Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime.
How I unearthed a forgotten chapter in corporate design history
At the time I was looking for a subject for my ‘Design as Protagonist’ project, part of Steven Heller’s Researching Design class at D-Crit (the MFA in Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts). Also known as the ‘No Google Class’, this course urges students to find more about a designed object without recurring to Internet search engines, in order to build a narrative around its manufacture, design, application and influence.
When asked if he knew these designs, Heller replied: ‘I don’t know the posters, but would love to know more. It also goes to the heart of how “modern” Pan Am was in its approach to graphics. Worth a book.’ I knew I was on to something.
At MoMA’s Architecture and Design archive, cataloguer Paul Galloway found ‘a whole lot of nothing’ on the posters apart from the 1972 shipping receipts. At the Chermayeff & Geismar (C&G) collection at SVA’s Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives, archivist Beth Kleber showed me other posters and materials from that period, which proved MoMA’s six were part of a larger set, but nothing else. I never got a reply from the Pan Am archives at the University of Miami. I simply had to go to the sources to find my answers.
Below: Opening spread from ‘Flight of the imagination’, Frederico Duarte’s article about the Pan Am posters in Eye 73.
What followed could be an experiment on the six-degrees-of-separation theory. On the week I contacted the C&G studio, Michael Bierut told me during his first class he knew the posters and how to reach Bill Sontag, a designer at C&G who worked on them – via Joseph Bottoni, a professor at the University of Cincinatti, Bierut’s alma mater.
I later met with Ivan Chermayeff himself, after speaking on the phone with Bottoni, Sontag and Bruce Blackburn – another designer who worked at C&G and whom MoMA – still – wrongly credits as an author of the Bali poster.
While looking at the posters for the first time in decades (including one which according to him could not have been designed at C&G and was swiftly thrown away), Chermayeff told me a few interesting anecdotes about the redesign, but not the whole story. The same day I met with George Tscherny, who also worked for Pan Am and whose work is also in the SVA archive. He gave me Patrick Friesner’s email and told me to get in touch with him: our correspondence began that evening. Friesner, a Briton now living in northern Dordogne, was at the time – under CEO Najeeb Halaby – Pan Am’s Head of Sales Promotion (not of Sales and Promotion, as I wrongly stated in the article). In his many witty and insightful emails, he revealed to me the fascinating process behind Pan Am’s short-lived Helvetica dream.
But I still wanted to understand how these posters ended up in MoMA. Chermayeff told me he was not involved in the acquisition process, despite being a trustee and consultant at the time. I then wrote to Christian Larsen, who while at MoMA’s A&D department almost included the Hawaii poster in the 2007 Helvetica exhibition he curated. Larsen got me thinking if Mildred Constantine, MoMA’s Associate Curator of Graphic Design from 1943 to 1971, had acquired the Pan Am posters during her last year at the museum, as part of her many other ‘Swiss school’ acquisitions from the likes of Armin Hofmann, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Manfred Bingler, Tomoko Miho and Massimo Vignelli. That would explain why there are no posters from 1972, only from 1971, in the collection (an easy way to tell the date: Logo + Pan Am = 1971, Logo + Pan Am’s World = 1972).
Connie Butler, MoMA’s current Robert Lehman Foundation chief curator of drawings who included the Chermayeff’s posters in an exhibition dedicated to the past 40 years of the museum’s collection, told me on the phone how surprised she was with their success: she got more feedback from fellow curators and artists about them than about any other of the more than 100 works on show.
Then, on the day we handed our research results (in the form of posters and books) to Steven Heller, Emily King visited our department on West 21st Street. While looking at my poster, she said ‘I think Alan Fletcher did work for Pan Am, too.’ Friesner had never mentioned Fletcher, but I also didn’t ask. By then I could finally Google the words “Pan Am Posters”, so I did. Not only I got immediate proof Fletcher had indeed worked for Pan Am, I later learned from Friesner how he got the job – another six-degree-of-separation-story, worthy of its own blog post: think Mad Men with extra air miles.
