The firm's work, and distinctive illustration style, featuring "bulgy" three-dimensional "interpretations of historical styles (Victorian, art nouveau, art deco),"made their mark by departing from what the firm refers to as the "numbing rigidity of modernism, and the rote sentimental realism of commercial illustration.
[2]After graduating from Cooper Union, Sorel and Chwast worked for a short time at Esquire magazine, both being fired on the same day.
[3] Sorel left Push Pin in 1956, the same day the studio moved into a much nicer space on East 57th Street.
[4] Today, Chwast is principal of The Pushpin Group, Inc.[5] Over the last six decades, the firm's work, and that of the founding designers, along with Reynold Ruffins, Edward Sorel and several other designers who have been associated with it, has led to several books, as well as publication in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Print (magazine) and traveling exhibitions, such as "The Push Pin Style," which traveled to the Museum of Decorative Arts of the Louvre,[6] as well as numerous cities in Europe, Brazil, and Japan in 1970–72.
[5] Out of house, the founding team served as art directors of Audience magazine, a high-end, subscription-only bimonthly arts and literature periodical, for whom Glaser and Chwast "used photographs, drawings, big pictures and lavish colors to accompany articles by Donald Barthelme, Herbert Gold, Martin Mayer, Thomas Whiteside and Frank Capra, among others.