5 Amazing Logo Designers & How They Started

Paul Rand

Published July 2, 2019

Logo designers attribute their success and fame from designing logos that are recognized worldwide. Their work has helped numerous corporations to succeed. This article is about five freelance logo designers and how they started their career journey.

Paul Rand (1914-1996)

Paul Rand was a freelance logo designer, best known for his logo designs for companies such as IBM, Morningstar, ABC, Inc., NeXT Computer, Enron and Yale University. He was born as Peretz Rosenbaum on August 15, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York. He developed an interest in designing and art from an early age as demonstrated by the signs he painted for his father’s grocery and events in his school. His father enrolled him at Manhattan’s Harren High School because he did not believe that art could be a successful career for his son. Rand was able to attend night classes while still in high school between 1929 and 1932.  After that, he attended other art schools such as The New School of Design, the Art Students League and Yale University Connecticut.

Although he had a rich academic career in arts, his graphic sense was largely self-taught through reading magazines where he studied the works of Cassandre and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.  Rand began his designing career by freelancing for a syndicate as a part-time stock image creator. He polished and expanded his portfolio from his class assignments and the part-time job. Rand success came from designing corporate logos. Steve Jobs called him “the greatest living graphic designer” after he created the NeXT logo containing a simple two-dimensional black box and the NeXT letters on top. In 1996 at the age of 82, Rand died of cancer.

Saul Bass (1920-1996)

Saul Bass was a logo designer, and some of his most recognized work includes the bell system logo, AT&T’s globe, Continental Airlines’ and the United Airlines’ tulip logo. He was born on May 8, 1920, in Bronx, New York. He studied at James Monroe High School, and in 1936 he was awarded a fellowship to the art students League in Manhattan. After that, he studied at Brooklyn College while at the same time attending night classes with Gyorgy Kepes, a famous Hungarian-born designer. He started graphic designing as a commercial artist after moving to Los Angeles. In the 1940s, he started working on some Hollywood projects which involved advertising prints, and later he started his practice in 1952 through his private firm Saul Bass and Associates.

Between 1970 and 1986, Bass took a break from his work on cinema and got back to logo designing.  He successfully designed the bell logo which opened a lot of opportunities for him with big corporations. His logos analysis done in 2011 found out that they had unusual longevity and the most cause of their end was due to collapse or merge of a company, rather than the redesign of the logo. He died on April 25, 1996, due to Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Rob Janoff

Rob Janoff is a freelance logo designer, who is best known for his creation of the Apple logo. Janoff was born and grew up in Culver City, California. He graduated from San Jose State University with a degree in industrial design. He concentrated on graphic designing after realizing that he had no interest in the area he studied. Janoff started his career working for a number of small agencies at Silicon Valley that did jobs for many high-end clients.

In 1977 he was employed at Regis McKenna located in Palo Alto California, and it was here that he was selected by his creative director to design a logo for Apple computer. He got chosen because of his hard work and familiarity with tech clients. At the time Apple Computers was not yet successful. He created the Apple logo with a bite so that people did not mistake apple with another fruit and included the color stripes as an indication of the colored screens of the Apple machines. Currently, he is an advisor to design students, consultant and educator globally.

Sagi Haviv

Sagi Haviv is a renowned logo designer, famous for designing the trademarks and visual identity of clients such as the Library of Congress, Harvard University Press, and Conservation International, Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the John D., the International Tchaikovsky Competition, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, including commercial brands such as Armani Exchange.

Born in 1974 in Nachshonim, Israel, Haviv studied at Telma art high school in Givataim. He migrated to New York in 1996 and joined The Cooper Union School of Art to study graphic design where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. His design career kicked off in 2003 when he joined Chermayeff & Geismar. He was called by the The New Yorker a “logo prodigy” and by the Out magazine a “wunderkind”. Haviv teaches corporate identity design at The School of Visual Arts in New York, and he also writes for Print Magazine on the topic of identity design.

Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser was a logo designer located in New York City on June 26, 1929. His most iconic designs include the I NY, DC comics bullet logo, SEED, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook Southampton and the Brooklyn Brewery logos.  He studied in High School of Music and Art and is a graduate of Cooper Union School of Art. He received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Art in Bologna. He began his career when he co-founded Pushpin Studio with Reynold Ruffins, Seymour Chwast and Edward Sorel. He later left Push Studio and together with Clay Felker they established New York Magazine. In 1974, he founded his firm, Milton Glaser Inc. in Manhattan and it was through this firm that he created corporate logos.

In 1977, together with Wells Rich Greene, they were hired by New York City to design a logo to boost the people morale and increase tourism due to the negative impacts of the increased crime rate in the city. He got the idea of the logo design at the back of a taxi on their way to the meeting.  He also did a rendition of the logo in response to the September 11 Terrorist attacks saying “I Love New York More than Ever” featuring a black spot on the Heart symbolizing the attack on World Trade Centre Site. He was awarded the 2004 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement and the National Medal of Arts by US President Barack Obama in 2009.