Journal of a typical or maybe an atypical Logo Design ProjectThe
Cupcake Station retail store was started a couple of years ago in the upscale town of Birmingham, Michigan. It has been a great success and has expanded now to an Ann Arbor store and a Van-Store that goes to big events in our area and sells cupcakes on location. I did the main logo first, then the Van-Store logo a year later.
One of the cupcake guys is an architect that I had done another project for, Tom Holliman. His partner is Kerry Johnson a landscape architect. They are both creative types who wanted a fun but tastful approach to their identity. I am including a number of the choices I gave them. On jobs like this I really have fun and always overdo the choices.
They had a hard time picking only one. I incorporated my usual method of gathering all manner of pertinent visual material. I believe "the solution usually lies in the problem". This is not always true, but is always a good place to start. First I hand drew the elements I wanted to use, cupcakes, bakers and border devices. I knew I wanted to do some old-time ad type of borders and shapes. I spent a full week doing the ideas and comps. The guys love their stuff and get lots of compliments for their “look”. This job went very smoothly. Guess I don’t have to tell you that logos can be very painful at times.
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And that was the final installment for the biography of Detroit great, Ron Rae. Once again I'd like to thank Ron for taking the time to put this together for us. It certainly was an honor to have him featured on
Illustration Pages. I really hope you enjoyed this special series on graphic designer and illustrator, Ron Rae. Don't forget to read our other
interviews too.
How the big Detroit Art Studios worked (and then they didn’t)
The big Detroit art studios (in 1968 there were eight or so of them) all had six or so full time reps who called on the big advertising agencies every day for work. A typical large studio (Skidmore-Sahratian) had a production department with a manager and, six or so "keyliners", the people who pasted up the boards with type and position photostats for art elements and photographs. This work was done under the direction of graphic designers. The "keylines" or "mechanicals" went first to the ad agency art directors for approval, then to the printing companies along with all the retouched photos and finished art work. The production department also included stat camera operators who could also shoot reference photos for the illustrators and a team of apprentices who ran back and forth to the ad agencies and learned a studio art skill when not busy with apprentice duties. Artists on the board would consist of several realistic figure illustrators, a couple of decorative illustrators, one or two lettering artists, several photo retouchers, a couple of penciling artists who did pencil drawing underlays of automobiles and all sorts of mechanical items on illustration board for the mechanical painters to do final art on. The "pencilers" also drew all the obvious distortions that one sees on 1950s and early 1960s auto art, the stretching and widening and lowering that made the cars look so big (and the figures look so small). Figure artists always put in backgrounds and people. Painting the figures in the cars had a name, "stuffing the cars". The big studios always had a design department. The graphic designers at any of the major studios were excellent at styling the concepts of art directors or designing a project from scratch with their own concepts. They did thumbnail sketches first to plan the project. These could be shown to the art director for approval before tight comps were done. Full sized tissues were then done by the designer as guides for the comps. By the middle 1960s the presentation comps for car catalogs and ads became very comprehensive indeed, with real type setting that had to be specked and sent out to the type house in the evening to be delivered first thing in the morning for assembly by keyliners. Major changes were a big problem. Sometimes patches could be done on the comps, but often the comps had to be totally redone. A whole class of artists came to be, who specialized in “zippy” photo indications for catalogs, ads and TV storyboards. The stylish comps done by these real pros resulted in the saying... "This comp makes promises that the finish can never keep!"
A New Lesson in Old Dogs and Pixel Tricks
When I was 55 years old, I had to learn the Mac computer and Adobe programs or fold up my tent. It was one of the hardest things ever for an old brain, but I stuck to it. Luckily I really wanted to be able to do all the cool things I was seeing in print. I had been doing elaborate collage, montage illustrations for years combining my art with photos and old prints, etcetera. I had even done transparent effects by overlapping Xerox images on tracing papers. I was really ready for Photoshop... and Illustrator was ready-made for my graphic icon styles. Being able to set my own type and do the comps without those awful type rubdowns was just too good to be true. One more really good thing about computer art... as a drawing board artist I had regularly had black india ink bottles land in my lap, but I have never spilled any pixels. Being able to make changes to things without redoing the whole hand rendered comp was a revolution in itself. If only we had unlimited “Command Zs” for everything in our lives.
