My acquaintance with Alvin Lustig was only in the realm of Architecture. All I can say of him as a man or as a designer is, in fact, related to his impact on the art which interests me most: Architecture.

I remember once working with him on a project for the western plains where all the skills which he had learned throughout the years in the field of design came to fruition. The problem was to create a symbol for Meteor Crater which could be read miles away, close to, and in repetition over the endless miles of Route 66, the numberless vistas that Route 66 gave us.

The way in which he translated the needs of the symbol into a simple diagrammatic form, the way he related the colors, the way the repetition of the circle for instance would gradually come to mean the Meteor Crater which he was trying to express—was his genius.

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“I don’t know of anybody on the contemporary scene who unites in one person all these facets. It was part architecture, part industrial design, part typography, part advertising—and all of it art.”

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I think that as a book designer there might have been others we could consider to be in the same category as Alvin Lustig. But no one expressed as he did the joining together of the arts of design in a public way. The fact that there is no word for this art is symbolic of the confusion of our times, of course, since it isn’t necessarily within the realm either of the architect or of the industrial designer to take care of public symbols.

One of his best jobs was, or is, the symbol for Northland. That is the field in which we miss him most, the creation of the symbols we see around us.

Though already his influence is felt in this field there is no one who has yet, in public, changed our surroundings as Alvin Lustig would have done had he lived.

It was by no accident that this was his specialty. He was always more interested in Architecture even than in the work he did himself, and he actually designed buildings and would have been, had he chosen, one of the better architects of our time.

There was focused into his person a channeling from the great modern painting of Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian. He focused their teachings into the creation of public symbols which make our surroundings.

There is no one to take his place…