Playboy art director who created bunny logo dies at 93

CHICAGO: Magazine dressmaker Art Paul, who created Playboy's famous tuxedoed bunny head logo, has died. He was once 93.
Paul died of pneumonia on Saturday at a Chicago-area medical institution, in keeping with his spouse, Suzanne Seed. Paul was once a contract illustrator when he got to work with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner as the magazine's first employee within the 1950s. He has said he crafted the bunny logo in about an hour. Paul additionally employed artists to create illustrations for Playboy, together with Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol and Shel Silverstein.

Paul was once the magazine's artwork director till he retired in 1982.

"We didn't think it would be such a success right from the beginning, just Hefner and I putting it together," Mr. Paul told the Chicago Sun-Times. "Hef was kind to me. I think I gave him a lot. He gave me a lot."

Paul was once born in Chicago on Jan. 18, 1925, and studied on scholarship on the School of the Art Institute of Chicago sooner than serving in World War II with the Army Air Corps. He returned to Chicago after the battle and collected studies on the Institute of Design on the Illinois Institute of Technology.

AIGA, the pro association for design, says it's a "testament to Paul's design acumen" that the Playboy bunny logo is universally recognized even without the Playboy identify.

"Art deserves the credit for the illustrator's liberation," Christie Hefner, daughter of Hugh Hefner and former chairman and CEO of Playboy, has said. "He helped redefine the whole notion of commercial art as being able to be as well-regarded and legitimate as high art."

After his retirement he endured working, together with educating and designing for magazines, advertising, tv and picture. He spent the decade drawing and painting. He was once a member of the Art Directors Hall of Fame and gained many awards.

Seed said he was once drawing till a few month in the past, regardless of unsteady palms and imaginative and prescient problems.

"He would say to me, `You should see what I see,"' Seed told the Chicago Tribune.

Jennifer Hou Kwong, who is completing a documentary film concerning the artist known as "Art of Playboy," said Paul "changed the landscape of magazine design and layout and illustration."

Paul's biography at the AIGA web site quotes the artist as pronouncing, "Good design principles should apply to bubble gum wrappers as well as museum posters."