He truly has inspired me and when I started on this brief to design a logo for the Cardiff Half Marathon I began to think of the use of repeptition. Rand uses repetition in his work for many reasons, here is an essay I managed to find about his use of repetition and his famous IBM logo.
“To design,” Rand writes in Design, Form and Chaos, “is much more than simply to assemble, to order or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.” For Rand, design was an orchestration of rhythm, contrast, balance, proportion, repetition, harmony, and scale—a philosophically sophisticated vocabulary of simple form, specific function, and symbolic content. In his vision, a circle could be a globe, an apple, a face, a stop sign; a square became a gift-wrapped box (the UPS trademark), an Egyptian frieze (the IDEO trademark), or a child’s toy (the Colorforms trademark). Over the course of a career that spanned more than six decades, Rand produced a prolific body of work that included advertising and posters, books and magazines, illustration and—perhaps most important—a host of extraordinary trademarks for such corporations as ABC, IBM, UPS, and Westinghouse. It is for these ubiquitous icons that he is best remembered.
