Push Pin Studios Graphic Artist Reynold Ruffins Dies At 90


Reynold Ruffins, illustrator, graphic designer, and artist, was an early member of Push Pin Studios, an understated and vibrant design firm founded by Cooper Union classmates. Milton GlaserEd Sorel and Seymour Chwast died on July 11 at their home in Sag Harbor, New York. He was 90 years old.

His son, Seth, said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Print advertising picture in the early 1950s was a pretty boring affair. Products were often sold using traditional typefaces paired with romantic or idealized photographs and illustrations on the one hand, or a cold, rational European modernist style – elegant photographs and sans serif type – on the other.

In witty, faux-nostalgic illustrations and writing, Mr. Glaser, Mr. Chwast, Mr. Sorel and Mr. Ruffins, all of whom are illustrators, turned the field upside down and in doing so created the discipline of postmodern graphic design at large. by taking formerly different roles – illustration and type design – and bringing them together.

“They took the fun out of design,” said Steven Heller, a former art director and editor of the 2004 visual history “The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration” at The New York Times Book Review. the work of the studio. “They did it by using local forms like cartoons and going back and reinterpreting styles like Art Nouveau and Art Deco. They brought back Passé. They put pastiche in the design vocabulary and made it cool.”

In his own work, Mr. Ruffins extracted images of late 19th and early 20th century Europe, such as posters and illustrations by Emil Pretorius or the German cartoonist and illustrator Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch. The kinetic craze of German cartoons and the undulating forms of art nouveau, taken up by Mr. Ruffins and other Push Pin illustrators, prefigured the trippy, psychedelic images that would mark the late ’60s.

“Reynold played with forms,” said Mr. Heller. “20. While they fit into the continuum of the century, they certainly belong to them.”

Being Black made him a rarity in the advertising business—an industry that was an all-white world of Mad Men before the Civil Rights era, as Mr. Ruffins later recalled. Because his job was his calling card, customers often didn’t know his race.

“After finishing a job, I would meet an art director and there would be some surprises” Mr Ruffins told the Sag Harbor Express in 2013:. “I once finished a big job, both physically and financially, and had my portfolio under my arm. I was feeling very good. The receptionist looked up and said, ‘The mailroom is over there. The assumption is that if you were Black, you were delivering something.”

Reynold Dash Ruffins was born on August 5, 1930 in Queens. His father, John Ruffins, was an appliance salesman for Consolidated Edison’s, alias Con Ed, energy company; his mother, Juanita (Dash) Ruffins, was a housewife.

Like a high school friend, Mr. Glaser, he attended Music and Arts High School and then Cooper Union, the highly selective and then free arts college in midtown Manhattan. Mr. Ruffins graduated in 1951.

One summer, he and his classmates Mr. Glaser and Mr. Chwast started a graphics company called Design Plus. Mr. Chwast remembered that he had two customers. One wanted to make lots of cork service mats (Mr. Ruffins designed the tropical scene where they had silk prints on them) and the other was a monologue in need of a flyer. “Then our vacation was over and we went back to school,” said Mr. Chwast.

Later, Mr. Chwast, Mr. Sorel and Mr. Ruffins had the idea to sell themselves with a summary of writing and illustration, a four-page booklet designed as a parody of the Farmers’ Almanac. they said that Push Pin Almanack and sent it to the art directors to complete the work. (Mr. Glaser had gone to Europe with a Fulbright.) It was filled with pieces of ephemera, such as facts, poems, and old-time toothache remedies, all interpreted in their own neo-nostalgic way. Mr. Ruffins designed the thumbtack logo. Replicas of the Almanack and its successor, the Push Pin Monthly Chart, are now collectibles for the design enthusiast.

In 1954, Mr. Chwast, Mr. Glaser, and Mr. Sorel founded a proper design firm and, although they had almost no clients, they called it Push Pin Studios and invited Mr. Ruffins to join.

But Mr. Ruffins had married Joan Young, a classmate at Cooper Union, and they had a baby, so he took a job at a more established firm. As a sign of the times, Joan was asked to leave Cooper Union while she was pregnant. The dean told him that he was wasting a place that could be given to a man. Years later, the school awarded him a certificate of completion.

When Push Pin Studios was founded, Mr. Ruffins was back and stayed for about five years, said Mr. Chwast, before stepping out on his own in 1960. Well-known political cartoonist and New Yorker writer, Mr. Sorel, left early. on too. Mr. Glaser would, of course, co-found New York Magazine, creating the “I♥ NY” logo and other iconic designs.

Mr. Ruffins contributed designs for The Urbanite, a short-lived cultural magazine for “The New Negro,” which was put together by Byron Lewis, an advertising executive, and others in 1961. James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes and LeRoi Jones also contributed.

“We were unable to attract the attention of paid ads,” said Mr Lewis, who founded his own advertising agency, Uniworld, to focus on the black market. “No mainstream advertiser wanted to advertise in a black publication. That’s what we were called back then. We were a startup trying to be different from Ebony and Jet, which focused on black celebrities. Reynold was a pioneer because he worked in the white mainstream advertising world. It was unheard of for a Black man back then. He was a role model.”

Mr. Ruffins later worked with his friend Ruffins/Taback, Inc. He set up his design studio. Simms Taback. (They also had a greeting card company called Cardtricks, which featured impressive belt drawings of the two men.)

He has collaborated with a writer, Jane Sarnoff, on 14 children’s books that are offbeat and hilarious expositions on any topic that interests them in any given year, from superstitions to chess and riddles.

his illustrations “Running the Road to ABC,By Lauture to the Sea, a Haitian poet, it won Mr. Ruffins the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustrator in 1997. children’s world,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in 1996.

Joan Ruffins, a painter, died in 2013. In addition to his son Seth, Mr. Ruffins has two other sons, Todd and Ben; one daughter, Lynn Cave, and six grandchildren.

Taught for a little over a decade in Queens College’s arts department, Mr. Ruffins began painting full-time in the early 2000s, with upbeat, jazzy, and often abstract works exhibiting in Sag Harbor and elsewhere.

“I’ve almost always had the chance to enjoy my work, of course some less than others,” he told The Sag Harbor Express. “I probably work more on easel painting than I did as an illustrator because I had limitations and a need to satisfy the client, but knowing what you cannot do can help.”



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