week 5

It's a presentation day. We talked about designers from 1945 tell 1980. My designer was George Tscherny. 

George Tscherny is one of the few designers of his age who almost did everything in Graphic Design. He worked with packaging, advertising, poster designs and branding. He thought that the “kick” was to keep your hand on all projects and never miss any opportunity.

Tscherny is famous not only for his good design artworks but well known also for his unique way of educating Graphic Design for students and his clients as well.

He was born in Budapest in 1924 but was raised in Germany tell he had to move because of the world war. His mother was a Hungarian. His father was Russian. Tscherny is a German spelling of the Russian word for black.

In the late forties Tscherny had prospect to design a package for Proctor & Gamble. He went to the dean requesting permission to accept the job while completing the remaining assignments on the side. The dean denied. However, Tscherny, and only six weeks before graduation, left Pratt without graduating.

In 1953 George Nelson, who owned furniture company, hired Tscherny as an assistant to Irving Harper. His first assignment was to design sixth-of-a-page magazine ad. He did an admirable job, which earned him the full-page ad assignment.

From the begging of his career he has worked with the elite of design. As he said, “the most enduring lesson was not to bring preconceived ideas to any project” and that’s what he taught his student later in the School of Visual Arts, SVA.

His work was remarkable because he gave attention to the professional audience who wanted to see the product alone. He didn’t use any good-looking women in his designs; instead he used what he called “the human element implied”.

He started his own business at the age of 30 beside his career as a teacher. He thought the best way to hone persuasive skills was by teaching. And as no curriculum existed, his initial course was based on what he learned as a student and he missed. Jazz music was played in his class and he usually took students to Broadway shows.

His designs stood out because it wasn’t about the layering of type and image, It wasn’t only about commercials and money all the time, he was providing new concepts and ideas to his clients based on human psychology and abstracted ideas and he was educating them as well on that good advertising and promotions are senseless unless they treated their customers with respect and provided a real good service.

George Tscherny has done great artworks through his career life. He challenged himself with doing better work than clients thought they wanted and to educate them into accepting graphic concepts that gave their products or philosophy a better meaning that they’d never imagined.

“Elegant but never chic, serious but never pretentious, disciplined but never dull. His work delight the eye and revive the spirit,” said Silas Rhodes. He earned respect not only to himself as a designer but also to his ideas and abstracted concepts. 

Here are some pictures of his work