George Tscherny
American, 1924-
Follow
George Tscherny is a Hungarian-born American graphic designer and educator. Tscherny has received the highest honors among graphic designers. He was awarded the AIGA Medal in 1988, celebrated in the annual Masters Series in 1992 at the School of Visual Arts, and inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1997. He has worked in a number of areas ranging from U.S. postage to identity programs for large corporations and institutions.
Working at the height of mid-20th century American modernist design, Tscherny displayed "an ability to seize the essence of the subject and express it in stunningly simple terms" and to reduce "complex content to an elemental graphic symbol expressing the underlying order or basic form of the subject."
At the same time, Tscherny straddled the line between the high European design of the early 20th century and the more popular forms of design communication in the burgeoning post-War American consumer culture. Reflecting on his career in Print magazine in 2014, Tscherny writes, “Unlike the fine artist who values only the original, I as a commercial artist, honor the reproduction as well as its source. I find myself comfortable at the intersection of high and low art”.