Alvin Lustig was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. He worked independently with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and also the french painter John Charlotte.
In 1937 he began designing book jackets in Los Angeles. This is an example of his work of that time.
Among others, Lustig's career in art direction and graphic
design was very successful. Alvin Lustig revolutionized the approach to book cover design in the 1940's.
He would first read the book and try to understand it and the meaning behind it. He would attempt to get the direction that the writer is trying to convey and then translate it into his own graphic style.Perhaps you have heard of the Great Gatsby. That is one of his more well known works.
After this period of his career he was offered a position at Look Magazine as a director of the visual research department. Below are some of his contributions to Look Magazine.The combination of technology and creativity in his designs was reminiscent of the Bauhaus, as did his intellectual approach to problem solving. He became very successful in his early career, having clients for all different types of projects.
In his later life during the 1940s, he was offered several teaching positions, including a position at Yale but he declined. He had said that he was recognized for his new directions of publishing where he contributed a decade's work of innovative and ingenious designs.
His wide-ranging works from the 1940's and early 50's included book and book jacket design, magazines, letterheads, catalogs, signage, furniture and lighting, textiles, interior design, logos, sculpture and architecture. We can see the amount of skill and talent Lustig must have had to create such vast topic of works. Lustig's approach to design as said before, reflects the Bauhaus tradition of integrating fine and applied arts, technology with artistic creativity. He would spend days brainstorming in his head before moving to paper.
For someone so passionately involved in design education, Lustig had only one year of formal training, at the Art Center School in Los Angeles.
Something that made his designs so special is that he used modern design sensibility
In addition to being a graphic designer, Lustig was also known as an interior and an architectural designer. One of his more popular designs is the mystic chair which he had done for Paramount Furniture. It is considered a revolutionary design and it inspired many other. There are still versions of this chair till this day.
With regard to GRAPHIC DESIGN, his style is probably best described as modern and abstrct at the same time. I noticed how a lot of his work had some sort of geometric shapes in an abstract pattern while having clean straight line is a minimalistic display while still being neat and tidy at the same time. You see a lot of bold accents and colours in his work while still being clean.
One thing about Lustig is that he didn't like to limit himself to one particular style.
Lustig possessed what he described as 'a very high standard of dissatisfaction'. So keen was his vision of the power of design, he thought it a force capable of bettering society. In his short 40-year life, he produced a great amount of brilliant work and pioneered a comprehensive approach to design, which will last far beyond his lifetime. His work is as vibrant today as it was 40 years ago. His simplified shapes and use of flat colours, all while creating elaborate and intensely interesting compositions, are still imitated today by many graphic designers.
http://adcglobal.org/hall-of-fame/alvin-lustig/
http://www.designishistory.com/1940/alvin-lustig/
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