Seymour Robins

Seymour Robins "Rob" LENOX Seymour "Rob" Robins, for sixty years a leading graphic and industrial designer whose work is included in the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt Museum, died on April 10 in his home in Lenox. He was 97 years old; death was from natural causes.Born Seymour Rabinowitz in Hamilton, Ontario on June 5, 1913, Robins moved with his family to Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1924. On graduation from high school, he moved directly into graphic design. He enlisted in the Army in 1942 and was assigned as art-director/designer, first for the Guide to the AAF manual, then for Air Force magazine. Released from the Army, he was hired by David O. Selznick Studios; after two years Robins returned to New York, opening a design practice providing logo and corporate identification, package design, posters, corporate literature and exhibition design for a roster of clients that included Diamond International, AT&T, Atlantic Refining, General Mills, General Foods, Phillip Morris, and Kimberly Clark. Robins' interest in visual perception led to a thirty-five year involvement with the field, including the design of the Princeton Perception Design Center. Another area in which Robins was a trailblazer was the development of interlocking paper forms as sculpture. He created hundreds of these works over a forty-five year period. In 1989 Robins was sent to the Kingdom of Lesotho by the UN; his brief was to study native crafts and businesses and develop a program guiding product improvement. In 1970 Robins relocated his design practice to the Berkshires, to a renovated barn which had been his personal design project. He became an EMT for the Southern Berkshire Volunteer Ambulance Squad and served on the squad for twenty years. When, in the late 1990s, Robins lost his sight to Macular Degeneration, he turned his focus to writing essays on perception. Robins was married three times; the first two marriages ended in divorce. He married Barbara George in 1953; the marriage continued until her death in 1986. He is survived by a daughter, Madeleine, a writer; and by his son Clement, who like his father is an artist with a strong interest in type design. He has two granddaughters, three grandsons, and four great-grandchildren.