Herbert Matter Film Debuts on October 22nd

The long-awaiting documentary film on graphic designer Herbert Matter, the man who designed the McGinnis-era logos and color schemes for the New Haven and Boston & Maine railroads, will debut in New Haven, CT on Friday October 22nd. The film will be shown at 7 PM in the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, located at 53 Wall Street. The showing should show up in the Whitney Humanity Center web site at http://www.yale.edu/whc/index.html as the date approaches. It is my understanding that the screening at Yale is open to the public and will be free. I do not know to what extent Matter's work on the NHRR and B&M will be presented but the film crew did spend several hours interviewing me and the NHRHTA's Paul Beck did provide some film for the filmmakers to use. More information about the film can be found on their official web site at http://www.herbertmatter.net.

Herbert Matter was a first rate graphic designer, photographer and consultant to Knoll Associates, the well known furnishings company. He helped bring the New Haven image out of the early twentieth century Pullman stodginess to post war modernity. I’m not fully familiar with the relationship between the New Haven and Knoll Associates, but after a successful design commission for an executive suite at Grand Central, Lucile McGinnis asked Knoll and Herbert Matter to help design a new corporate identity. The EP-5 then obtained its famous harlequin pattern which gave it an iconic sense. The only other electric loco that received this level of attention was the GG-1 with designs by Raymond Lowey.

If you'd like to learn more about the relationship between Knoll Associates and the New Haven Railroad, check out "The New Haven Railroad in the McGinnis Era", which I wrote a few years ago. The book is still available from the publisher, White River Associates. You can check it out on-line at http://www.whiteriverproductions.com/shopexd.asp?id=41. Among other things, this book presents in substantial detail the corporate image design program implemented on the New Haven by president Patrick McGinnis with the help of his wife Lucille (trained in interior decoration and modern art at the Parsons School of Design) and a group of designers who worked for Knoll Associates including Herbert Matter, Haino Orro, Minoru Yamasaki, Eero Saarinen, and Marcel Brueur. The corporate image design program had a number of aspects including a graphic design aspect, led by Herbert Matter with the help of fellow Yale design professor Norman Ives, which involved the new NH logo and the red-orange, black, and white color schemes; interior and exterior decoration schemes for existing passenger stations by Haino Orro, new standard passenger station designs by Minoru Yamasaki, Eero Saarinen, and Marcel Brueur; and new high speed passenger train designs by Marcel Brueur.

Thank-you FM for that suggestion. Was the station at Rye one of the sole architectural realizations of this program?

I'm under the impression that the Rye station shown above dates from the early Penn Central era and had nothing to do with the McGinnis era passenger station design program. The McGinnis era stations were to have been part of the high speed passenger train service program. The only components of this design effort that were actually implemented were standard passenger station platform canopies, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, that were erected at Noroton Heights and one other location (Rye perhaps but without a reference I'm not sure). The high speed passenger train service program was supposed to have involved three experimental high-speed passenger trains, continuously welded rail, certain right of way improvements to straighten out the worst curves along the Shore Line Route, grade separation, special high-speed signals and automated switch equipment (the trains were supposed to pick their own routes and dynamically trigger switches), and the new stations (which would have featured commercial space that could be rented out or leased to make the stations profit centers for the railroad). The plan was to test and debug the three trains and pick the best one for use in revenue service, build out the infrastructure, and introduce a 2.5 hour trip between Route 128, MA and New Rochelle, NY around 1960. Instead, after Patrick McGinnis left his successor, George Alpert, cancelled the infrastructure program and threw the three experimental testbeds (Roger Williams, John Quincy Adams, Dan'l Webster) immediately into revenue service with minimal testing and debugging and without an adequate supply of spare parts. The results were disasterous.

Neat clip of the hundreds of sketches he went through while working on the NH logo...

http://www.herbertmatter.net/clips.html

-otto-

Most of the Rye station dates to the high level platform project but the building was built in the New Haven Railroad days
when I-95 AKA New England Thruway was built around 1959 or so. The highway project took the stations at both Larchmont
and Rye and new ones were designed and built by the NHRR but paid for by government funds in connection with the
highway project.
Noel Weaver

Otto:

Thanks for posting that wonderful clip of the evolution of the Matter "NH". Amazing what an iconic symbol it became. Imagine, designed in 1954 and still alive in 2010! I would say he well achieved what he set out to do.
I had read an article stating that the "NH" was one of the most recognizable corporate symbols; up there with the CBS "eye."

