Unimark

Posted on July 6, 2010 9:35 am

Although I was educated as an architect, I was aware of and interested in graphic design from my high school days. My first job with an architecture firm was a summer internship with the Houston office of Wilson, Morris, Crain and Anderson, where I spent a lot of time press-typing Helvetica Medium from Letraset sheets. I became quite proficient, with first-rate kerning skills that still serve me well. My first job out of college was in the graphics department at Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS, later CRSS), the innovative Houston-based firm. By this time the Italian architect and designer Massimo Vignelli had become a hero of mine, and a kind of bridge for me as I moved from architecture to graphic design. Seemingly effortlessly, but with extraordinary discipline, he designed interiors, products, furniture, signage, and print graphics. Unimark, the firm he founded with several others in 1965, was the first truly international design firm, with eleven offices in five countries. Unimark’s spectacular successes, failures, and lessons have been documented in an engaging monograph published last Fall.