Lucian Bernhard

Lucian Bernhard was a German graphic designer who like many others, lived in New York. An interesting story about his work is that when he was first starting off as a graphic artist, he quickly entered a poster design competition in Berlin for Priester Match Company. His original design included the matches with a lit cigar sitting on a table with a picnic blanket on it and smoke rising from the cigar to show dancing women in the background. The caricaturist that he showed his piece was very proud of the work that Bernhard produced. Bernhard however, was not. He went back and changed the composition so that the only things on the poster were the red and yellow matches, and the name of the brand. During the time of the competition, the judges saw his piece and threw it in the garbage, because they thought it was so odd. It would have stayed undiscovered in the trash if the most important judge, Ernst Growald didn’t show up right when he did. Being unimpressed with all the submissions on the table, he glanced into the trashcan and said “this is my first prize. This is genius!”. Bernhard won not only the contest, but also the long-term benefactor.

Lucian Bernards work is very bold, clean, minimal, and obvious all at the same time. What’s most interesting about his work is that most of it is written in German, so it’s unreadable to the majority of his English speaking audience members, but it’s still so obvious what’s being advertised or the message being conveyed that the language barrier doesn’t effect the work very much, or at all in most cases. What I find most intriguing about his work is how precise everything is–there was no photoshop when he was around to clean up the edges or reference what a typewriter looked like from a certain angle–it was all 100% hand-made, which is something that is rare and special to find these days. His silhouette style of advertising is something that is still used very efficiently today, which I think is a really cool thing–his work outlived him and will probably outlive me, too. Not many artists can say that.