Cipe Pineles: The Prototype PDF

C IPE, THE PROTOTYPE Amelia Hugill-Fontanel introduces Cipe Pineles, with images from the extraordinary archive of her work, pictures, and manuscripts at RIT’s Cary Graphic Design Archive Cipe Pineles, about 1935. Photography by Trude Fleischmann There is a resurgence of craft, as a generation of...

C IPE, THE PROTOTYPE Amelia Hugill-Fontanel introduces Cipe Pineles, with images from the extraordinary archive of her work, pictures, and manuscripts at RIT’s Cary Graphic Design Archive Cipe Pineles, about 1935. Photography by Trude Fleischmann There is a resurgence of craft, as a generation of industrious folks are YouTubing their way into niche careers, capitalizing on their uniqueness and creating brands for themselves. What if art directors used the same concept to get their product out? Quickly rolling up shirtsleeves to whip out custom designs with their own illustrations and lettering, not only meeting the publication deadline, but surpassing expectations in the process? A pioneering mid-century designer did just that. Cipe Pineles was her name and she led a remarkable typographic life. Cipe Pineles (1908-1991) moved to New York from Vienna in 1923 with her family. In her childhood she developed artistic skills that sailed her through art school, eventually landing an assistantship with the great M.F. Agha at Condé Nast in 1932, working on Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines. Dr. Agha, almost forgotten today, was the TYPE : NO. 2 : Images: Cary Graphic Design Archive at Rochester Institute of Technology 19 most influential magazine designer in the United States from the 30s through the 50s. His management style was that of the Great Master, later emulated by Alexander Liberman. Cipe carried none of this baggage. Her creative and collaborative spirit set her on a trajectory for making milestones: Art director at Glamour magazine in 1942; the first woman art director of a major magazine for the burgeoning teen market at Seventeen from 1947 to 1950; the first woman to be inducted into the Art Director’s Club in 1948; and art directorships at Charm and Mademoiselle from 1950 to 1961. Cipe was a leading woman in design when almost all her counterparts were men. Mid-twentieth century typography for fashion and lifestyle magazines could be exquisite, albeit a little formulaic: spindly modernist Didone headlines and justified columns, sprinkled with sans serif asymmetry. Pineles’ design style was a colorful mix of type and image that did not always fit the standard for the prescribed Modernist aesthetic of her time. She learned to manipulate all manner of type styles early on. She wrote that Agha, when working at Condé Nast had, “assigned me the task of selecting a different typeface for every headline in Vogue.” “I plunged into old type books, as well as into A role model peering over my shoulder 20 the advanced graphic publications from Europe, to gather inspiration.” She wrote “By the time you looked through five issues of Vogue, you had a hundred typefaces to work from, including five versions of my own handwriting. I used to hate type. It scared me. But it was this process of being compelled to search for headlines that gave me my feeling for type. It made me see what makes one page look good and what makes the same Cipe’s map for Glamour, 1942, gouache on paper. Her cover of Charm, 1954, William Helburn, photographer. IT WAS 1973 , and I had just started my first (and what would turn out to be brief) graphic design job in New York. From the first day, it was impossible not to notice the woman with a charming Viennese accent who dropped in regularly to schmooze with my boss, her good friend, and critique the work. She called my first week’s effort “too Lubalin.” Her name was Cipe Pineles, and I knew her as the widow of William Golden and a teacher at Parsons. I knew nothing of her place in design history. To learn, much later, that she was an exceptional art director came as a surprise. Her influence was great. She commissioned a new breed of idea illustration, and used fine artists as well. She designed pages that had an impact on magazine design. For women, she was a role model: Cipe was the first to be given a membership into the Art Directors Club (and later inducted into the hall of fame). With Seventeen, she showed teenage girls what it was like to be “smart” and “modern,” presaging a new market and a new culture. She was also quite a wonderful human being. Kind, generous, smart—and modest. How ironic that in my continually fruitless search for role models through college and beyond, here was Cipe peering over my shoulder, telling me what to do. And I didn’t even know it.−LOUISE FILI SPRING 2018 TYPE : N o . 