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Company in the Spotlight: The medium is at least part of the message
Sunday, November 12, 2000 By Deborah Mendenhall, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Correction/Clarification: (Published Nov. 14, 2000) Rick Landesberg, founder and owner of the graphic arts firm Landesberg Design Associates, early in his career worked at the University of Pennsylvania. A story Sunday incorrectly said he had been at another university.
Rick Landesberg is a man who appreciates good design, even when he finds it beneath him. Recently, he marveled at a manhole cover that was imbedded in a quaint cobblestone street in Aarhus, Denmark.
"It was very contemporary and had images that seemed to have to do with the history of the city," he said. "And I thought about how that manhole cover was beautiful, functional and how it also sends a positive civic signal about that community."
"When design can do that, then you're really cooking."
What he admires is something to which he also aspires. Landesberg's goal is to be "really cooking" in all projects he undertakes at Landesberg Design Associates, a graphic design firm he founded in 1982.
The firm designs publications, exhibits, Web sites, banners, brochures and annual reports, with a major portion of its work involving the conception, design and production of identity programs.
Its work has received numerous awards, including those from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the New York Art Directors Club and the Mead Annual Report Show competition, which honors the top 30 annual reports nationwide.
While small, the South Side firm has attracted big clients. Landesberg was in Denmark in the spring to supervise the printing of "Poverty Report 2000," which examined efforts to eradicate poverty around the world. The firm designed the report for the United Nations Development Programme, the world's largest aid agency.
As with all of its work, the poverty report was designed with the "client's clients," or the end user, in mind, Landesberg said.
"When I first met with the people at the UN, I asked, how can we design this to make it a good tool for the people who will use it?" he said. "They found that question to be disarming, and that took our discussions to a completely different plane. Too often people see a report as a compilation of material."
BUSINESS: Design firm
EMPLOYEES: Seven
OWNER: Rick Landesberg
HEADQUARTERS: 1219 Bingham Street, South Side
BUSINESS: Founded in 1982 by principal Rick Landesberg.
For the Poverty Report 2000, he began with the visual organization of the book, making sure it was easy to follow and that the pictures of different cultures were representative and respectful, while accurately reflecting reality.
In charts and diagrams, he suggested a strong declarative statement be used as a headline instead of an explanation, with the statistics speaking for themselves.
It was exactly the look for which Maureen Lynch, art director for UNDP, was looking. "The typography and the colors he used gave the report a warm, human quality that it needed," she said.
The United Nations discovered Landesberg Design Associates after someone at the UN saw material the firm had designed for the Rockefeller Foundation, one of its oldest clients.
Locally, the company designed the outdoor banners for the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, the Web site for the Frick Art & Historical Center, and the baked-enamel-on-metal panels that promote the 1888 Allegheny County Courthouse.
Currently, Landesberg designers are developing printed materials for the Friends of the National Parks at Gettysburg, which is raising money to restore the Gettysburg battlefield and landscape.
The firm is known for its large cultural clients such as the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Museums. However, the firm also designs for technology start-ups and corporate clients, such as Alcoa.
"We've even created a logo for my dentist," Landesberg said. "In our work, we try to convey the sense of institutional character."
To illustrate his point that objects and images convey messages, Landesberg often tells a story that he believes came from a prestigious business school.
People often have a warm feeling when they see a hand-painted plywood sign that says "Lemonade, 10 cents" with a backward "d" and paint dripping from the letters. However, if the same plywood sign were written in the same manner and said, "Flying lessons, $500," the feeling evoked would likely be fear.
"That communicates something entirely different," he said. "Your response is likely going to be, 'I'm not going to get in the plane with that guy!' The signals you send can be creative and unpredictable but they must be appropriate."
Design work requires a love of typography and images, a passion Landesberg said he didn't at first realize he had.
Landesberg was trained as a fine arts painter who worked in watercolors, acrylics and oils. He earned a certificate from Central St. Martins College of Art in London in 1972 and a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. After completing school, Landesberg wasn't sure what to do next. One day he came across a book on typography and design in the library.
"I realized this is what I had wanted to do all along, but I didn't know it had a name or its own discipline," he said. "I just had this enormous hunger, and finally it was given a path."
He took a course in print production and landed a job in the production office at the University of Pittsburgh, making $3.50 an hour pasting up copy.
"That turned out to be a wonderfully rich environment, where I was able to learn a lot from very good designers," he said. "I was dealing with subjects I cared about and that affect the work we do today in my firm."
He still paints privately to express his personal creative urges but has found a creative outlet of a different sort in design work.
"In fine arts, one solves the personal creative problems," he said. "In design, you have the opportunity to solve creative problems for someone else."
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