Paul Giambarba (1928 - 2023)

Paul F. Giambarba died peacefully at his home in Mashpee, MA on May 1, 2023, surrounded by his family’s love, after a brief illness.

Paul Giambarba was born in Boston on October 15, 1928 to Leopoldo and Grace (Ardini) Giambarba. His first wife, Ruth (Tremaine) Giambarba preceded him in death. He leaves his loving wife of 41 years, Fran (Martin) Giambarba; two children, Lily, of San Antonio, TX, and Andrew, of Mashpee, MA; two step-sons, Allan, of Kingston, MA, and Stephen, of Santa Rosa, CA; seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

He attended schools in Taunton, MA and graduated from Medford, MA High School in 1945. He attended the Massachusetts School (now College) of Art while working in the studio of his mentor, artist Harold Irving Smith.

He served as an artillery sergeant in the Massachusetts Army National Guard from 1948 to 1955.

Although best known for his work as a graphic designer both here and abroad, he was a versatile artist with accomplishments in multiple media, as well as a prolific book author, illustrator and publisher. He also built two homes on Cape Cod, where his family grew up, despite no formal training in architecture.

In his youth, he worked as the daily sports cartoonist for the Boston Herald. Over the course of his career, he contributed artwork to Sports Illustrated, Scholastic, This Week, True and Spy magazines, as well as book publishers Little, Brown and Houghton Mifflin.

His career in graphic design began after he made the unusual-at-the-time move to Europe with his wife, Ruth, in the late 1950s, settling in Switzerland where he could immerse himself in what he believed was the best graphic design in the world.

Upon his return to Boston, he began freelancing for Polaroid Corporation and Gillette, among other clients, becoming Polaroid’s first art director and continuing to develop their product identity, including the iconic rainbow stripes, for more than 25 years. He also wrote, photographed and published the essential guidebook on How to Make Better Polaroid Pictures.

In the early 1970s he moved his family back to Europe, this time to Porto Cervo, on the rustic Italian island of Sardinia, where a Boston- and Cambridge-based group of architects and designers was involved in developing the Costa Smeralda resort for His Highness the Aga Khan. Giambarba contributed the graphic design for several of the major hotels in the resort. Subsequent freelance design clients also included Tonka.

A longtime resident of Cape Cod, for decades at a time with an almost 10-year interval in Northern California, Giambarba was struck when his children were little by the lack of high-quality children’s books about the Cape’s natural and maritime history. Consequently, Giambarba began writing, illustrating and then publishing a series of maps about Cape Cod and then almost 20 books, including Cape Cod Seashore Life; Surfmen and Lifesavers; Whales, Whaling and Whalecraft; Early Explorers of America; What Is It? at the Beach, The Lighthouse at Dangerfield, and Around Cape Cod with Cap’n Goody, mostly under the Scrimshaw Press imprint. His books were recognized as historically accurate and exquisitely illustrated, and several were later sold to Little, Brown and Doubleday.

In the early 1980s, again impressed with the lack of a magazine highlighting Cape Cod’s substantial group of writers, artists and craftspeople, Giambarba filled the gap by creating “CapeArts,” which he wrote, illustrated, published, sold the ads for, and distributed, with limited freelance help. He also set the type for the magazine, another skill he had taught himself.

Over the course of his career, his artistic achievements especially in graphic design included several Gold Medals from both the Boston and the New York’s Art Directors Club and three Certificates of Excellence for Package Design from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He guest-lectured on graphic design at Cornell University and Wellesley College, and was an adjunct instructor at Simmons College. He has silk screen prints in the collections of Harvard University and Bates College, as well as those of private individuals. His work has been the subject of articles in Graphis (Zurich); Industrial Design; American Artist, Idea (Tokyo); Relax (Tokyo); Grafik (London); Brand Wins (Hamburg) and Communication Arts.

In his Sebastopol, CA sojourn with second wife, Fran, he created Arts & Flowers, a publisher of botanically accurate greeting cards and mugs sold to museums and retailers across the U.S. He was a member of the San Francisco Society of Illustrators and contributed pro bono work to the Art Directors’ Club in Santa Rosa, CA.

In later years, back on Cape Cod, he was an early convert to blogging, creating the very popular 100 Years of Illustration, celebrating the work of American illustrators primarily from the previous century, as well as The Branding of Polaroid, talking about his design work, and Analog Photography at Its Best — several of the blogs receiving millions of pageviews and resulting in his inclusion in documentaries about Polaroid, such as Time Zero: The Last Year of Polaroid Film, design work for The Impossible Project, and course syllabi on design and illustration. He also wrote and published Elizabeth Shippen Green: American Illustrator, edited by his daughter, Lily. He was an avid mentor to those who sought him out.

The family wishes to thank the Visiting Nurse Association of Cape Cod for the comfort and support provided in his final days. No funeral service is planned. In lieu of a memorial, contributions can be made to your favorite charity.