A whole new area opened for me by 1994-1998. I joined the Detroit area’s best interior and environmental design group, Peterhans Rea Design as they merged with James P. Ryan Architects. The two groups had merged to add an interior and environmental design group to their capabilities. We did total projects... buildings, interiors, and major high-end shopping complexes, restaurants/bars, music venues and zoo projects. Some of the work was for projects in London, England, Brazil in South America and Sydney Australia as well as all over the United States. My part of this was an amazing number of logos (mostly illustrative), art murals and dimensional decorative graphics and signage. Environmental design has been described as "just like regular graphic design... only thicker!" This period allowed me to design with some of the most creative and skillful artists I had ever worked with, David Peterhans, Ron Rea (pronounced just like my name, talk about confusion), Greg Tysowski (architect), Eileen Devine and Jim Ryan founder of JPRA Architects. This was one of my favorite periods of my career.
50 Looong Years of Graphic Art and Design.
by Ron Rae
First Beginnings
I was born in 1937 in Saginaw, a town in Mid-Michigan famous as a lumbering center in the mid to late 19th century. A couple of sections of Saginaw have clusters of Victorian Era mansions built by the Lumber Barons. My first home was in one of these Victorian palaces, a mansion turned into an apartment house. My grandparents lived in another elaborately detailed Victorian home close by. I think growing up in this overtly decorative environment influenced my life-long interest in historical art movements and design styles. I started drawing as a youngster as most of us did and often illustrated my school projects to get better grades than the written content deserved. Many of my teachers fell for this ploy. I knew early on that I was destined (or doomed) to be some kind of an artist.
Hitched and Married at Twenty-One
When I married in 1958. My wife Kathy and I soon became avid antique collectors and she became, and still is, an antiques dealer. She handled a wide variety of antiques, but our own favorites were of the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and later on, Mid-Century Modernism as it is now called. We recently found some of my 1970s silk screen prints showing up in the Modernism antique shows. I’m now officially an "antique artist" - I guess.
Just a Smidgen of Education
I attended Wayne State University in Detroit for one year (1957). My formal art education also consisted of one year (1958) at The Art School of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. Today it's known as Center for Creative Studies. In the 1970s I taught graphic design there myself. Incidentally I have no degrees (except 98.6). My first job in 1959 was as an apprentice in a desirable commercial art studio in Detroit called Gilchrist-Osler Studios. My first boss was Jerry Campbell, Detroit’s premier lettering artist and designer. My early training was for a position called “Layout Man” the old designation for a graphic designer.
My first job “on the board” (that’s drawing board) was at a small but pretty hot art group called LeBeau Studios. At this studio I first met and worked with my friend of 48 years, Edward Fella, now a world famous designer/graphic artist, teacher and lecturer. Ed and I discovered and explored a lot of art influences both historical and contemporary while working together in the same room. It was with this group (1960-1962) that I was officially called a graphic designer, and it was here that I was caught up in what I call "The Great Graphic Art Explosion of the 1960s". My first admired New York contemporary group was the original Pushpin Studios... Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis and John Alcorn. Imagine how amazing it was, when a few years out of Saginaw I was actually (if only occasionally) competing with Pushpin Studios for specific projects. In their "Historical Eclecticism" approach the Pushpin guys were referencing the historical styles and eras of art that I was so interested in, Victorian woodcuts, The Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and the great early
This week we’re changing things up a bit. We’re going to do something you don’t normally see here on Illustration Pages. I’m very excited to report that all this week we’ll be featuring the biography and art of one of the most prolific and accomplished illustrators and graphic designers, Ron Rae.
Ron was a major player during the height of the Detroit advertising scene in the1960s and 70s. And everyday this week we’ll be featuring a different segment of his biography written exclusively for
Illustration Pages by the artist himself.
Ron Rae’s career as an artist has spanned more than five decades – almost four of which were spent working at top Detroit agencies sid
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