Skip to main content

Georg Olden - Pioneer in Corporate Digital Visual Communication Design

By Anonymous
Consider the life of George Olden, an award winning graphic designer who worked as the "head of [CBS]'s division of on-air promotions at the dawn of television" and produced broadcast graphics (AIGA). Born in 1920 in Birmingham, Alabama, a time where racism against African Americans ran rampant, Olden briefly attended Virginia State College and then dropped out to develop his skills by working as a graphic designer for The Office of Strategic Services. 

Olden was renown for the quality of his work that was distributed and displayed to hundreds of thousands of Americans through television. His broadcast graphics were characterized by their usage of bold imagery, "playful pictographs and witty typography" (Heller & D'Onofrio). Olden effectively "transformed the space between programs and commercials into happy respites" for viewers and actively made them look forward to the programming (Heller & D'Onofrio).  He was also responsible for supervising the designing of imagery for popular shows that aired during his tenure such as I Love Lucy, Ed Sullivan, Burns and Allen, Lassie, and Gunsmoke and other various kinds of programming. These images often combined photorealistic elements with asymmetric type.


These were just some of the designs Olden and his staff made for CBS's sports programming

Despite his impressive career in designing broadcast graphics, Olden proceeded to make strides in other fields of design such as advertising. In 1963, Olden became the first African American to design a widely distributed, United States postage stamp. 


The design of the stamp itself displayed a broken segment of a chain to commemorate the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 that declared enslaved people as free individuals 

Olden's designs were recognized in multiple publications and this acknowledgement served to inspire other notable designers of color such as "Lowell Thompson, Michele Y Washington and Frank Briggs" (AIGA). 

Olden was pivotal in the history of human designers in that with television just emerging as a mainstream medium for news and entertainment, he managed to set precedents on how people can incorporate design into multimedia. He was able to design these brilliant, nuanced broadcast graphics, despite not having any previously existing templates to guide his process. Each design combined form and function and was able to introduce dynamic elements in ways that were accomplished by other designers in previous movements.

There was an aspect of problem solving to his designs as well. With every additional graphic he released to the public, he had to consider the level of detail that was necessary, who the audience was and how to most effectively get the message of that graphic to its corresponding audience. For an example, he helped produce the design of a "vote-tallying scoreboard for the first televised presidential election" (Heller & D'Onofrio). Designing digestible data visualizations for large audiences is a skill that designers still struggle with today!

My point is that Olden was a pioneer in visual communications and really defined a path in an area (television) that was still ambiguous for many other designers. Especially during a time period where African Americans were barred from receiving advancement in their jobs, Olden's work still served to encourage and influence many others to strive towards a similar path in pursuing good design.

With digital communication being at the forefront of contemporary product design practices, having an understanding of these preceding practices in corporate, digital visual communication and how they evolved would help us, collectively as a design community, get insight into how we could improve in the future. To overlook the work of these accomplished designers, including Olden, and ignore the lessons they learned is not prudent. 
Sources:

 The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design by Steven Heller, Greg D'Onofrio
https://laughtoncreatves.com/13-african-american-graphic-designers-know-part-1/
https://www.aiga.org/medalist-georgolden

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

John Warren Moutoussamy

By
John Warren Moutoussamy John Warren Moutoussamy studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology and graduated in 1948, a mere 26 years after McKissack & McKissack became the first black-owned architecture firm in the United States (Fazzare and Olson). Moutoussamy studied under Mies Van Der Rohe, and Mies’ strong exterior style and structural design is evident in his work throughout the Chicago area. After finishing his education, Moutoussamy became a partner in the Chicago Architecture Firm, Dubin Dubin Black & Moutoussamy, making him the first African-American in U.S. history to become part of a major established architecture firm (Goldsborough). Later in his career, Moutoussamy also played prominent positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Loyola University, and the Chicago Plan Commission                As an architect, Moutoussamy followed the style of Mies Van Der Rohe in many of his wor...
Post a Comment
Read more

Beverly Loraine Greene (1915-1957)

By
Beverly Loraine Greene was born October 4 th , 1915 in Chicago Illinois. Although she was born during a time where she was not accepted in the professional world she never stopped moving towards her goal of becoming an architect. In 1936, Greene made history by becoming the first African American female to earn a bachelor of science degree in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Although she was “ amidst a sea of white male faces” at school, Beverly was known for having a calm presence that allowed her to focus on her difficult education (Illinois.edu). After graduating she began to search for a job in the industry, albeit the many obstacles in her way. Although it was difficult to find work at first due to racial discrimination, Greene’s talent and drive landed her a job with the Chicago Housing authority. This made her the first African American to be a part of the Chicago Housing authority, a corporation that oversees the housing in the cit...
Post a Comment
Read more

Let's fix history

By
OK, you're down to do the work. Cool. First, let's talk about what we mean by "Design" and "Designer". Design as a formal profession has only been around for a relatively short time, during which BIPOC were systematically excluded from both higher education (where designers become formalized) and industry (where designers work). On top of this, systematic oppression of BIPOC has kept their wealth and power in the economy low, which is used as a justification not to design with or for these end users. So, we will need to expand our idea of design beyond that which is done by formally trained designers. Instead, we should think about all traditions of problem solving which try to satisfy human need with technological capability, while pursuing an aesthetically beautiful solution. These may include traditional crafts, toolmaking, architectural design or decoration of traditional buildings, traditional graphical motifs and styles, letterforms or scripts, graphic...
Post a Comment
Read more