Quality by Paul Rand

Quality by Paul Rand

The concept of quality is difficult to define, for it is not merely seen, but somehow intuited in the presence of the work in which it is embodied. Quality has little to do with popular notions of beauty, taste or style; and nothing to do with status, respectability or luxury. It is revealed, rather, in an atmosphere of receptivity, propriety and restraint.

Quality is concerned with the weighing of relationships; the discovery of analogies and contrasts; with proportion and harmony; the juxtaposition of formal and functional elements — with their transformation and enrichment.

Quality is concerned with truth, not deception; with ideas, not techniques; with the enduring, not the ephemeral; with precision, not fussiness; with simplicity, not vacuity; with subtlety, not blatancy; with sensitivity, not sentimentality.

— Paul Rand

Commissioned 1990 by Tom Hardy, IBM Corporate Design Program Manager