Yale School of Art Graduate Program: 1989–1990 (Paul Rand)

In 1973, Bell Labs researchers Leon D. Harmon and Béla Julesz published “Masking in Visual Recognition: Effects of Two-Dimensional Visual Noise” in the journal Science. It was a foundational perception study that investigated how the human visual system processes and recognizes degraded images. By digitally reducing a portrait of Abraham Lincoln into a coarse grid of gray-tone blocks, the authors demonstrated that high-frequency noise from sharp block edges actively "masks" the recognizable low-frequency features of a face, and that blurring the image—or stepping back—oddly restores recognizability by filtering out that structural visual noise. Paul Rand must have been a Science subscriber, because he put those ideas into practice for this flier to promote Yale’s graduate program. Also nice is that it lists all the people who were associated with and teaching at the time. It was good to see the name of Herb Fox on there. He was the first printer we ever worked for.