When Design Saw the Future

Our hero this month, designer Alvin Lustig, believed design could transform the world. Under Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentorship, he absorbed the idea that design should dissolve boundaries between disciplines. He ditched architecture for a maverick career that spanned book covers, interiors, signage, industrial pieces and even typography. Call him the invisible hand crafting how we still live 75 years later.

Mid-century design thrived on these visionary connections. Graphic designers borrowed from industrial designers. Furniture makers thought like sculptors. Filmmakers treated opening credits like moving posters. A Charles and Ray Eames chair shared the same visual DNA as a Saul Bass title sequence or a Lustig book cover. Everything worked toward clarity. Each field fed the others, creating a culture where objects, images, and spaces spoke the same language.

Lustig’s New Directions book jackets, for example, pulled readers into new realms. Abstract figures, jagged forms, bold color merged narrative and visual poetry, reframing literature as a visual experience before a single page was turned. Readers encountered Gertrude Stein or James Joyce in books that opened abstract gateways to the avant-garde. More than a vessel for words, a book became the point of entry into the modernist mindset. 

The cross-pollination of graphic, industrial, furniture, and film design created a visual culture so cohesive that we still feel its pull today. Walk into a coffee shop in 2025 and you see echoes of the era in sleek chairs, sans serif menus, and geometric wall art. Scroll through a streaming service and you’ll find title sequences that owe their pacing and composition to mid-century innovators like Lustig.

Mid-century modernism was about clarity of purpose and a belief that design could point the way forward. Alvin Lustig showed us what that future could look like. In many ways, we are still looking.

My old friend Karrie Jacobs wrote a piece in 2017 titled When Mid-Century Met Modernism that still resonates. She wrote:

“Modernism is not something that happened once, and came to an end. Rather, it is a way of looking at the world. It is a constantly changing set of technologies and opportunities, a method for integrating a ceaseless pageant of radical breakthroughs into our mundane routines. Modernism is a technique for taking the explosive forces that are constantly reshaping the human environment and domesticating them. For that reason, modernism is infinitely, endlessly relevant.”