Push Pin Studios

About Push Pin

In 1954, young Cooper Union graduates and aspiring graphic designers Seymour Chwast, Edward Sorel, Reynold Ruffins, and Milton Glaser founded Push Pin Studios in New York City. In order to attract freelance illustration work, they began to publish the Push Pin Graphic, which was a short periodical they illustrated and sent out to several thousand art directors with the hope that it would catch someone’s eye and inspire future work opportunities. While it was a gamble, it was a gamble that paid off, and not only did the work start coming in, but the Push Pin Graphic itself also became an iconic vehicle for expression and experimentalism, gaining a cult following as it went on. Through the Push Pin Graphic as well as their wider work, the Studios’ distinctive style of “exaggerated forms, humorous juxtapositions, and colorful illustrations” is exuberantly exemplified.[1]

Much of the reason why Push Pin Studios took off the way they did in the 1950s is because most of the graphic design landscape at the time was still heavily influenced by postwar high modernism. This means that Swiss Design, the grid system, Helvetica, and a very minimal visual language was the prevailing style. What’s more, corporate design, developed in the mid-20^th century, was primarily ruled by the International Typographic Style – defined by graphic design giants like Josef Müller-Brockmann and Paul Rand.

The work of Push Pin Studios, on the other hand, “rejected tradition in favor of reinvigorated interpretations of historical styles…provid[ing] a fresh counterpoint to both the numbing rigidity of modernism, and the rote sentimental realism of commercial illustration.”[2]Their inspirations ranged from German woodcuts to the Renaissance, Impressionism, art deco, art nouveau, graphic styles from the Victorian period, and more. As Milton Glaser wrote, “A defining characteristic of our work was our integration of design, typography, and illustration into a single practice…We were children of modernism but turned to the past for inspiration just as the artists of the arts-and-crafts movement had. We were excited by the very idea that we could use anything in the visual history of humankind as influence.”[3]

In this way, Push Pin’s work, both bold and unique, was successful for balancing a fine line: while they looked to history for inspiration, the Studio remained contemporary and fresh in their own design. Tackling social and political issues alongside designing for music and entertainment, Push Pin not only visually expressed the zeitgeist of the 1960’s but remains as one of the defining looks and feels of the midcentury moment.