Another thing I learned from Google was that none of the people running the many Pan Am memorabilia websites, dedicated as they can be, seems to have even heard of these posters. Few have found any of the materials designed between 1971 and 1972. Judging by these sites (or eBay, for that matter) it was as if this redesign never existed.
Pan Am is no longer. But the story of its redesign, as told by the people behind it, proves personal connections, proximity and chance are all makers of (design) history. How many other great design stories are left untold?
You can read Frederico Duarte’s article ‘Flight of the imagination’ on the Eye website and in Eye 73, a photography special issue.
Eye is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop. For a taste of the magazine, try Eye before you buy.
December 14th, 2009 at 12:49 pm | by Twitter Trackbacks for Eye blog » Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime. How I unearthed a forgotten chapter in corporate design history [eyemagazine.com] on Topsy.com
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December 14th, 2009 at 2:38 pm | by uberVU - social comments
Social comments and analytics for this post…
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December 14th, 2009 at 3:42 pm | by Kimberley Crofts
Great design history sleuthing. Thank you. These are such wonderful posters and brilliant examples to show students when teaching them about balance and form in graphic design.
December 15th, 2009 at 12:25 am | by Design Diário
[...] posters da Pan Am dos anos 1970 foram encontrados por Frederico Duarte. 14.12.2009 | Sem comentários Escreva [...]
December 15th, 2009 at 5:38 am | by Almanacco del Giorno – 14 Dec. 2009 « Almanacco Americano
[...] Eye Blog – Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime [...]
December 15th, 2009 at 7:25 am | by ISO50 - The Blog of Scott Hansen » Pan Am’s “Helvetica Dream”
[...] Am’s short-lived Helvetica dream” came to be. He chronicles this process over on the Eye Blog and in an article for Eye Magazine. These posters are incredible and their story is well worth the [...]
December 15th, 2009 at 3:35 pm | by jerome san juan
I miss Pan Am, which represented global reach in the most unthreatening way and, for my family, was the plane that would take us from Latin America to US every summer — in the days when you could sit in the co-pilot’s seat and listen to the chatter over their headsets. All gone, but not forgotten.
December 16th, 2009 at 2:47 pm | by Parkbench » Blog Archive » Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime – a forgotten chapter in corporate design history
[...] by David on December 16th, 2009 via [...]
December 19th, 2009 at 12:17 am | by PanAm at thegraffik | Design and Illustration
[...] to get hold of PanAm stuff from this era (early 70s) for years but have always drawn a blank. Now, thanks to Frederico Duarte, it’s all in/on Eye, which is [...]
December 21st, 2009 at 7:56 pm | by Pan Am’s Helvetica Dreamtime | Arkitip Intel
[...] of my all-time favorite marketing tools…the ‘Flight of the Imagination’ poster series. Courtesy of [...]
December 22nd, 2009 at 3:55 pm | by Visual Arts Briefs » Blog Archive » In The Press: MFA Design Criticism Department Students
[...] Duarte recently wrote a piece for Eye blog about his work investigating a project for a D-Crit course taught by MFA Design Department Co-chair [...]
December 28th, 2009 at 7:02 pm | by Eye blog » Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime. How I unearthed a forgotten chapter in corporate design history | Дизайн Блог!
[...] http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=415 Tags: blog Комментариев [...]
December 28th, 2009 at 8:12 pm | by Eye blog » Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime. How I unearthed a forgotten chapter in corporate design history | Design2o
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December 29th, 2009 at 1:15 am | by Do Not Destroy dot com @ DoNotDestroy.com Blog » Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime
[...] eyemagazine via: ffffound! Related [...]
January 1st, 2010 at 2:48 am | by Alex
hello
January 5th, 2010 at 1:33 am | by simples » Blog Archive » Pan Am, 1970-1971
[...] Flight of the Imagination, came out on issue #73 of the magazine in October. This week, the follow-up post I wrote on the process was published and fully linked on the eye blog. This has been a truly [...]
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[...] on it here: moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/315 eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=168&fid=773 blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=415 [...]
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[...] Eye Magazine has a great article on PanAm’s advertising and design – albeit only one chapter, as found at the ‘Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Really modern approach to advertising, graphics and generating that sense of wonder that travel companies seem to forget in this day and age. Read more, but more importantly, see more here! [...]