2 21 letterforms combined with photography and hand-lettering. While inside, the jelly bean pink and violet spread in print is almost as she imagined it in her gouache sketch: a handwritten headline placed on a diagonal with a triptych of fashion illustrations. This kind of precise visual direction to the illustrators, photographers, and typesettters working on Cipe’s team must have been invaluable in creating a consistent feel for each issue. Cipe Pineles’ tenure as art director at Charm from 1950 to 1959 is marked by sleek modernist typography and elegant fashion photography. This allusion to sophistication attracted its audience of young urban women who were working for a living—“between school and marriage.” The cover from January 1954 shows a chic A “comp layout” for the cover of Vogue, 1939. Lettering for Glamour, 1942. Opposite: In the Charm offices c. 1935 (E.I. Jacoby, photographer, typeface, specified elsewhere by another person, look poor.” Her facility in choosing the appropriate typeface or lettering style would serve her well throughout her career. A magazine designer’s challenge is to create a cohesive flow of disparate information from spread to spread. Pineles’ layout plans for single issues are models not only for sequencing and the balance of type and image, but also for the craftsmanship of lettering and sketching. Several examples of her layouts as art director at Glamour (1942-1946) are in her archive at the Cary Graphic Design Archive at Rochester Institute of Technology. The cover from the November 1942 issue shows her innovative combination of cut-paper Hand-written, Eye-popping, colorful,— before its time 22 : PHOTOGRAPH : E. I. JACOBY SPRING 2018 TYPE : N o . 2 CIPE PINELES totally changed the world of editorial design during her reign. She was a powerful role model and a major creative inspiration for all those that came after her. She could make an editorial spread come alive with eye-popping, colorful illustrations, often accompanied by hand-written typography, way before its time. Not only was she a female creative in a very powerful role, but was one of the first women to hold the position of art director for a major magazine, opening the door for many that followed.—ILENE STRIZVER 23 gal poised against a background of monospaced words. Her flawless composure is enough to eclipse her everyday concerns: “wrinkle-resistant clothes, “drugs to keep you on the job,” “protecting fingernails,” “mothproof,” “lipstick,” “zippers. . .” How could one resist buying the magazine to see if it indeed held all the answers to those “miracles for women who work!” Pineles repeatedly won awards from AIGA and the Art Director’s Club for her creative work on Charm. Cipe’s archive at RIT overflows with pasteups, proofs, tear sheets, and final copies of printed work she designed. We can learn much Everyday life as well as fashion and glamour I FIRST DISCOVERED Cipe’s work about a dozen years ago, when I was working a 9-5 job as a graphic designer in a Minneapolis firm and trying to do my own work during my off hours. As someone who was struggling to bushwhack a career path out of combining illustration, type and design, Cipe’s work spoke to me. At a time when lettering was unpopular, and both art schools and the professional world tried to keep these disciplines segregated, she moved between them effortlessly, and combined them in innovative, striking ways—like pairing loose, hand-painted drawings with sleek typography, or featuring colloquial or folk themes in a sophisticated fashion magazine. Her work stands the test of time and is as fresh and approachable today as it was when she created it. At the same time, she forged her own path as a pioneer and leader, both as a woman and as an illustrator-designer. She was also producing work for a largely female audience, rather than trying to appeal to everybody (which is impossible). While many designers or advertisers from that era might have created work that is simply “feminine,” or merely designed to pander to women, Cipe’s work spoke to her audience with true understanding and respect because it came from a fellow woman’s point of view—and celebrated everyday life as well as fashion and glamour.