreme close-up of a hand holding a bullet.

Mr. Dorfsman also came up with the slogan “Re-elected the Most Trusted Man in America” to promote Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the 1972 presidential election.

Though he enjoyed the public affairs work, Mr. Dorfsman relished producing advertisements for entertainment programming, employing both wordplay and pictureplay to capture attention.

Advertisements were not Mr. Dorfsman’s only métier. He created corporate annual reports and promotional commemorative volumes to bolster CBS’s standing as “the Tiffany Network.” To celebrate the first landing on the moon, Stanton proposed a limited-edition book, which Mr. Dorfsman designed with a special cover embossed to look and feel like the lunar surface. This and other promotional pieces set a standard for broadcast advertising. (Please stop by J H I if you’d like to see a copy of this book)

Mr. Dorfsman saw the value of integrating graphic design with interior design and on-air displays as well. He designed sets for Mr. Cronkite’s evening show and “The CBS Morning News.” He oversaw every detail of the graphics for the CBS headquarters building, which was designed by the architect Eero Saarinen, selecting the type and making certain that the spacing between letters was flawless for the numerals on wall clocks, the elevator buttons, even the elevator inspection stickers.

For the building’s cafeteria, he designed a mammoth wall, 35 feet wide by 8 ½ feet tall, of hand-milled wood type that wed antique letterforms to modern aesthetics. It was titled “Gastrotypographicalassemblage” and spelled out all the fare the restaurant offered. It was removed after 25 years and is now being restored.

Mr. Dorfsman remained with CBS until after Laurence Tisch assumed control of the company in the mid-1980s and instituted cost-cutting programs. During one such campaign, Mr. Dorfsman designed an annual report that lacked any visuals or typographic flourishes. After Mr. Dorfsman left in 1991, William S. Paley, the former chairman of CBS, asked him to become creative director for the Museum of Broadcasting, now the Paley Center for Media.

In 1988 a book, “Dorfsman & CBS,” documenting his work was published. A review in The Times said, “Leafing through this abundantly illustrated book, one is struck by the fact that television nurtured one of print’s most innovative graphic designers.”