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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

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