Robert Runyan; Famed Designer Elevated Corporate Logos to Art

Robert Miles Runyan, graphic designer who created the “Stars in Motion” logo for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and became known as the father of modern corporate annual reports for the innovative graphics he introduced to the formerly dull tomes, has died. He was 76.

Runyan, who spent much of his life in Playa del Rey and Manhattan Beach, died July 27 at his home in Mexico, said his former partner, Grady Hinsche.

The designer’s firm, Robert Miles Runyan & Associates, which he founded in 1956 and renamed Runyan Hinsche Associates in 1991, was considered one of the most honored in the country, receiving more than 50 awards in a single year. Runyan was one of only four designers in the world selected as a Hallmark Fellow at the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1987. He was the subject of a 1983 book, “The Art of Robert Miles Runyan.”

His work also is featured in “Graphic Annual Reports 4” and “Logo World,” among other international design books, and is part of the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. When a Runyan retrospective was exhibited by New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum, one newspaper critic ranked Runyan along with Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth as “some of the best talents in design.”

Among the familiar corporate logos Runyan designed have been those of Computer Sciences Corp., Transamerica Corp., Crown Zellerbach, Teledyne, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and Times Mirror Co., which owned The Times until last year when Tribune Co. purchased it.

Runyan, who defined design as a powerful form of “wordless PR,” once described his well-known flowing CZ for the Crown Zellerbach paper company as bright red and orange because the paper industry is “colorless,” and with a gracefully curving ribbon to emulate a streaming roll of paper.

The commercial graphics artist also was popular in Japan, where he created logos for such businesses as Obunsha Publishing Co. and Mitsui Comtek. A retrospective of his work was exhibited in Tokyo in 1981.

Runyan set annual reports on a more attractive and readable course in the 1960s when he took over the task for Litton Industries. Disdaining the usual dull financial and statistical reviews, Runyan created what became the perfect model of a report touting the best elements of a company, illustrated by informative, artistic graphics. [Think pie-chart redrawn into something worth framing and hanging on the wall.]

For Litton, Runyan depicted the electronics manufacturer as a sophisticated, internationally oriented, advanced technology firm in a changing decade when Litton’s future was more promise than substance.

A Nebraska native educated at the Art Center College of Design and the former Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, Runyan was a stickler for professionalism and had no qualms about establishing his control with clients. If a chief executive chose to hire his own brother-in-law as a photographer and his uncle as a printer, he snapped, the client deserved the likely poor result and should find himself another designer.

“Hire someone who doesn’t follow trends in design but regularly breaks new ground to establish new trends and produces pleasingly shocking work,” he advised a group of Las Vegas businessmen during a 1992 speech.

It was Runyan’s “pleasingly shocking work” that landed him the plum assignment of creating the 1984 Olympics logo, the crowning project of his stellar career. He was justifiably proud, commenting rhetorically a decade after the Los Angeles Olympiad: “They don’t award that design job too often, do they?”

As colorful as his work, Runyan even advocated Olympic inclusion of his favorite sport--kite flying. That did not happen in 1984, or as yet, but Runyan himself traveled to Tahiti, Acapulco and elsewhere to fly his kites--including a 208-foot-long Chinese dragon model, a connected group of 27 stunt kites he could snap into formation with the tug of a line, and one with a 25-foot wingspan trailing 17 feet of tail with the power to lift a small child off the ground.

Describing kite flying as a beautiful, artistic, soul-satisfying and “just plain dynamite” sport, Runyan told an interviewer in 1980 that it also proved ideal for girl watching.

“I can dance the tail of a kite inches above any bikini on the beach,” he said. “Down on the boardwalk here, you always collect a crowd . . . the surfers, the skate boarders, the bicyclists and roller skaters all stop to watch.”

Inadvertently, Runyan also sparked an architectural trend in Manhattan Beach a couple of decades ago when he converted what he described as “the hokiest one-story typical plaster box that you could imagine” into a two-story, antique-filled Victorian showplace a block from the surf.

“I had no intention of starting a trend,” the designing homeowner told The Times a few years after he did just that. “What I had in mind was satisfying my own aesthetic desires. But I think [additional Victorians] look great and I’m greatly encouraged to see it happen.”

Runyan, who once advised Las Vegas businessmen to abandon their suits and ties for casual clothes to sell their city as a combination work-play destination, dressed as creatively as he talked. The burly ex-Marine characteristically wore--even to meetings with the “suits” who hired him--open-collared (often pink) shirts, jeans and cowboy hat and boots.

The designer is survived by his wife, Claudette; two daughters, Tevis and Kimberly; and a grandson.