Excellence in all things

Paul Rand's 1961 logo for Westinghouse.

At the beginning of the 1960s, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation was the fourteenth largest industrial corporation in America producing a wide range of electronics for nuclear power stations, public transportation and the home. The growing global presence and extensive catalogue which amounted to over 300,000 product lines across sixty divisions, meant that a new and more ‘conscious’ design policy be introduced to maintain a consistent image throughout the corporation and across all the industries it operated within.

In 1960, the architect and industrial designer Eliot Noyes was hired as consultant director of design at Westinghouse. His duty was to help shape the philosophy of the corporation through a new and ‘long-range’ design program. Titled ‘Image by Design’, this was to be an ongoing study of the Westinghouse image during an era of continuous development and growth, and sought to convey ‘excellence in all things’.

Further, the design program would need deliver an authentic expression of the company as a whole; demonstrative of quality and performance; and give it a contemporary appearance to give the impression of an ‘advanced’ corporation. Noyes commissioned renowned graphic designer Paul Rand (IBM) (with whom he previously had worked with to develop IBM’s logo and design policy) to coordinate Westinghouse’s visual identity.

Continue reading to discover how Rand evolved what came before, and created a system of logo, type and colour that would unify and formalise all aspects of Westinghouse’s corporate communications, and see this in action across a range of examples.