Behind almost every man-made thing in modern life–shoelace grommets, artificial grape flavoring, traffic patterns–there’s a whole industry most people never think about, with its own companies and professional organizations, its own acronyms and jargon, its own internecine warfare. Most people, for instance, probably don’t think much about typefaces. But the Chicago-based Society of Typographic Arts, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this month, has had a broader influence and more raucous history than you might expect.
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The STA went on to play a vital role in the development of graphic design in Chicago, documenting its history and cultivating change and discourse. The city may have been known as hog butcher for the world, but even hog butchers need graphic designers. The advertising, printing, and transportation industries made Chicago the nation’s largest, if not its most glamorous, producer of printed goods. The School of the Art Institute established a department of printing arts in 1921, though many people “who ended up doing design…didn’t call themselves designers…they were called layout people or something else,” says Rob Dewey, who wrote the bound STA history handed out at last week’s reception. “That was that first generation.” In the late 19th century Chicago typesetters, commercial artists, and printers regularly wrestled huge amounts of text into readable form in the massive catalogs for Ward’s and Sears printed by the likes of R.R. Donnelley & Sons.
The STA, which met often both socially and professionally, directed enormous energy toward design through its combination of “talent, expectations, and just egos,” says board member Matt Doherty. The organization counted among its members and affiliates many important designers, including Oswald Cooper and Frederic Goudy–names the average computer user may recognize from her font menu. Their interests weren’t limited to typography or even graphic design; their mission also included the wholesale elevation of public taste. To that end, STA members took field trips to meet Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller, and cofounded the International Design Conference at Aspen, created by Container Corporation of America owner Walter Paepcke and his designer wife, Elizabeth. The STA created an influential exhibit for the 1933 World’s Fair, and was instrumental in disseminating the ideas of Moholy-Nagy and the New Bauhaus school. The STA even started a film group, the Magic Lantern Society, which evolved into the School of the Art Institute’s Film Center.
The ACD diminished the social component of the organization. The board wasn’t entirely local, there were fewer opportunities to volunteer, and placement services suffered. Some members of the old STA missed the collegiality and the face-to-face discussion of design ideals, and it wasn’t long before they began meeting informally on their own, calling themselves the Supper Therapy Association. By the late 1990s Doherty was calling the secretary of state’s office every six months to find out if the STA name, which belonged to the ACD, was available again. When he found out one day in 1998 that it was, he ponied up the $25 to reserve it himself and then broke the good news to the group.