That NH logo film clip that was posted here actually came from me. It was one of my many contributions to the Matter film (the producers spent about three hours filming an interview with me at home last year and I provided a large selection of photos and other graphic material - the producer told me that he was "very happy" with the way the New Haven Railroad section of the film came out) and was derived from a PowerPoint presentation that I put together with the support of Herbert Matter's son Alex and Jeffrey Head, the curator of the Stanford University library, to show at a NHRHTA annual reunion banquet a few years ago. The logos were transcribed from original pencil sketches that were made by Herbert Matter that are in the hands of the Herbert Matter Archive at Stanford University. I have color copies of the original sketches. Unfortunately, the original sketches do not reproduce well. Most of these designs were literally pencil "doodles" made on a yellow notepad that are very small and in some cases have faded over the years. Some of them, obviously the later ones, were fairly well developed and even were done in color. Most though seem to have just been very basic concepts that seem to have been done fairly quickly kind of like Herbert Matter was just throwning ideas out as quickly as they came into his head.

Noel Weaver wrote:Most of the Rye station dates to the high level platform project but the building was built in the New Haven Railroad days
when I-95 AKA New England Thruway was built around 1959 or so. The highway project took the stations at both Larchmont
and Rye and new ones were designed and built by the NHRR but paid for by government funds in connection with the
highway project.
Noel Weaver

Noel, I think you’re right. I saw copies of the construction drawings for sale on eBay about a month ago. The drawings were dated 1958.

Also, fm the logo clips truly showed his creative mind at work.

A quick reminder. The Matter film debuts at Yale University in New Haven, CT tomorrow (Friday).

If I were in New Haven... !
Re: the filmstrip of designs leading up to the new New Haven logo: there are a number where Matter was playing with superimposed N and H and then coloring in some of the triangles outlined-- perhaps these helped inspire the bold contrasting triangles of color on locomotive noses in the new scheme?

Allen Hazen wrote:If I were in New Haven... !
Re: the filmstrip of designs leading up to the new New Haven logo: there are a number where Matter was playing with superimposed N and H and then coloring in some of the triangles outlined-- perhaps these helped inspire the bold contrasting triangles of color on locomotive noses in the new scheme?

I think a lot of these were merely design exercises meant to work out some variations, and not meant to be presented to the client. Not much of what I saw in that clip would make a good, practical logo. A GOOD logo has three common elements:

1) Simple design, easy to read/reproduce at ANY distance, without loss of meaning. Think: Nike "swoosh," the Apple logo, the CN wet noodle...

2) Does not depend on color to communicate

3) Uhhh... I forgot what the third thing was. I'm not a very good graphic designer.

-otto-

Otto--
Agree with most of your comments. Not thinking of the sketches I mentioned as things shown to customer, just as maybe something that appealed to Matter: "Hmmm... I LIKE those triangles. Won't do for the logo itself, but let's see if I can use them some way or other."
--
Do you know Gombricht's discussion of the London Transport barred circle and the British Rail railmarkin "Art and Illusion"? Likes both, but felt the Railmark not quite as good: tended to look insect-y at small sizes. Still, comparing the Railmark to other railway logos of the era... Nederlandse Spoorwegen's logo was, I'm sure (i.e. no actual documentation, just my confident inference from looking at the two), inspired by the B.R. mark, but is much klunkier. Swiss Federal Railway's cross-with-arrow is about the same complexity as the B.R. emblem, but much less dynamic (perhaps because too symmetric?).
--
I once talked about the Matter N-over-H logo with a (British) printing historianm an expert on the history of type faces. He thought it was very goodm that the "Egyptian" (I think he used this word) font used had strong subliminal associations of railroad advertising back into the 19th C. (And, of course, like the B.R. mark, if you look at it hard there are suggestions of railroad track!)