Louis Danziger


Louis Danziger is an American graphic designer and design educator. He is most strongly associated with the late modern movement in graphic design, and with a community of designers from various disciplines working in Southern California in the mid-twentieth century. He is noted for his iconoclastic approach to design, and for introducing the principles of European constructivism to the American advertising vernacular.
In 1998, Danziger was awarded the AIGA Gold Medal for "standards of excellence over a lifetime of work."
Danziger retired from design more than 20 years ago to work as a consultant and educator. He has held faculty positions with ArtCenter, Chouinard, CalArts and Harvard University.

Early life

Louis Danziger was born on November 17, 1923, in Brooklyn, and raised in The Bronx, New York.
At age eleven, Danziger was enrolled in courses in art and poster design run by the Federal Art Project: "Their art classes turned me into a designer," Danziger later said. He began to browse the German design magazine Gebrauchsgraphik, which was available at the Fordham Public Library, and which he later credited with piquing his interest in typography, and with establishing his high visual standards. As an art major at Evander Childs High School, Danziger received a free student membership to the Museum of Modern Art: as a consequence Danziger was exposed to the modern-art movements of Futurism, Constructivism, and Dadaism, and studied the work of Picasso, Matisse, and Klee.
Danziger prepared for a career as a commercial artist. As a teenager, he worked as an apprentice at United Litho Company and silkscreen shop S&K. He also worked as a stage designer at Berkshire Country Club in the Catskill Mountains, and as an assistant to the art director at Delehanty Institute.
After high school, Danziger served in the Army in the South Pacific, where he was a Staff Sergeant and worked as a radio operator and communication chief, from 1943 through 1945.
He turned 100 on November 17, 2023.

Education and influences

After his discharge from the Army, and eager to escape cold weather, Danziger moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in the ArtCenter School on the G.I. Bill.
At Art Center, Danziger encountered the first of two teachers who would be particularly influential: graphic designer Alvin Lustig. "I didn't like school at all, because it was very rigid at that time. But one day I heard this voice coming out of a classroom talking about social structure, religion, and the broadest implications of design. So I stuck my nose in the door and saw that it was Lustig. From then on I sat in on every class," said Danziger. From Lustig, Danziger learned how graphic design connected to the worlds of art, music, and literature, and that design could have social and cultural importance: " made me feel, naively, that I could move the earth by putting pencil to paper."
Danziger left school less than two years later, and began to work as a freelance graphic designer. Discouraged by the scarcity of opportunities available in Los Angeles at the time, Danziger returned to New York City; while working at Esquire, he enrolled in the famous 'Graphic Journalism' evening class of graphic designer Alexey Brodovitch, at The New School for Social Research. Danziger was encouraged by Brodovitch's enthusiasm for Danziger's portfolio of work, and was inspired by Brodovitch's insistence on originality and authenticity, and his view of design as a simple, joyful activity: " design needs no justification other than the pleasure of the act itself," said Danziger.
Danziger has spoken frequently about the twin influences of Lustig and Brodovitch, each very different from the other in style, focus, and temperament: "One said 'night,' and the other said 'day.'" Danziger observed that the differences between these two teachers helped him to resist the impulse to imitate either, and instead compelled him to develop his independent style and voice: "I always felt that it was the contradictions between my two masters that allowed me to form my own point of view."
Though noted for his intellectualism, Danziger describes himself primarily as an auto-didact: " constituted the major part of my design education." He has cited as formative texts Buckminster Fuller's 'Nine Chains to the Moon,' György Kepes' 'Language of Vision,' Louis Sullivan's 'Kindergarten Chats,' and Paul Rand's 'Thoughts on Design.' Rand's writing in particular imprinted on Danziger the importance of identifying a solution to each design problem that connected closely to the visual language and conceptual territory of the subject matter, and the power of visual metaphors as a tool of communication.

Work

Danziger returned to Los Angeles in late 1948, where he studied architecture briefly at the California School of Art, under Raphael Soriano. He began an independent practice, offering graphic design, advertising, and consulting services, in Los Angeles in 1949.
Prolific and efficient in his work, Danziger created thousands of works of design over the next three decades, including advertising, book covers, magazines and catalogs, packaging, logos, album covers, and exhibition design. His client base grew from small local entities to large national corporations and organizations. His clients included charitable and cultural institutions, educational institutions, and many commercial enterprises.
Among Danziger's better-known works:
Danziger largely retired from studio work in 1972, although for several years after he served as a corporate design consultant for Atlantic Richfield Company ; he also consulted for Microsoft, LACMA, the National Endowment for the Arts, and others.
In 1995, Danziger donated his collection of visual work and related documents to the Design Archives of Rochester Institute of Technology, where it can be accessed by students, design scholars, and historians.

Philosophy and approach

Although Danziger himself tends to eschew labels, he is most strongly associated with the late modern movement in graphic design and advertising design. Danziger's work is characterized by essential values associated with modernism, and more particularly with the principles of European constructivism:
  • Economy of means. "I strive for elegance, using the word in its scientific sense: accomplishment with minimum means." Danziger's stated goal is to take "a minimal amount of material and a minimal amount of effort—nothing wasted—to achieve maximum impact." Danziger has noted frequently that the constraints of any project, whether budget, schedule, or client requirements, were simply a condition of the process and no obstacle to finding an effective solution.
  • Appropriateness to the purpose. Danziger defines design as a useful, problem-solving activity rather than as an aesthetic pursuit. He insists on starting each project with a blank slate stylistically, in order to create a communication that is uniquely appropriate to that client and that situation: "The "look" is not brought to the work but rather emerges from the process." Similarly, he states: "I want solutions that make it difficult to separate form from content." Danziger rejects design that is aesthetically appealing as a vanity, and the province of the fine artist.
  • Clarity. Danziger is intolerant of any ambiguity or obfuscation in communication: "I want to be clear. I never try to be subtle or clever." He observed: "I am concerned with the production of work that demonstrates intelligence … there is continually a search for clarity and depth rather than cleverness."
  • Social responsibility. Danziger insists on viewing design as an ethical pursuit, mindful of its impact on its audience. "As socially responsible people we try to accomplish objectives in a positive way. We do this by providing some services for our audience. We provide information, entertainment, and aesthetic pleasure." He observed that ethics in design "is primarily about being responsible for what one does. In the case of communication design, the number one rule is not to deceive." In contrast to designers who shunned advertising as banal or corrupt, Danziger embraced advertising as an important part of his practice, reasoning that he could change and improve the world of advertising by offering the audience work that was intelligent, respectful, and valuable to them.
Danziger is also viewed as a seminal figure in the burgeoning graphic design and advertising industry in Southern California in the mid-twentieth century, which was noted for its experimentalism, its reverence for modern art, and its indifference to the strict design traditions of the east coast. Danziger's work was additionally informed by his own knowledge of design history.
Danziger resisted the stylistic signatures that are common to many graphic designers: this contributed to a sort of visual timelessness in his design, which critics have described as "effortless" and "classic." Danziger is noted for his innovative uses of photography in advertising, including overlaying multiple photographic negatives to create a new image, presenting tiny objects as enormous on the page, in order to draw new attention to them, and the deft use of visual metaphors. Together, these techniques embodied a "revolutionary redefinition of the photograph" as an element of communication.
Danziger had an early interest in the potential application of computers in graphic design, taking a course at UCLA Extension in the fundamentals of computer science in 1955. Later Danziger worked with programmers at the California Institute of Technology to create perhaps the first logo to be designed with the aid of a computer.