Honorary UCDA member McRay Magleby—pictured here during the 1979 UCDA Design Awards Show—worked for the Graphic Communications department at Brigham Young University for 26 years, winning more than 160 awards (many of them series) in the UCDA Design Awards.
In 1965, fresh out of the University of Utah’s graphic design program, I wondered if I was doing the right thing by staying in Utah to pursue my career. While my contemporaries set out for the big design cities on the two coasts, I stayed behind, primarily so I could spend my spare time enjoying the outdoor lifestyle that meant so much to me while living in Utah.
For a long time I thought I’d made a big mistake. While I was starting my career at design studios in Salt Lake City, all my friends had moved to New York and their work was starting to appear in the national magazines.
Around that time, Brigham Young University decided to create its own in-house art department. Because BYU is isolated, the people there had a difficult time producing their work and often relied on student artists. Ernest L. Wilkinson, the president of the university at that time, contacted an art director from Los Angeles and offered him a job to start a Graphic Communications department at BYU. He took the job and came to Utah.
He did a few things I really appreciate. One was telling the printers that they weren’t doing a good job. In fact, he insisted that they start doing good quality printing. The printers were used to getting by with the least amount of work, so he got the reputation for being an SOB and a hard person to work with. Finally, the printers refused to work with him anymore and the administration decided that they needed to hire another art director. They sent about a hundred letters, and I got one of them. I carefully put together my portfolio and set up an interview with the director of the press, who had a background in English and knew nothing about graphics. I went in there with my portfolio and kept giving it to him to look at, but he never opened the cover. As it turned out, what they were really looking for was some kind of milk-toast, wimpy guy who wouldn’t give the printers a bad time. I guess they thought I was milk toasty enough, so they gave me the job.
Left: McRay Magleby, 1987. Center and right: Two of a series of registration posters for Brigham Young University. These silkscreened posters were designed by McRay Magleby.
When I first came to BYU, I was impatient and wanted to start entering my work in shows. It was a big disappointment to me to spend weeks on a project only to have it botched in the printing. That’s why we set up our silk screening department—so that we could have full control over at least one aspect of our jobs. The silk screened posters were the thing that put us on the map, as far as getting into the national shows such as CASE, Communication Arts, Graphis, Print, and UCDA.
The good thing about silk screen printing is that we could print low quantities. On campus there were only about 100 places to hang posters, so we would usually print 100 posters for the client and overrun 50 to 100. Then we would try to sell those remaining posters from a mail-order catalog through our department. The idea was to recoup some of the costs we might have incurred while making the poster that we may not have been able to bill to the client due to a limited budget. We created posters for concerts, plays, sports, special events recruitment, and to inform students of class registration deadlines.
The registration posters were what got me out of bed every morning and to work because I was most excited about that part of my job, but there was another part of the job that I really liked which we called catalog inserts.
They were little 16-page brochures that were inserted in the general catalog and the subject was completely up to myself and a writer, co-worker named Norm Darais. We used to sit down and brainstorm about what subject to do the insert on and we could choose anything we wanted; it just needed to be visually interesting. We’d research the topic and find an expert at the university to help us write the text and we had total control.
Left: McRay Magleby (center) reviews UCDA Design Awards entries with fellow judges Paula Scher (left) and Murray Tinkleman (right), 1987. Right: The UCDA Design Awards Show in Boston, Massachusetts, 1984.
The posters and the catalog inserts were really the fun part of my job. We also did all the recruiting materials and book design, but my first love was the posters. The large format allowed for creativity. Posters also required a careful integration of concept, copy, and art. For this reason, Norm and I worked together on these projects. We’d often take mid-morning breaks to brainstorm ideas. Typically, we’d flounder a good deal at first while entertaining different possibilities. Sometimes the best ideas are spontaneous, natural and fresh—even a bit “off the wall.” At other times the first things that come to mind were predictable and, consequently, not as creative.
People around the nation comment on how well Norm and I worked together. On many campuses, writers and designers are at odds, exhibiting ego, condescension, blindness, and insensitivity, but here we conceptualized together from the start and engaged in a dynamic give-and-take process. By the time I left BYU, we had done about a thousand posters. Approximately 300 have been selected for inclusion in a catalog that is currently being compiled, and many of them are now part of the permanent UCDA collection.
The 1980s was our most productive decade as far as poster output, and many are reproduced in this publication of the UCDA Design Collection with select images from 1980-1989. Designing posters for BYU was the primary reason I stayed for 26 years. Every day was fun.
Wit and Vision: The Creative Collaboration of McRay Magleby and Norm Darais
Brigham Young University Museum of Art
March 3-August 26, 2023
Over the course of two decades, BYU hosted the partnership of a match made in heaven. In 1978, graphic designer McRay "Mac" Magleby, best known for iconic logos for the 2002 Olympics and Young Women's torch, began working with writer Norm Darais on a series of posters for the BYU Registration Department. Soon their creations proved so popular that students began stealing them from walls across campus to decorate their dorms and apartments.
In this exhibition, you'll see not only original editions of Magleby's most iconic images, but the collaborative efforts of this dynamic duo to educate and delight the campus community. From myths and monsters to shoes and ships, with bugs and biplanes and bicycles to boot, you'll be surprised to see how, with a perfect design and inspired text, even the most ordinary subjects become priceless works of art.
Join McRay Magleby in the UCDA Design Collection by entering and winning your best work in the UCDA Design Awards!
Enter at: https://www.ucda.com/designawards