The Herb Lubalin Study Center
Today our Experience Design team at Hearst visited the Herb Lubalin Study Center and it was genuinely inspiring. It felt like a playground for designers.
Founded in 1985, the center exists to preserve Herb Lubalin’s incredible body of work. Lubalin was a Cooper Union alum, and the session was a show-and-tell led by Alexander Tochilovsky, the center’s curator.
Lubalin is best known for his expressive, art deco–leaning typography. I also learned about his groundbreaking work on Avant Garde, Eros, and Fact. The archive is deep. Drawings, editorial and advertising work, typefaces, posters, logos, and more spanning 1950 to 1981. If you’re in New York, it’s absolutely worth a visit. The center is free and open by appointment.
“Graphic design is a form of communication and almost everything we encounter on a daily basis is communication… In order to understand what transpires and to see the markers of history, you interact with pieces that were designed,” he says. “There are other places like libraries that collect materials and paper, but through graphic design, you get an incredible sense of what’s going on.”
Highlights:
Rare periodicals like Massimo Vignelli’s brand manual for the New York City subway
Drawers of catalogs and brochures that Lou Dorfsman art directed for CBS
Logo sketches to magazines like U&lc—that Herb Lubalin designed in his lifetime
