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Judging A Cover By Its Cover: Bradbury Thompson

March 26, 2009 by John Foster

I had the pleasure last week of escorting living design icon Art Chantry about town. We spent the bulk of our time chatting about DC via espionage and politics (he had an Obama poster in his window in Tacoma and someone shot it out – we’ve only come so far…) and the Northwest with the gentrification of Seattle and how no matter what Tacoma always stays the same. In-between all of this gabbing, the name Bradbury Thompson came up. Art loves to spin about design history and his own work references a clear admiration for Thompson in a number of pieces, so it wasn’t a surprise to hear the name bandied about. What was a surprise, however, was the pang I felt in thinking about his work. Thompson is one of my design “heroes” on a surprisingly tight list. What I always loved about his work was his innate ability to exploit the printing process for all that it was worth over every little inch. Few before or since have been able to design in such a manner as to consider the order of plates and flow of ink like Thompson could.

The pang came from the recent news of multiple closures in the printing industry and a lengthy talk with an old college classmate about the impending death of print as we know it. Presses today have tightened up all of the margins that Thompson enjoyed decades in. He would have to do a great deal of convincing to get a pressman to pull off his little experiments on a current job (besides doing so in ghost form having passed on in 95, but lets not get bogged down in the details.) As the barriers between printers and designers reaches Grand Canyon proportions – not to mention taking place far too often on differing continents in opposing languages – I know that another Thompson is not to be. Print will still live in some form and you can’t convince me otherwise, but I know if won’t ever shine quite like this:

It was Thompson’s upbringing as a son of Kansas that so informed his work. It was here that he entered the industry through the printing business and not only fell in love with type and binding – but learned typesetting by hand and watched the actual bindery assembling volumes of work. This love would lead him to design simplified alphabets of type with the groundbreaking Monalphabet and Alphabet 26, meshing upper and lowercase characters to great effect. He applied his creative flair most memorably to the publication of Westvaco’s Inspirations. Here he could show the rest of us what we could actually do with two fonts and four plates of ink, if we really set our minds to it. His mastery of overprinting (running one ink directly over the previous, to create a new “third” color) has never been matched. He would continue to do so over nearly two decades for the paper company.

While he might have left the deepest impact on future designers via the Westvaco series, that tome reached only a select audience. Where his true legacy lies is in the creation of modern publication design, as we still know it today. Pushing the limitations of the page and process during 15 years as Art Director for Mademoiselle, his elegant solutions still hold the standard for fashion layout. No one had dared to mix design, typography and photography like Thompson would. When you peel back a page today and marvel at the refined yet playful type and breathtaking image – you now know you have a simple, reserved man in a dark suit to thank.

He would then apply a completely different solution (but essentially the same approach) to such diverse publications as Smithsonian and ARTnews among others, with always amazing results. His clear design direction would produce over 120 astonishing solutions for the U.S. Postal Service that harkens back to a glory period in both stamps and sophistication. He also undertook what many consider to be the most comprehensive graphic review of the Bible. Swallowing nearly a decade of his time, the final result, The Washburn College Bible runs more than 1800 pages over three leather-bound volumes and is a revolutionary pairing of relevant art (both religious and abstract) and type and information design.

Using the Sabon typeface for one of the first times, Thompson handset the type for each page using “thought-unit” typography which relies on breaking each line based on their spoken sound (in essence – making it so that you read in the manner in which you hear, so no lines would end in a pause like “if, and, but, it and so on.) You can now see the true mark of a publication designer based on how they rag their text and if they have received this form of teaching. I have to confess that it was one of the things that drove me insane in overseeing staff when they wouldn’t take the extra time or philosophically understand the process. As the computer does more and more work for us and we read far too much on-line (here included of course) you come to appreciate a properly set paragraph all the more.

It is amazing to ponder all of the areas Thompson managed to influence through his work as well as four decades as a professor at Yale. Many of his students went on to great heights in the publication world and in his days as an Art Director, it was Thompson that hired a then unknown Andy Warhol to produce illustrations for Mademoiselle, before following with work from the likes of Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. In his many ways he did nothing but give and give to the design field and the public as a whole. Few people make the world not only more beautiful – but easier to understand.

Bradbury Thompson did both with amazing ease.

John Foster owns his very own design firm, Bad People Good Things and is the author of For Sale: Over 200 Innovative Solutions in Packaging Design (HOW), New Masters of Poster Design (Rockport), Maximum Page Design (HOW) as well as an upcoming collection of handmade graphics entitled Dirty Fingernails for Rockport and a monograph on Jeff Kleinsmith for Sub Pop Records.

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