2021 AIGA Medalist: Thomas Miller

Miller would find a home at the Goldsholl Associates. He was among the first designers hired by Morton and Millie Goldsholl when they formed their own studio in 1955. Graduates of Chicago’s School of Design and students of Hungarian émigré László Moholy-Nagy, the Goldsholls were for Miller a living connection to the vanguard of modern design. With the Goldsholls, Miller participated in the reconstruction of one corner of the design industry. The Jewish American Goldsholls would not only espouse Moholy-Nagy’s socially egalitarian design philosophy but also sought to re-create its egalitarian workplace where white Americans, African Americans, Japanese Americans—and men and women—worked together as equals. Miller’s daughter, Joyce Miller-Bean, remembered the Goldsholl studio as an “international family.” Co-workers were welcome friends at the Millers’ home in Morgan Park, and the Millers were frequent guests at the Goldsholls’ Highland Park home. In many respects, Miller’s cosmopolitan career and social life was a model for what was then called America’s Second Reconstruction: the Civil Rights Movement that during Miller’s career daringly challenged the white power structures that segregated both the Jim Crow South and the putatively liberal professions in the North.

For Miller, the reconstruction of the world extended to the aesthetics of design itself. Working the Motorola account in 1955, Miller particularly admired how the team rendered the “M” as an oscilloscope wavelength, an abstraction that distilled the complexity of the communications industry into its most essential form. Miller applied these principles to the 7Up redesign in 1975. Launched in 1929, 7Up was first marketed as a tonic for an ailing stomach. By the 1950s, advertisements were hokey: model consumers drinking 7Up at picnics, in living rooms, soda shops, and other spaces of bourgeois life. Miller overhauled the brand almost entirely. Like the Motorola “M,” Goldsholl's “see the light” campaign elevated the commodity—citrus-flavored carbonated sugar water—to a higher essence: the effervescent bubbles as dots of light. Rather than address a particular “White” or “Black” market, Miller’s redesign envisioned the consumer marketplace on the most universal and egalitarian terms: as a drink for everyone, in any place at any time, in a graphic style far more sophisticated than the contemporaneous “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” campaign. The new 7Up appeared everywhere, on bottles and cans, in magazines and store displays, and won Miller awards and professional recognition.

Miller’s commitment to the egalitarian ideals of the Civil Rights Movement and of modern design were lifelong. When Miller retired from Goldsholl, he returned to art and to civil rights activism. In the late 1980s, the NAACP commissioned Miller to produce a plaque honoring the accomplishments of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, who had been elected in 1983 and died suddenly during his second term in 1987. Washington’s election greatly impressed Miller. When artist Margaret Burroughs commissioned him to design the murals for the DuSable Museum, which were installed in the museum lobby in 1995, he made the mayor a central figure, his portrait framed by Chicago’s iconic Water Tower and the Hancock skyscraper along with emblems of interracial comity. The mural was not only an expression of Miller’s politics but also a consummation of his design career. Miller built his mosaics out of translucent plastic squares made from egg crate light diffusers, the mesh squares that filter light from overhead fluorescent bulbs common in late-twentieth-century workplaces. Harkening back to his army days, Miller sourced the material from offices around the city and broke them down with the help of his children. He handpainted each tile—thousands of them—and assembled them into a pre-planned grid. At once homespun and carefully executed, Miller’s mosaics refracted the “light” of his 7Up campaign to envision a reconstructed Chicago. Each tile had to be placed at a precise angle, he explained, “to catch the light.”