Milton Glaser
Milton Glaser (b.1929) is among the most celebrated graphic designer in the United States. He has had the distinction of one-man-shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Georges Pompidou Center. In 2004 he was selected for the lifetime achievement award of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. As a Fulbright scholar, Glaser studied with the painter, Giorgio Morandi in Bologna, and is an articulate spokesman for the ethical practice of design. He opened Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974, and continues to produce an astounding amount of work in many fields of design to this day.
To many, Milton Glaser is the embodiment of American graphic design during the latter half of this century. His presence and impact on the profession internationally is formidable. Immensely creative and articulate, he is a modern renaissance man — one of a rare breed of intellectual designer-illustrators, who brings a depth of understanding and conceptual thinking, combined with a diverse richness of visual language, to his highly inventive and individualistic work. *
David Carson
He was born September 8, 1952 in Corpus Christi, Texas. Carson and his family moved to New York City four years later. Since then he has traveled all around the world but has maintained New York as his base of operations. Carson now owns two studios; one in New York and another in Charleston, South Carolina.
He became renowned for his inventive graphics in the 1990s. Having worked as a sociology teacher and professional surfer in the late 1970s, he art directed various music, skateboarding and surfing magazines through the 1980s. As art director of surfing magazines and more famously style magazine Ray Gun (1992-5), Carson came to worldwide attention. His layouts featured distortions or mixes of 'vernacular' typefaces and fractured imagery, rendering them almost illegible. Indeed, his maxim of the 'end of print' questioned the role of type in the emergent age of digital design, following on from California New Wave and coinciding with experiments at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In the later 1990s he shifted from 'surf subculture' to corporate work for Nike, Levis, and Citibank.
The World of Pentagram 2007
Pentagram is a design studio that was founded in 1972 by Alan Fletcher, Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky in Needham Road, West London, UK. They now have offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Austin and Berlin.
Pentagram was founded on the premise of collaborative interdisciplinary designers working together in an independently owned firm of equals. The firm currently comprises 17 partner-designers in 5 cities, each managing a team of designers and sharing in common overhead and staff resources. The partners in each office share incomes equally and all the partners own an equal portion of the total firm. This equality, along with the tradition of periodically inviting new members to join, renews the firm while giving even the newest members an equal footing with the partners of long standing. This 'flat' organization (there are no executive officers, CEO, CFO or board, other than the entire group) along with the self-capitalized finances of the business, allows equal participation and control of the group's destiny by the members.
Paula Scher: Gobbledy -- Gook,
by Nada Rayv
Paula Scher (born 1948 in Virginia) is an American graphic designer and artist. Scher studied at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and was awarded a Doctor of Fine Arts Honoris Causa by the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C.. In the 1970s she designed album covers for CBS Records and Atlantic Records, before moving into art direction for magazines. She worked at Time Inc. before forming her own design firm, Koppel & Scher. Since 1991, she has been a principal at the New York office of the Pentagram design consultancy.
Scher has been inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame (1998), received the Chrysler Design Award for Innovation in Design (2000), and a Gold Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (2001). Some of her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Her album designs have earned her four Grammy Award nominations.
Gail Anderson: SpotNYC
Gail Anderson is a creative director at SpotCo, a New York City-based design studio and ad agency that specializes in creating theatrical advertising for Broadway productions. From 1987 to early 2002, she served as senior art director at Rolling Stone magazine. