Where a Logo Came From

Yesterday I learned where the Blue Cross logo, and even the name, came from. 

The story started with a this, in the Pioneer Press, which told of two time capsules recently discovered in the headquarters of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, which is located in Eagan, a suburb of Saint Paul.

I've never thought a lot about BCBS: it's one of those parts of the health care world in the U.S. that seems like it has always been around, but of course that's not true. The various BCBS's around the country are state-based; their Wikipedia page is very confusing, with some for-profit, some nonprofit, and some hard to understand. 

Despite what the Wikipedia says about some guy in Texas, Minnesota claims it was first to create a prepaid health care network. It was in 1933, when seven hospitals formed the Minnesota Hospital Services Association. Members paid $.75 a month and in return could get 21 days of hospital care per year.

The next year, 1934, they hired Joseph Binder — an Austrian artist and poster designer who had recently begun moving his practice to the U.S., including lecturing at the Minneapolis School of Art — to create a poster for the MHSA. This is what he created:



According to a blog post on the Blue Cross Minnesota site, that's a "blue Geneva cross" on the nurse's sleeve and the "[p]osters were placed on bulletin boards in workplaces across the city, leading more people to sign up for the insurance plan with the 'blue cross.'"

"The name stuck," as the Pioneer Press story put it, and the symbol was adopted by the network of other hospital associations that had sprung up nationwide in 1939.

It's funny that I had to look pretty hard to find an image of that poster. Searching the name Joseph Binder and the phrase "blue cross," for instance, does not turn up an image of it. What I have above is a screen-grab from a video in the Blue Cross blog post. There don't appear to be any images of the actual poster on any of the Joseph Binder-related sites that exist.

Binder is best-known for this poster:



He is overshadowed in graphic design history by his fellow Europeans of the pre-war period (A.M Cassandre, Lucian Bernhard, E. McKnight Kauffer, among others). He didn't even have a Wikipedia page as late as 2016.

He finally got a few articles from graphic designer/historian Steven Heller after that, though. I particularly liked this one.



Binder was a Cubist painter before he was a designer and illustrator, and he continued painting throughout his life. But he made his living from posters.

Heller quotes an American Artist article from 1944 about Binder's work:

Binder usually reduces naturalistic expressions to the minimum, his idea being that the greater the simplification … the quicker the recognition of the poster’s intention and the more powerful its impact.

In a different article, Heller quotes Binder himself:

“the artist should contribute to the development of the modern style instead of indulging in realistic representation of past periods and vain attempts to imitate the works of former times.” He believed that the new industrial style was descended from painting, but its function was “to convey the essence of the advertising message in the shortest and most impressive way. … It is the artist’s task to transfer the clear and constructive shape of the objects as he sees them to the two-dimensional surface. … Realism should be left to photography. The artist must not compete with the camera. … Therefore the artist must abandon realistic representation and take up styling.” ... Binder also believed that color was an important aspect of styling, and taught his students that the artist must “surpass the optical effects of nature with a limited number of colors.”

Binder published a book call Colour in Advertising (1934) that looks very interesting, but appears to be hard to get ahold of. 

I wonder if they have a copy in the University of Minnesota library, or at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.