To celebrate the 100th anniversary of its brand name, Herman Miller unveiled a specially curated exhibit celebrating its rich graphic design history. The exhibit was held in its Milan showroom in the Brera Design District during Milan Design Week last month.
Throughout its history, Herman Miller has worked with many graphic designers and artists who came to define the look and feel of their respective eras. This visual journey celebrates their work, and the boldness, rigour and joy innate to the brand.
Starting in 1930 with the hiring of Gilbert Rohde (an architect with Bauhaus education), as Herman Miller’s first design director, founder D.J. De Pree made a pivotal step in transitioning the company from traditional to modern design.
Joining Herman Miller in 1945, outsize personality George Nelson cemented both storytelling and design partnerships – with the Eames Office, Alexander Girard, and others – as essential parts of the Herman Miller brand.
Coinciding with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and the artistic liberation of the 1970s, a shared spirit of idealism and playfulness carried through from the Swiss-influenced, Helvetica-heavy tenure of designer John Massey to his protégé, Steve Frykholm, whose exuberant Summer Picnic series came to typify the company’s graphic identity throughout the 1970s.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Barbara Loveland and Linda Powell steered the company through a postmodern period of design leadership. And as Herman Miller increased its international footprint, its graphics reached every corner of the globe.
Finally, one cannot discuss graphics at Herman Miller without Alexander Girard, founding director of the company’s textile division. Throughout his career, Girard used graphics to create motifs with meaning, and his pattern language would reach its apex in the early 1970s with a series of Environmental Enrichment Panels.
