The ‘father of Hong Kong design’ Henry Steiner on creating the HSBC logo, Standard Chartered banknotes
Henry Steiner, who arrived in Hong Kong on a nine-month contract and never left, says he was the first person in the city to call himself a graphic designer
Ticket to America: I was born in Vienna, in 1934. My father was a dentist, my mother was a seamstress, and we lived in Baden bei Wien, a spa town southwest of Vienna. I had a pleasant enough early childhood, but in 1938 came the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.
My mother was very concerned and started searching desperately for a way to get us out of Austria. She heard about an American-Austrian Hollywood film producer who summered in Baden and knocked on his door and said she wanted an affidavit from him to go to the States. He said he’d received many similar requests. She pulled out a picture of me and said, “If not for me, then for my son.” He said, “How can I refuse this little Chinese boy?”
So, that was how we got out. We went by ship to New York and arrived in 1939. My father found it difficult to adjust to life in New York. He ended up as a dental mechanic, making dentures, and my mother remarried.
Thought provoking: For my bar mitzvah, I was given a book called Adventures in Time and Space and that got me interested in science fiction, which was wonderful escapism. I went to Stuyvesant High School and from early on began drawing caricatures and illustrations. When it came time to decide what to study at college, I was torn between writing and illustration, but decided it was easier for me to draw one picture than write 1,000 words, so I went in that direction.
I went to Hunter College, which had a very good art department. When it came time to graduate, the Hungarian printmaking teacher Gabor Peterdi asked me what I most enjoyed in college. I told him it was the extracurricular stuff, being art editor of the student magazine and yearbook, and I’d also written a play. He told me Yale University had started a design department and asked if I’d like to go and study graphic design. I said, “Yes, sure, but what’s graphic design?” He said it was printing, reproduction, typography – all the things I had been interested in.
