Twenty years ago I flat-out wouldn't have believed you

One of the benefits of being a graphic designer is that it affords opportunities to provide pro bono solutions for causes that one is in sympathy with. During 45 years of teaching, it was especially gratifying to arrange for students to take on pro bono design community opportunities, in which they could then produce exemplary solutions, to enrich their portfolios. Having retired, I myself don't have a professional need to create designs for community causes, and yet I continue to do it, simply because of the satisfaction of producing things of quality in support of worthy causes.

A couple of years ago, for example, I took on the problem of designing eight large format panels for a traveling exhibition (including a banner and the shipping container) about the life and work of an Iowa-born novelist and short story writer named Ruth Suckow. Through the efforts of Iowa scholar Barbara Lounsberry (President of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association), the exhibit has had enormous success, resulting in its installation at numerous libraries, history centers and other Iowa venues. It is currently on view at the German American Heritage Museum (Davenport IA), as shown above in a view of the installation space.

More recently, I agreed to design a full-color folded brochure for the Dysart Historical Society in Dysart IA. Screen shots of the unfolded outside and inside page layouts are reproduced below. It is a pleasure to take these on, but of course they are also a source of frustration at times, since one has to comply with the client's intentions for the function of the finished design (its content), while producing a visual solution (its form) that is beautifully and effectively made—not merely "slop" that pays the rent.

As Bob Dylan famously said, "the times they are a-changing." A daunting profusion of ugly tattoos (mindless graffiti on youthful architectural skin) are ruining otherwise beautiful forms—of which the deaths of democracy and the rule of law are easily the most frightening. I thought of that just recently as I once again watched one of the best designed films of our era, No Country for Old Men (2007). Here is the salient passage:

"You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you."

WWI camouflage artist / taxidermist Louis Paul Jonas

Taxidermy Hall of Fame

It certainly comes as no surprise that a person who practices taxidermy would also be interested in the appearance of animals, in protective coloration, mimicry, and camouflage. Over the years, I’ve run across any number of naturalists, museum exhibit designers, ornithologists, and wildlife artists, who, at one time or another, have contributed to the study of camouflage in nature. Some have even served during wartime as camouflage consultants.

Shown above is a photograph of the well-known museum display of a group of African elephants in the Akeley Hall of the American Museum of Natural History. It was completed by a famous naturalist, taxidermist and sculptor named Carl Akeley, who collaborated on it with one of his prominent students, the sculptor and museum exhibit designer Louis Paul Jonas (1894-1971). Born in Budapest, Hungary, Jonas initially worked with his two older brothers, who owned a taxidermy studio in Denver (eventually there were five brothers in the firm). After moving to New York, he established his own studio, and created admired exhibits in more than 50 museums throughout the world.

I want to focus on Louis Paul Jonas because I hadn’t realized that, during World War I, he served in the US Army’s Camouflage Corps. I learned this only recently from a news article titled MONSTER MAKER, so-titled because he had been commissioned by the Sinclair Oil Company to build full-size fiberglas models of dinosaurs for the New York World’s Fair.

In that article (published in the Barrytown Explorer, Barrytown NY, on October 1, 1963, p. 4), it states that Jonas bought a 120-acre farm near Churchtown NY “and gradually made over the barns and stables into studios, and built up a staff from among his Columbia County neighbors. Now he has a staff of 16 experts, all trained by himself. One he found in a Hudson shirt factory, a young Italian who had been a mold maker in a ceramics works back home; several were members of an Adult Education class in sculpture conducted by Jonas in connection with the Hudson school system—bricklayers, housewives, and factory workers among them; three came to him via the GI Training Program, and the rest are members of his own family, including his ‘key man,’ Louis Paul Jonas Jr.” An extraordinary person obviously.