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The attempt to reinvent the familiar has been a key strategy in American design since the 1940s, when art directors for magazines and advertising mixed abstract, dynamic compositions inspired by European modernism with the ready-made vocabularies of commercial media. A preference for witty concepts based on colloquial idioms over abstract formal solutions marked the graphic design of Saul Bass, Gene Federico, Cipe Pineles, Paul Rand, and others in the 1940s and 1950s.
© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum