The Herb Lubalin Study Center
Today our Experience Design team at Hearst went to the Herb Lubalin Study Center for a workshop and it was very inspiring. Truly a design playground for creatives.
Opened in 1985, this center was opened to preserve an unprecedented resource: Herb Lubalin’s vast collection of work! Lubalin went to Cooper and the workshop was a show and tell led by Alexander Tochilovsky, the curator at the center.
Lubalin is best known for his super illustrative and art-deco-style typography. Also, something I didn’t even know about was his groundbreaking work for the magazines Avant Garde, Eros, and Fact. The Study Center’s core collection includes an extensive archive of his work, including drawings, promotional, editorial, and advertising design, typeface design, posters, logos, and other materials dating from 1950 to 1981. I really recommend visiting - The Lubalin Center is free and open to the public 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