January 20th, 2010 at 9:55 am | by Pan Am posters « +THECHURCH+ BLOG
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January 20th, 2010 at 9:59 am | by Pan Am posters « +THECHURCH+ BLOG
[...] http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=415 Spread the word: or leave a comment 0 [...]
January 27th, 2010 at 7:23 pm | by Randy R Cox
This collection of images leave a lasting impression of the earth. Thank you
February 12th, 2010 at 2:01 pm | by The Society Of The Spectacle » Blog Archive » THE LOGO.
[...] aborted rebrand that took lace in 1971, via the hand of designer Ivan Chermayeff (in the case of Pan Am World) his deconstruction of the identity kept the logo core to it’s dynamic, but twisted and [...]
February 12th, 2010 at 6:03 pm | by Juan Trippeing Daisy | Thighs Wide Shut
[...] Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime [...]
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[...] v Look: PanAm’s World [...]
February 26th, 2010 at 5:05 pm | by Rachel Toy
There were several examples of Alan Fletcher’s work for Pan Am at the wonderful exhibition the Design Museum in the UK put on soon after his death. I think Pentagram got the gig and he worked on it. Anyway brilliant use of Helvetica and White Space. I too tried to find this recently but in vein – so thanks for sharing!
March 9th, 2010 at 8:43 am | by Six Degrees of Snorting Bacon | Thighs Wide Shut
[...] Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime [...]
March 11th, 2010 at 7:21 pm | by Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime « ImJustCreative
[...] March 11, 2010 · Leave a Comment via blog.eyemagazine.com [...]
March 15th, 2010 at 6:42 pm | by Pan Am Posters « Delayed Again
[...] stuck at your desk today and pining away for an escape, check out the Pan Am posters at Eye Blog. They remind you of a time when the airlines wanted you to travel and wanted you to think travel [...]
March 23rd, 2010 at 3:07 pm | by L’indicible attrait des vieilles affiches de voyage | Le blogue Voyage
[...] Money vient ainsi de publier un excellent billet sur le sujet, tandis que le Eye Blog reproduit des affiches, simples mais splendides, de feu la Pan Am, qui faisaient partie d’une récente exposition du MoMA de New York. Pour sa [...]
June 16th, 2010 at 5:16 am | by Pan Am Destination Posters | AisleOne
[...] Duarte did a little digging and discovered some interesting info on these posters. You can read the story on the Eye Magazine blog and in a [...]
June 17th, 2010 at 5:49 am | by Laily Mumtazi-Sims
This is great! Thanks for reminding me how we used to design…
before the computer came along,
SIMPLE & BEAUTIFUL.
June 18th, 2010 at 7:09 am | by Eismann-SF News
[...] came across this post in Aisle One about Frederico Duarte’s column in Eye magazine about these incredible posters for Pan Am designed by Chermayeff & Geismar.What I [...]
June 24th, 2010 at 10:31 am | by SheynkLABS
[...] Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime. [...]
July 16th, 2010 at 9:49 am | by ISO50 - The Blog of Scott Hansen » Hi-Res Pan Am Posters
[...] gallery the Pan Am posters by Bill Sontag. So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon this article at Eye Magazine with some relatively large scans of the prints. Break out your Epsons, I’d imagine you could [...]
July 23rd, 2010 at 8:47 pm | by Ian Carpenter
dreamtime indeed
July 23rd, 2010 at 8:51 pm | by Ian Carpenter
indeed dreamtime
July 28th, 2010 at 11:34 pm | by PanAm Posters « Blog Racimo
[...] mayor info, acá un artículo de Eyeblog, y un post con guías de Pan Am que también siguen el mismo partido [...]
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[...] Want the story behind? Read this great article about the Helvetica Dream of Pan Am. [...]
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March 27th, 2012 at 12:03 pm | by Do Not Destroy Posts at DoNotDestroy.com » Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime. How I unearthed a forgotten chapter in corporate design history
[...] Eye Magazine via: ffffound Related [...]