—CHANDLER-O’LEARY 24 from her process—the multiple, painstaking versions of lettering, paintings in various states of completion, and sketches in all media. This creative product provides a breadcrumb trail of ideation and problem-solving that every practicing artist should see. An example of this is her successive hand-drawn letterhead layouts for Green Mansions, a resort in the upstate New York Adirondacks, where she worked as a freelance designer into the 1960s. Each drawing is a patient exercise in the refinement of typographic form, well before the instantaneous digital cut-andpaste practice of today. After leaving the magazine industry in 1961, Cipe entered a long-time relationship at Parson’s School of Design, as designer and teacher. She mentored a generation of students in the 60s and 70s, a time of changing production workflows as phototypesetting and offset lithography were supplanting letterpress. A glimpse at her process use of substrates of vellum overlays, photostat proofs, and type samples on film. Her work on the Parson’s diploma even incorporated some computer-generated typography, as mylar proofs by “Tom Carnase Computer Typography” are included in the archive. It does not, however, neglect her facility for lettering by hand. Her personal aesthetic seemed to incorporate it without Photos in Charm, September 1957, using letterforms from the office. Carmen Schiavone, photographer. SPRING 2018 TYPE : N o . 2 25 the certain showiness and precision evident in many of today’s lettering styles. At the end of Cipe Pineles’ career, she was celebrated in the design world. Her work is chronicled in several publications, notably Martha Scotford’s monograph, Cipe Pineles: A Life of Design, 1999, and a 2002 chapbook, Cipe Pineles: Two Remembrances. As trends ebb and flow, it is no surprise that she was “rediscovered” last year in Leave Me Alone with the Recipes: The Life, Art, and Cookbook of Cipe Pineles. This bestseller is a tribute to Pineles’ gift for illustration, with salutes by contemporary creatives, including Steven Heller and Maira Kalman. Print magazine featured her in a retrospective article in 1985 with some 70 reproductions of work from her five decades in practice. Her illustration on the cover of the issue is a colorful mix of still life objects. Scrawly blackletter and modern roman letterforms adorn the porcelain ware at center of the painting. Stencil type sits on the word tiles at the bottom of the page, reflected by sturdy transitional letters on the building blocks at the top. These myriad objects are a fitting summary of her typographic experience to which she added the enjoyment of food, and nature, as well as a lifetime of collecting, and in short, living to her fullest. A cover for Print magazine sums up Cipe’s style: Concept, illustration, lettering—from the first sketch to the final excution—done in her own hand. Print, January/February 1985. The pencil “rough” for this cover (below). 26 SPRING 2018 TYPE : N o . 2 ‘Couldn’t they find one token woman for this?’ IT SEEMS STRANGE to me that Cipe Pineles needs to be reintroduced to a young generation of designers. When I began designing she was already legendary for her work with Alliance Graphique Internationale. She was married to Bill Golden, creative director for CBS who designed the CBS eye, and then to Will Burton, the American Modernist. I met Cipe in the early 80’s when she left the magazine business and was teaching at Parsons where she was also their promotion and publications director. I wrote a snide article about the design of Condé Nast magazines which appeared in the AIGA journal. In the early 80’s, Condé Nast magazines were designed in a scrapbook style, utilizing a lot of ripped images overlaying other images topped with ugly typefaces surprinting or dropping out the of mess. My article was entitled, “The Mystery of Condé Nasty.” Cipe read it and thought it was very funny (and true). She found out who I was, called me up and invited me to dinner at her apartment. I went. She made me a hamburger in her kitchen. Cipe and I were 40 years apart. She was a legend and I was a young designer, but I felt no age or status difference. First, we laughed at the type at Condé Nast and then we laughed at our shared state of being women designers in New York. She showed me a mailer she had just received from the Art Directors Club for a series of lectures entitled, “An Evening with One of the Best.” There were about 12 men in the picture, who were each giving a lecture at the Club. I remember Lou Dorfsman and Henry Wolf were in the picture, but I don’t remember the rest and I doubt I would recognize them now or know what they designed. Cipe said, “Couldn’t they even find one token woman for this? Even one who isn’t very good? Just one to keep up appearances?” We couldn’t decide which was worse; the group arrogance, or the laziness. It’s 40 years later and I am the age Cipe was when we first met, and, really, not all that much has changed.