Art Paul, creator of Playboy’s iconic bunny logo, dead at 93

Art Paul, the founding art director of Playboy magazine who created the familiar bunny logo that became the symbol of Hugh Hefner’s publishing and entertainment empire and who exerted a lasting influence on magazine design, died April 28 at a hospital in Chicago. He was 93.

The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Suzanne Seed.

Hefner was developing his idea for a new men’s magazine in 1953 when he approached Paul, then working as a freelance illustrator and designer in Chicago. Hefner sought a clean, modern design for the magazine that he wanted to call Stag Party.

When another men’s publication, Stag, sent a cease-and-desist letter, Hefner was forced to come up with another name, and Playboy was born. Paul designed the first cover, a photograph of Marilyn Monroe taken during a parade as she waved to the crowd.

“Art Paul managed to create a striking black-and-white cover design with a red logo,” Hefner wrote in Playboy in 1994. “This was just the first example of how Art took ordinary pictures and, through inventive design and the addition of illustrative details, made the magazine and its covers innovative and interesting.”

Paul, the first person hired by Hefner at Playboy, designed the magazine’s table of contents, articles, regular features – and the magazine’s first nude photo, an image of Monroe on a red satin sheet. (“I had nothing on but the radio,” she later quipped.)

When Hefner, who died last year, decided the magazine needed a recognisable symbol, like The New Yorker’s top-hatted Eustace Tilley or Esquire’s mustachioed “Esky,” he suggested the idea of a rabbit. Paul swiftly sketched the bunny head in profile, with a jaunty bow tie.