In the world of graphic design, Steven Heller is as much an icon as an anomaly. Not only is he a designer with 33 years experience as art director of The New York Times under his belt. He’s also one of the profession’s most respected critic-historians, the co-chair and co-founder of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and author of some 100 books on design and pop culture. When his latest book, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-century Totalitarian State (Phaidon), hit shelves, it cemented his reputation as a great design thinker, and he was one of the marquee speakers at Toronto’s Designthinkers conference.

As expected, Heller talked about his book, which looks at the last century’s biggest self-branding dictators – Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and Stalin. He described how the Nazis, fascists, cultural revolutionaries and Soviets spent as much time art-directing their own image as they did running their countries (Mussolini being the exception, having spent almost all his time finessing the Fascist message rather than actually creating or executing
policy). Party posters often made use of avant-garde design; it turns out the Nazis favoured the Bauhaus style at first, before persecuting its adherents. Mussolini’s “Du-Ce”, a poster treatment of his role as Il Duce, became something of a “typographic chant”; while the Führer’s infamous moustache was akin to a logo. Whatever the dictatorship, its message made its way into textbooks, youth groups, letterheads, not to mention the armbands and
banners that permeated all visual life. The most fascinating aspect of Heller’s talk was his observation of how the regimes borne out of socialism – Mao’s China and Lenin’s Russia –
initially rejected iconography, viewing it as a vestige of imperialism, a type of mind control they had overthrown. But they soon realized they could not rule – with an iron fist – without an instantly recognizable image.
 
The only thing missing from Heller’s talk was a connection to today's most effective branding. He started his lecture comparing corporate logos – like Mr. Clean and McDonald’s – with the iconography of his iron men, but never returned to the comparison. How does state-issued mind control compare to corporate message-making? Perhaps Naomi Klein (No Logo) already answered that question.