—PAULA SCHER 27 The chemise in typography A woman in charge: At Charm magazine, Cipe Pineles tells how she learned her type skills in a lighthearted presentation in 1958 at the at the Silvermine Arts Center in Connecticut O NE OF THE QUESTIONS at the Sunday session of the Silvermine conference that I enjoyed most was, “What is typography?” Mr. Spencer, who obviously knew very well what typography was, answered the question civilly and with admirable self-control. I am not sure, though, whether the question was meant to be facetious. I never dreamed that I, for example, was a typographer. I thought a typographer was a man who worked in a composing room and knew everything there was to know about type. Now, I know he’s a compositor and not a typographer, and that I, who know nothing about type but have designed thousands of magazine pages, am a typographer, for typography has been roughly defined as the arrangement or organization of text and other visual information on a printed page. 28 SPRING 2018 TYPE : N o . 2 29 In the fashion world which was my own training ground, nobody looked for definitions. They only looked for an effect. I don’t think the definitions came to America until after the war―after conferences like these. That’s when I learned that I too, was a typographer. When I want to select a new typeface for a magazine, I have a very sure guide for my choice: I ask my husband. “What type shall I use for Seventeen Magazine, Bill?” This is not just a demonstration of wifely deference, but also a sincere recognition that Bill knows type and I know fashion; mode; style; rage; craze; fad and vogue. I should, I worked there and learned there. That’s why I don’t know type. The art department had drawers full of proofs of body type, plenty of pictures and layout sheets and it was not uncommon to make half a dozen versions of a single double page editorial layout. The arrangement of pictures and text on the spread was an exercise in lack of self-control. Photographs were not always cropped, sometimes we tore them, sometimes we burned the edges, perforated them, pinked them, curled them. When I made a layout for “How much do American women spend for beauty,” I tore a beautiful photograph of a nude into bits and put a price tag on the pieces. Body text, the necessary evil, we cut into shapes. Very long and skinny, very short and wide on a layout for “How to take off and how to put on weight.” We cut the gray body text sheets into circles, triangles, vases, leaves, paper dolls. But where we really went to town was in hunting up, inventing and torturing typefaces for headlines. Since each editorial spread worth its name was designed to create a new surprise within the magazine, a shock, a change of pace from the preceding one and following one, each double page needed a different typeface to suit its subject matter, its mood, its caprice. I, who know nothing about type but have designed thousands of magzine pages, am a typographer—defined as the arrangement of text and other information on a page. 30 And since I was required to make many versions of each spread, I had a colossal chance to gobble up as many types as I could find. But type books were useless to me. They didn’t have enough variety. Often, the name of a type sounded good and intriguing. Spartan, for instance, sounded just right for those noble looking fashion photos on my table. But when I looked inside the type book, I screamed: “Spinach—Futura!” So we invented more luxurious and more varied title styles. We made Onyx look pale and squat with our longer, skinnier, blacker version. Black as hell paled before our ultra version of Ultra Bodoni. Piggyback Gothic had nothing on our Mutation Mondial. Futura Light was coarse and clumsy compared to our hairline letters, and an accidental stencil led to a string of elegant stencil innovations which gave our designs the casual look. T HERE was a portfolio of bathing suits photographed under water which started an epidemic of Blurry Bodoni. We used blotters, mirrors, match sticks, sable brushes, camelhair and wrong ends of brushes. One layout I particularly remember had a headline, “The most chichi thing I ever saw” and the experts who were doing the seeing were the Elsa Maxwells, the Dahlis, the Wallis Simpsons. Not to be outdone, I used a herringbone, knock-kneed Bodoni for this layout. An English art director who was being screened for English Vogue, was asked to redo this layout. After a few days he returned to say that he couldn’t redo it―it was the most chichi layout he had ever seen. Then we abandoned attempts at type altogether and went into a stretch of brush lettering. The brush letter influenced by Matisse Schnorkels was very loose, very brushy and had we felt a particularly stylish effect with square-cut photographs, like the mink stole on a tailored suit. The test of a good brush caption was its spontaneity and offbeat rhythm. I would cover sheets of bond with a phrase like, “Vogue says.” Some sheets backhand, some straight, some slanty, some very slanty, some