Georg Olden

George Elliott Olden (November 13, 1920 – February 25, 1975) was an American graphic designer who worked in television and advertising. Working at CBS, Olden helped to create the visual identities of shows such as Gunsmoke, I love Lucy, and Lassie. In 1963, Olden became the first African-American to design a postage stamp, creating a design commemorating the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Olden was an AIGA medal-winning graphic designer, and a Japanese magazine, Idea, once listed him among the top fifteen designers in the United States. Early life George Elliot Olden was born to James Clarence Olden and Sylvia Ward Olden in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 13, 1920, as the grandson of a slave and the son of a Baptist preacher. Shortly after his birth, his family relocated to Washington D.C., where his father served as minister to Plymouth Congregational Church. In 1933, after becoming increasingly politically active, Olden's father left his family in order to dedicate himself entirely to the civil rights movement. In youth he attended Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., one of the U.S.'s first public high schools for African American students, and then went on to study at Virginia State College. Career Olden dropped out of college after the attack on Pearl Harbor to work as a graphic designer for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA. While working at the OSS, Olden published cartoons in National CIO News, The New Yorker, and Esquire and designed posters promoting wartime conservation efforts. Olden worked for some of America's leading artists, designers and writers and made contacts that opened significant professional opportunities after the war. When the war ended in 1945, the head of the OSS communications division, Colonel Lawrence W. Lowman, who in civilian life became Vice President of CBS's television division, was searching for someone who "had a full grasp of the whole range of commercial-art techniques." He found Olden, and from a one-man operation involved with six programs a week, Olden eventually headed a staff of 14 in charge of 60 weekly shows. When he joined the network in 1945, there were 16,000 television sets in the entire nation. By the time he left the network in 1960, there were 85 million sets, one for every two Americans. During his time at OSS, Olden dropped the second "e" from his first name as a way to make himself more noticeable to magazine editors.