Honeywell animals was: Chips as jewelry

On 9/13/10 4:29 PM, Al Kossow wrote: article in Datamation, Jul, 78: Famed for His Menagerie Joe Veno is a very peripheral character in this industry. He wouldn't know a cpu from a transistor; to him, DBM looks like a misprinted logo. Joe Veno is an artist, an independent commercial illustrator, known for his playful and loose style, a cartoonist's spirit that seems more germane to the muppet characters of Sesame Street than the corporate symbols of a mainframe manufacturer. Yet Joe and Honeywell have gotten along well. Veno is the artisan who has created most of Honeywell's acclaimed animal menagerie, those homey creatures sculpted of multicolored diodes and widgets that have danced through HIS promo ads and added panda-bear friendliness to the Honeywell booth at innumerable trade shows. The 39-year-old Veno works in a small studio on stately Commonwealth Avenue in Boston's Back Bay that is cluttered with paper sculptures, cartoon drawings, posters, and children's games that Veno designed or has in process. A small storage room to the rear is cluttered with boxes of tiny electronic components from Honeywell warehouses. "I still don't know what these parts are," the bush-mustached Veno admits." "I'm embarrassed to say it after all these years, but to me they're just color and form elements." When he picks up a new commission Veno visits a local HIS plant and wanders through the warehouse with a shopping cart. "It's always kind of a crazy scene, going through a factory looking for pretty pieces of things," he laughs. "Mostly I get things out of the bins for rejected parts, but in some of the later plexiglass creatures we used some very expensIve gold-plated components. But when I'm going through the factory, all these guys are coming up suggesting I use this little thing, pointing out some gadget with a particular color-wanting me to use the pieces they work with." Veno has been working on Honeywell assignments for "six or" seven years," and although he has not been the only artist to have done HIS animals~five or six were involved in the early years, most notably Red Bank, N.J., sculptor" Jack Ridder--Veno's work so dominates the menagerie in both number and style that he is generally identified as the series creator. Yet advertising art, like theater, is a collective art: the style and form are largely Veno's, but the subject and concept are dictated by HIS ad men at Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (B80&0) "and Honeywell's director of advertising, Morey? Depman. Veno justly and generously shares credit. If it were not for the Boston office of 13BO&O, he would have stayed with his staple work, illustrating children's books and standard copy layouts, and creating games and various displays for Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Veno did a kooky paper sculpture for a Playboy magazine layout that caught the eye of a BBD&O art director who first asked him to design a skunk for the Honeywell series then underway. "I was rather hesitant to get into it," said Veno, "I'd never thought of myself as a sculptor; I was really just playing around with paper sculpture. But I did it and they liked it. It was cute, but not too sturdy. I had shaped the form with cardboard, and then glued the little pieces to it. I went from cardboard to using rigid polyurethane, big blocks that I could actually chisel and cut into." The polyurethane creatures Veno created over the years--the Honeywell camel, lion, fish, eagles, etc.-became the most prominent members of the HIS funny farm. While other artists who had earlier tried their hand had sculpted only a part of the animal, the angle of the head and body n~eded for a given camera angle (Ridder's bull's head is perhaps the most memorable example), Veno created full-bodied creatures, offering the ad designer the luxury of choosing a camera angle (or several) with the completed work before himand leaving Honeywell with a standalone menagerie that could tour for display. Last year Veno was asked to redesign the blocky style used in most of the series, to bring in a new, more modern flair. Inspired by Star Wars, he came up with an elaborate plexiglass design; futurist sculptures that capture life in a clear plastic form, and only display computer parts within. "I was really pleased with them. You can look through and around them; there is little of the solid mass that the earlier animals had. I did a series of three: a tiger, a fox, and the ram: They had movable limbs and eyes that lit up. Crazy! But it was fun, a real challenge." 'Those might be the last of the animals for a while," he added with an impish laugh. "Honeywell seems to think we went too far, but I really like those the best. In my judgment, the ram was the best of what I did. In fact, I'd love to have that one back .. " Com-_ mercially, I don't know, but critically, it got rave reviews." Feb, 1979 WILL THE REAL MR. RINDER PLEASE STAND UP? . I found your "People" story on Joe Veno (July, p. 39) very interesting, but also inaccurate on several counts. The name of the' notable sculptor of most of the early Honeywell animals is Jack Rindner (not Ridder). You also misspelled the name of Honeywell's director of advertising-Morey Dettman (not Depman). Most significant is your attribution of the new plexiglass design to Veno. The lion which appeared in January 1977 is Jack Rinder's, reflecting a creative use of curved plexiglass in response to BBD & O's request that he help them change the approach to the Honeywell series. ALAN B. SALISBURY Eatontown, New Jersey