a combination of all directions. At the point where I was too groggy to see, I knew I had exhausted the possibilities and let someone else pick the spontaneous one. I also tried my hand at writing with a pen, and my favorite one, and the envy of my playmates, was a pen I found with a double point. We placed these varied headline styles anywhere on a double page, though never straight SPRING 2018 CIPE CAPTION: Goes here, could be two lines, but not more. and never at the top of the page. I had a hit with a layout in which I put the heading upside down, and the copywriters indulged me and wrote an upsidedown type headline to go with it. Mirror writing was another favorite and when Vogue got a letter from a lady wanting to know the proper way to announce her daughter’s secret elopement, we came to the rescue with the suggestion she print the announcements in invisible printers’ ink. TYPE : N o . 2 We headline designers became strong forces on the editorial staff and made outrageous demands on the copywriters. They were ready to comply with our latest extravagances and there was only a small protest, once, when we designed a page with a title that called for three words, 14 characters wide with no ascenders nor descenders. In this industry, there is no room for a designer to fall in love with his typographic design, and anyone who was tempted to use his tricks over and over again got fired. This way of working was not quite as imbe- 31 cile as it sounds. It had a real relationship to the International world of fashion which it expressed. It was a world of constant change and our magazine pages were designed to reflect this change. It set a fast pace in graphics, too. Its pages influenced the advertising world, particularly fashion advertising. In fact, Dr. Agha, who set the pace in those days, laid down a strict rule that as soon as one of our typographic fashions appeared in the advertising pages, it must be dropped editorially, and a new one invented. As irresponsible as it might seem now, we did try to communicate an idea―a fashion―an emotional attitude. And we rejected every layout that failed to do it with sufficient clarity or conviction. When the war broke out, the fashion magazines changed their face again. It was uncomfortable to be chichi and gay and extravagant while serious articles began finding their way into the pages of fashion magazines. Fashion photographers like Lee Miller were taking pictures of American and Russian troops meeting in German dugouts. Society photographers like Cecil Beaton were photographing survivors of Auschwitz and Belseir. Our format had to accommodate this new content. The pages became more restrained. The use of the 32 I same typeface throughout the major section of editorial pages became fashionable. In a period of austerity, anything else might have been offensive. Of course, it was cheaper and simpler to use type than handlettering, but whatever the dominant reason was, the new “sensible” typography became a fashion—a fashion that we thought of as perhaps an ultimate solution. T IS NATURAL, I think, for artists and designers, or anybody else, for that matter, to feel convinced that the solutions they have just discovered are really final solutions. From the catalogs of the last two exhibitions of your organization, it seems to me that you have decided that Piggyback Gothic is here to stay. Just as we in the fashion world once seem to have decided that everything but handwriting was obsolete. That lasted quite a while, too. Longer than your Piggyback Gothic will last, I’ll bet. I don’t really mind that line of thinking. I just mind it being considered so new. I have a feeling it has been here before. If it wasn’t tried in the fashion magazines, it was certainly tried by Bracque and Picasso. If I wanted to be sure of having something of mine shown in your exhibition, there is another old hat that I would use that now seems to be news. I would use the shortest word that I could get away with and make it large―in gothic, of course. And if there should happen to be some text that for some unreasonable reason had to be included, I would CIPE CAPTION: Goes here, could be two lines, but not more. CIPE CAPTION: Goes here, could be two lines, but not more. CIPE CAPTION: Goes here, could be two lines, but not more. SPRING 2018 TYPE : N o . 