“DEDICATED TO THE CONCEPT OF FORM”
The work of George Giusti perhaps best exemplifies the ability of the designer to give visual expression to the conceptual or the abstract. His diagram-like illustrations communicated complex information and ideas from fields such as mathematics, physics, and sociology in simple graphic form. Giusti studied art in his hometown of Milan, receiving an education that would provide him with the foundations to develop into not only a highly respected graphic designer, but a recognized architect and sculptor as well. Giusti came to the United States in 1939 after several years practicing design in Zurich, where he acquired an appreciation for both the playful whimsy of Paul Klee, and the rigid formalism of Mies van der Rohe.1
GEORGE GIUSTI
1960
THE BIRTH OF A NEW PHYSICS
Doubleday Anchor Books
Among Giusti’s early American projects were a number of ads in Fortune and a series of masterful posters for the Forest Service with remarkable graphic impact.2 From an illustrative style in the 1940s similar to Salter’s and Kauffer’s, Giusti went on to develop a crisp, reductive style in which he integrated schematic illustrations, diagrammatic symbols, and straight-forward type. For Giusti, modernism provided the primary foci of design: purity, directness, and clarity. In his contribution to the voluminous and somewhat extravagant 1967 pedagogical publication Famous Artists Course In Commercial Art, Illustration and Design, Giusti repeatedly underscored themes like the “power of simplification,” and “simplifying and subtracting.”3
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