In the world of graphic design, no matter how serious a project may seem, designers must always start with complete creative freedom and unrestricted exploration. Paul Rand, the legendary American advertising, poster, and logo designer, called this essential element "play." This concept lies at the heart of effective design and serves as a crucial component in creating surprising, memorable work that resonates with audiences.
Play represents a fundamental aspect of design that underpins its significance in mass communication and popular culture. During a 1990 interview, Rand emphasized this point by stating, "Without play, there would be no Picasso." He explained that play is directly connected to experimentation, and without experimentation, there can be no quest for answers to the complex problems designers face daily.
Rand, who lived from 1914 to 1996, belonged to a passionate generation of postwar Modern designers who transformed graphic design from a basic service industry into an expressively methodical art form. From the mid-1940s through the 1960s, these Modernists brought a special quality – a personal flair that provided eye-catching and mind-grabbing powers of attraction – to advertising, products, periodicals, and books. Their work had the force to pull audiences directly into messages in ways that had never been achieved before.
While graphic design is sometimes viewed merely as a tool to serve product messages, it represents far more than routine selling through predictable typefaces and boring images. The element of wit and humor in graphic design dates back to before the turn of the 20th century, when the discipline began as an extension of printing. This playful aspect became more prominent in the early to mid-20th century when Modernism brought forward many dedicated professional designers who believed graphic design's mission was to make the world both better and happier.
In his influential essay "Design and the Play Instinct," Rand argued that the best Renaissance teachers didn't beat their students but instead motivated them through appeals to the play principle. They transformed the difficult task of learning challenging subjects into games, making education more engaging and effective.
Any graphic designer who claims that play isn't an essential part of the design process is being dishonest. The very nature of design work – whether analog or digital – involves cutting, pasting, and composing letters, pictures, shapes, and patterns. How can anyone involved in such activities reject play as a fundamental behavior? While designers certainly want to be taken seriously by business and the public, acknowledging that design involves play doesn't diminish the importance of creative professionals who produce the printed materials surrounding us in every corner of our daily lives.
Graphic design isn't a mechanical activity performed on a production line but rather a series of trials and errors derived from playful investigation. Bringing order to chaos is, strictly speaking, the definition of design itself. However, without play, design becomes nothing more than a rigid blueprint. While blueprints, templates, schematics, and other guidelines are necessary when designing corporate identities and branding systems, before these graphic standards are set in stone, there must first be play – a venture into the unknown and unbiased.
Design begins as a blank slate. Following rules rarely produces originality; experimentation is essential, even when it fails. Play enters unknown territory and serves as the driving force of the creative spirit, though Rand also noted that "creative" is an overused word. True creativity is sensitive to both change and the unchanging, focusing not only on what is right but on what is exceptional.
Play functions as a gateway behavior that defines children as children, but many adults also engage in serious play. Professionals across various fields – musicians, actors, artists, and athletes – depend on play for their success. Play and work only appear to be natural opposites. Virtuosos and maestros don't reach their levels of expertise through intuitive play alone, but tinkering, which is another form of play, leads to invention and revelation. In graphic design, playing through sketching, cutting and pasting, rendering, and iterating represents that essential first step toward decision-making.
Playing provides the foundation for ideas, which is the crucial outcome of any playful experience. As Rand explained, "I use the term play, but I mean coping with the problems of form and content, weighing relationships, establishing priorities." Every problem of form and content is different, which means the rules of the game are different too. Rand and others don't engage in play unconsciously – it's built into the design process, and whether it's called play or something else, designers simply do it naturally.
Like any artist or craftsperson, a graphic designer is free to play indefinitely, but the process must have an endpoint. The role of commercial art, as distinguished from fine art, is to convey and clarify information of various types using images, typography, and layout as the means. On this playing field, the goal is an idea – a combination of visuals and words that resonates with the receiver. Regardless of how artistic the outcome is or how much stylish finishing is applied to the final result, graphic design's purpose is to foster understanding. If the design is ultimately ignored, it has failed.
Play is generally considered a means to an end, the foundation for stronger concepts, never an end in itself. However, even this rule has exceptions. Some designers may mistake play for something more deliberately formal or tried and true. Rand warned that "the visual message which professes to be profound or elegant often boomerangs as mere pretension," noting that when play leads to self-consciousness, it is doomed. His rule of thumb was always simple: "I like things that are happy; I like things that will make the client smile."
One important role of design is to make consumers feel better about what they consume. Rand was one among many designers, but his work provides a valuable example of the play instinct in action. Sometimes play appears on the surface, as demonstrated in Rand's advertisements and package designs for El Producto Cigars. These designs integrated comic drawings with straightforward photographs of the actual product, typifying his approach.
