George Tscherny

Individual Information

Biographical / Historical Note

George Tscherny was born in Budapest in 1924, and raised in Germany until the late-1930s. Following the rise of the Nazi party, the Tscherny family relocated to Holland and finally, in 1941, was reunited in Newark, New Jersey. In 1944, Tscherny enlisted in the United States Army and was deployed in France as an interpreter. After returning from his tour, he enrolled in the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts on the G.I. Bill. The next year he transferred to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied with Herschel Levit (the celebrated design teacher who also counts among his alumni George Lois and Marshall Arisman), who in turn recommended the young designer to Donald Deskey & Associates.

At Donald Deskey, Tscherny worked primarily on packaging for Procter & Gamble. In 1953 he joined George Nelson’s design office, and began designing trade advertising for the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. Working alongside Irving Harper, Tscherny made rapid progress toward the stark but witty graphics that would become his signature. He eventually became the head of the graphics department at the Nelson Office, before leaving to start his own firm in 1955.

The same year, Tscherny began a long and fruitful relationship with the School of Visual Arts, designing many of the iconic early posters for the school and teaching classes in graphic design. As his reputation grew, Tscherny’s small firm started taking assignments from increasingly larger corporations: and despite the commercial constraints and institutional impediments generally associated with those accounts, his work grew seamlessly to transition from quarter-page advertisements to comprehensive identity systems for such international corporations as the Ford Foundation, W.R. Grace & Co., Pan American Airways, General Dynamics, Johnson & Johnson, and Ernst & Whinney. Despite the range of industries—from airlines to accounting—Tscherny maintained a distinctive graphic personality expressed primarily through contrast and geometry. SVA founder Silas Rhodes once characterized it as “elegant but never chic, serious but never pretentious, disciplined but never dull,” his designs “delight the eye and revive the spirit. They shatter once and for all the myth of incompatibility between commercial enterprise and graphic integrity.” Tscherny designed the school’s current “flower” logo for its fiftieth anniversary, in 1997.

Tscherny has taught at Pratt and lectured at the Cooper Union. His work is featured in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. He is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and twice served as president of AIGA. He was awarded the AIGA medal in 1989.