2 Since each editorial spread worth its name was designed to create a new surprise within the magazine, each needed a different typeface to suit its mood, its caprice. set it in 5 point. I would try to resist using a photographer drawing, but if I were forced to, I would use it small within the white space of one of the large letters. If I wanted desperately to be in the exhibition, I wouldn’t use a word at all. I’d use that sure-fire stopperoo of 1958 ―an ampersand! It must be surefire, because it was a stopper in 1938, too. Or was it an exclamation point then? In some segments of the design world, this solution is the modern equivalent of another surefire American formula: A magazine cover with a picture of a baby, a dog, and a pretty girl―or pref- 33 The brush letter was very loose, very brushy and had a particularly stylish effect with squarecut photographs, like the mink stole on a tailored suit. erably all three. When I walked through the International section of the exhibition, I found that it was difficult for me to decide whether a “big word” poster or booklet was good unless I knew the language; unless I knew more thoroughly what was being communicated to me. And the thought sent a chill up my spine. Because it occurred to me that conferences like these, which I imagine are designed to prove to the business world that designers are people who can also read and write―may be proving just the opposite. Do you remember the days when under the impact of modern art we used to turn a layout upside down and announce with triumph to some poor philistine of an editor that it looked even better that way, therefore it was good right side up? I remember very well seeing those wonderful French text pages in Arts et Métier Graphiques, which ran the full width of a wide page with barely any leading at all. I also remember setting a magazine section that way―only to find that in English it had lost its glamour―and was impossible to read besides. Could it be true that some of us have been looking at those European posters in this way? That the big four letter word may have meant something sensible in the foreign language―may have had a logical reason for being so big, but when we copied the pattern without being able to understand the meaning of the word, it came out sort of silly. The success of any form of visual communication, must obviously be based on how well the intent has been communicated. But there is also a determination to ignore whatever content there is CIPE CAPTION: Goes here, could be four lines, or to fill the rest of the space. Itatus sitat aut optas eatemodis modit volor arum rese. Totatem sit ut resti nusa prori 34 SPRING 2018 TYPE : N o . 2 and to make it subordinate to design. Since the last war ended, there is one generation that is confused or disillusioned by the strange peace it brought. And there is another generation that finds it difficult to be interested in what principles were involved in the war to begin with. The painters who tried to say something about the war in their paintings have all disappeared, the abstract boys who wouldn’t be caught dead saying anything have inherited the galleries, and we all seem to be determined not to talk about it. There isn’t any question about the strength of the influence of the abstract painters on modern graphic design. And it is probably strong. It has been the fashion for some time now, not to talk. And abstract painting is certainly fashionable. M R. WEBSTER defines fashion as a way of conforming. It might offend the painters to be labeled conformists. It might even offend the graphic designers. But that isn’t by intention here―I think any visual manifestation can―and should―serve as inspiration to a designer. But I think we ought to feed on abstraction with care. It can be pretty indigestible. Graphic design is useless if it communicates nothing. But there may be a ray of hope in what I privately call the new world of Will Burtin. I am talking about the Scientific Age―Will seems to have been aware of it even before Sputnik. Apparently, the scientists have something to say. And it is important that we understand it―and communicate it to others. The electronic machines are able to communicate with each other pretty well, but I’m still having trouble trying to understand how synthetic fabrics in 28 gorgeous colors are just as good as the old-fashioned, natural ones. Surely, those designers who are crying out to work with more important content—designers who feel that they are stuck in the rut of outmoded fashion, who fight against convention only to find they too are conformists―will welcome the Scientific Age I don’t mean to imply that modern typographic habits are bad merely because they have been borrowed or because they are not new. I mean that they should not be taken so seriously; no one specific fashion should be considered a permanent solution. They can be fun while they last, but please let’s not make them last so long. And if it makes you sad to see them go, maybe it will cheer you up a little when you remember that another generation will discover them. Just as we have discovered the Chemise of the 20’s. 35