While Sigmund Freud is often quoted as saying "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" (though it's unclear whether he actually said this), it's a fact that after experimenting with several unsatisfying ideas, Rand took cigar photographs and added cartoon drawings of arms, legs, shoes, hats, and other elements that transformed each cigar into a particular character representing all kinds of people, from clowns to laborers to gentlemen. This approach didn't distort or dismiss the product or make it cute, but retained its realism while adding personalities to inanimate objects.
Rand used these cleverly enhanced images to create a weekly serial or situational comedy starring the variously sized and shaped cigars interacting with one another. Although cigars weren't a child-appropriate product, Rand's lighthearted approach transformed the campaign into a comic fantasy world. Like the best children's stories, he engaged the audience in a narrative that increased their anticipation for what came next. This approach extended from weekly newspaper advertisements to special holiday boxes and tins decorated with carnival-like colors and patterns shaped like cigars.
The long-running campaign represented a radical departure from stereotypical, formulaic cigar promotion that typically featured decorative Victorian typefaces and detailed chromolithographic art. This departure was influenced by Modern artists like Paul Klee and Joan Miró, who rejected conventionally accepted representational art in favor of highly tuned and energized, purposefully naive abandon. The common criticism of Modern art during the 1950s and 60s was "my 5-year-old could have done this." However, could a 5-year-old develop a series of playful scenarios that so captivated the consuming public?
Although Rand and others like him – designers such as Bradbury Thompson (known for giving typefaces distinctive voices), Alvin Lustig, Saul Bass, Leo Lionni, Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser, Cipe Pineles, and more – may have borrowed aspects of their art and design language from children, and may have never truly grown up, they still understood how to adapt, transform, and ultimately use these aspects to make complex statements accessible. They understood that rather than blindly accepting the academic rigor of ultra-formal art and design, there were other more primal, expressive ways of making images and words jump off the page and into the hearts and minds of audiences.
Bradbury Thompson wrote in his monograph, "There is no creative aspect of graphic design more enjoyable than the indulgence of play, and there are no sources from which to learn more about the art of play. But one must first resolve to provide the time in which to have fun and to record the ideas that will come one's way." Thompson's own design work demanded play, and in his practice, he allowed his children to help conceive layouts for his signature publication Westvaco Inspirations, which was dedicated to showing other designers how serious playfulness could infuse printed pages with youthful energy. The play experience was as enriching for the designer as it was vital for the children, who often became collaborators in the process.
Milton Glaser observed that Rand was different from other designers. His play was deliberate but never forced. Every shape, every element, whether cut out of paper or drawn with pen and brush, was perfectly executed. Glaser suggested that Rand's technical skill and enthusiastic spirit were in complete harmony. This is exemplified by the series of posters Rand designed for Interfaith Day ceremonies, which instead of being predictably conservative announcements for the Interfaith Movement in New York, became veritable rays of graphic sunlight. The posters contained all necessary information – time, place, and date – but were also enlivened by abstract expressionist shapes and bright colors, as well as impressions of an angel playing a horn and a candle lighting the darkness. While his typography was carefully composed, his exuberant imagery conveyed a sense of optimism.
Even when Rand was directing design standards for major corporations like IBM, Westinghouse, and UPS, he never suppressed his instinct to create joy, using playful tools like rebuses and puzzles to his advantage. The ribbon atop the UPS logo was added purely for the joy of it. The more important the job, the less bound he was to conventional practice, understanding that surprise is power.
In a series of advertisements for The Architectural Forum, not known as a witty magazine, he created a collection of graphical animals – a seal balancing drafting tools, a parrot sitting on a hammer, a frog leaping from a box, a fish flying in air – made from geometric and organic shapes, brightly colored and radiant. They were unexpected yet born of intention: the intention to capture imagination and announce that even in precise, man-made architecture, there is natural play.
The author once believed that Modernists marched in lockstep to the rigors of the International Style, a Swiss-originated, Bauhaus-inspired philosophy that design should be clear, simple, and unambiguous. From this narrow perspective, this style seemed to reject play and improvisation. However, this view was completely wrong. Although there are clear similarities between the works and styles of Rand, Lester Beall, Walter Allner, and Herbert Bayer, among his contemporaries, there are significant differences in how each played with graphic elements and solved the design problems they were assigned to address. Through the juxtaposition of pictures and words, colors and overlays, geometries and abstractions, it became clear that each of these Modernists was playing a variant of visual jazz – and what is jazz but playful improvisation?
The legacy of Paul Rand and his contemporaries demonstrates that play isn't just an optional element in graphic design – it's fundamental to creating work that connects with audiences on both intellectual and emotional levels. Their approach proved that serious design work can and should incorporate elements of joy, surprise, and creative exploration, ultimately making the world not just more functional, but more delightful.
