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url: /design-history/seymour-chwast/
title: "Seymour Chwast | Push Pin Studios, End Bad Breath, Anti-War Design | TGDS"
template: design-history
priority: 3
wordCount: 1935
lastModified: 2026-06-22T06:00:34.123Z
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site: "The Graphic Design School"
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---

# Seymour Chwast | Push Pin Studios, End Bad Breath, Anti-War Design | TGDS

Design history · 1960s Seymour Chwast The co-founder of Push Pin Studios who turned wit, illustration and outrage into one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century American graphic design. Seymour Chwast (born 1931) co-founded Push Pin Studios in 1954 with Milton Glaser, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins, and spent the following decades proving that illustration, historical reference and political conviction were not obstacles to serious graphic design — they were its substance. His anti-Vietnam posters, the long-running Push Pin Graphic periodical, and more than forty illustrated books form the body of a career still active into his nineties. Seymour Chwast in his studio. · Photo credit Seymour Chwast Archive. CC BY-SA 4.0. Key facts Born 18 August 1931, The Bronx, New York Nationality American Era American mid-century · illustration · editorial design · anti-war graphic activism Studios Push Pin Studios (co-founder, 1954) · The Pushpin Group (principal, 1974–) Known for Push Pin Studios (1954) · The Push Pin Graphic (1957–) · End Bad Breath poster (1967) · War Is Good Business poster (1967) Archive MoMA, New York · Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum · Philadelphia Museum of Art · Library of Congress Iconic works Push Pin Almanack 1953 Before Push Pin Studios existed as a studio, Chwast, Ruffins and Sorel produced the Push Pin Almanack as a self-promotional mailer from their Cooper Union lodgings. Modelled on early American farmers' almanacs, it combined facts, ephemera and hand-drawn woodcut illustration in a small folded format. The Almanack ran to fifteen issues and brought in enough commissions that the four Cooper graduates decided to leave their day jobs and formalise as a studio in 1954. Cooper Hewitt holds multiple copies in its permanent collection. Push Pin Almanack, No. 10, May–June 1954. Offset lithograph. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, accession 1998-74-1. · Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser and Edward Sorel / Push Pin Studios, 1954. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (accession 1998-74-1). Statutory educational licence. · AU statutory The Push Pin Graphic 1957 Launched in 1957 as a free promotional mailer to art directors and editors, The Push Pin Graphic grew from a modest broadsheet into an ambitious design periodical that ran for eighty-six issues over twenty-three years. Chwast edited and contributed illustration throughout its run. The Graphic had no advertising, no paying subscribers and no editorial brief beyond what Push Pin chose to explore — Victorian typography, Art Nouveau revival, satire, and the full range of historical styles the studio mined and reworked. Sent to three thousand recipients at its peak, it became one of the most influential design publications of the era without ever setting out to be one. The Push Pin Monthly Graphic, No. 5, June 1957. Push Pin Studios. · Seymour Chwast / Push Pin Studios, 1957. Statutory educational licence. · AU statutory End Bad Breath 1967 Made in response to the United States bombing of Hanoi during the Vietnam War, this poster shows a caricature of Uncle Sam — his face green, his expression fixed in an exaggerated open-mouthed grimace — with the bombing campaign visible inside his mouth. The slogan "End Bad Breath" borrows the language of American toothpaste advertising to make a point about foreign policy. The blue layer was printed as a woodcut; the remaining colours were added through photo-offset. MoMA holds the work in its permanent collection (accession 355.1969), donated by Push Pin Studios. Chwast described the aim simply: "Wit is a way to get people to lower their guard so you can slip the message in." End Bad Breath, 1967. Offset lithograph with woodcut, 94 × 61 cm. MoMA accession 355.1969. · Seymour Chwast / Push Pin Studios, 1967. Museum of Modern Art, New York (acc. 355.1969), gift of Push Pin Studios. Statutory educational licence. · AU statutory War Is Good Business / Invest Your Son 1967 Chwast's companion anti-war poster transforms a slogan circulating in the peace movement into a cold corporate pitch. Where End Bad Breath used visual satire and a familiar advertising voice, War Is Good Business operates through bluntness: the phrase does the work, set in bold type against a simple ground. Together the two posters demonstrate Chwast's range as a political designer — the warm grotesque alongside the cold poster — and established him as the most committed anti-war voice among the Push Pin generation. War Is Good Business / Invest Your Son, 1967. Seymour Chwast / Push Pin Studios. Statutory educational licence. · AU statutory Kiss Kiss Bang Bang — book jacket 1968 Chwast's jacket design for the Pauline Kael film criticism collection published by Atlantic–Little, Brown is a concise example of Push Pin Studios' approach to book-cover work in the late 1960s: flat colour, comic-strip clarity, and lettering drawn by hand rather than set in type. The bold title treatment and the small illustrated figure are characteristic of the studio's output during its most productive decade. The cover was published without a copyright notice, placing it in the public domain in the United States, and is held in Wikimedia Commons. Chwast designed typefaces as an extension of the same sensibility — the Artone face (1964, Photo Lettering Inc.) grew from a single letterform drawn for a Push Pin client; Filmsense and Blimp followed in 1970. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Pauline Kael. Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1968. Jacket design by Seymour Chwast. · Seymour Chwast / Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1968. Published without copyright notice; public domain in the United States. Source — Wikimedia Commons. · Public domain 01 Biography Seymour Chwast was born in the Bronx on 18 August 1931. He grew up in Brooklyn, where art teacher Leon Friend at Abraham Lincoln High School introduced him to the possibilities of graphic design. He enrolled at Cooper Union in 1948 and graduated with a BFA in 1951. At Cooper he met Milton Glaser, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins — the four people with whom he would shortly change the direction of American graphic design. After graduation Chwast worked briefly at the New York Times and at Esquire. In 1953, still freelancing, he and Ruffins and Sorel began producing the Push Pin Almanack — a small folded mailer modelled on early American almanacs, combining woodcut illustration, hand-lettering and deadpan facts. It brought in enough work that in 1954 the group formalised as Push Pin Studios, with Glaser joining from a Fulbright fellowship in Bologna. Push Pin operated as a deliberate counterweight to the European modernism arriving in New York through Unimark, Vignelli and the International Style. Where the modernists insisted on Helvetica and the grid, Push Pin drew from Art Nouveau, Victorian printed ephemera, comic illustration and folk art. The Push Pin Graphic, launched in 1957, sent that vocabulary directly to three thousand art directors and editors for free. It ran to eighty-six issues over twenty-three years and became one of the most influential design publications without ever having a subscriber or an advertiser. In 1970 the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs mounted “The Push Pin Style” — the first time the museum had ever exhibited graphic design. The show travelled through Europe and Japan. Glaser left the studio in 1974 to establish his own practice; Chwast retained it, renaming it The Pushpin Group. Chwast’s political work ran alongside the commercial output throughout his career. His anti-Vietnam War posters — End Bad Breath (1967) and War Is Good Business / Invest Your Son (1967) — are among the most reproduced American protest graphics of the twentieth century. He continued producing anti-war work through the Gulf War, Iraq, and beyond, and in 2014 published a book-length survey of five thousand years of human conflict as illustrated broadsheet. He was awarded the AIGA Medal in 1985, inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame in 1983, and named an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry in 2005. In 2023 the Cooper Hewitt awarded him its National Design Award for Design Visionary. He continues to work in New York City. 02 Push Pin Studios Push Pin Studios operated from 1954 to the present under various names, but its decisive period ran from its founding through to Milton Glaser’s departure in 1974. During those two decades the studio produced posters, book jackets, magazine covers, corporate advertising and the Push Pin Graphic — a promotional periodical that looked unlike anything else being produced in American design at the time. The studio’s approach was explicitly historicist. Chwast and Glaser understood that the canon of print design from the fifteenth century onwards offered a resource that the International Style had largely discarded as ornament. Victorian woodtype, Art Nouveau letterforms, the American dime-novel cover, the French affiche — all of it was available for reworking. The result was not pastiche. It was a methodology: take a historical visual language, understand its internal logic, and apply that logic to a contemporary problem. The 1970 Louvre exhibition made the argument internationally. A studio that had been sending free mailers to art directors in New York since 1957 was now exhibited in Paris as a cultural phenomenon. The show demonstrated that American graphic design could be something other than corporate Swiss modernism — that illustration, wit and historical literacy were not obstacles to design credibility but its source. “We were against the numbing rigidity of modernism and the rote sentimental realism of commercial illustration.” — Push Pin Studios Seymour Chwast co-founded Push Pin Studios alongside Milton Glaser, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins. The two men directed the studio for two decades and remain the central figures of its legacy. Glaser’s page covers his independent trajectory; Chwast’s is the story of what Push Pin became after 1974 — smaller, more focused, and still producing work in the same spirit. 03 Anti-war design Chwast used the political poster throughout his career with a consistency that distinguished him from designers who engaged with protest work episodically. He began making anti-war images in 1957 and continued through Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan. His two landmark Vietnam pieces — End Bad Breath (1967) and War Is Good Business / Invest Your Son (1967) — work through different registers. End Bad Breath borrows the syntax of American toothpaste advertising and loads it with a grotesque image: Uncle Sam’s open mouth contains the bombing of Hanoi. War Is Good Business operates through the cold logic of the slogan itself, presented without illustration, as corporate copy. Both posters depend on the viewer’s familiarity with American commercial language; both use that familiarity to create a moment of recognition and discomfort. Chwast’s explanation of his method was direct: “Wit is a way to get people to lower their guard so you can slip the message in.” The End Bad Breath poster is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, the Imperial War Museum and several other institutions. It is one of the best-documented examples of American graphic design as political speech. Learn at TGDS Chwast’s career demonstrates that illustration and design are not separate disciplines — and that a strong visual point of view is more durable than any particular style. We teach this integration across our courses: Courses Certificate IV in Design (CUA40725) — covers typography, visual communication, illustration fundamentals and the history of graphic design practice. Intensive Foundation Course — 11 modules covering design thinking, drawing, typography and visual storytelling. Related movements & people Milton Glaser Paul Rand Herb Lubalin George Lois Further reading Books Seymour Chwast and Steven Heller, The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration (Chronicle Books, 2004). Online Seymour Chwast on Wikipedia. Seymour Chwast Archive. MoMA — Seymour Chwast in the collection. Cooper Hewitt — Seymour Chwast biography. Official website seymourchwastart.comSeymour Chwast — official website (seymourchwastart.com).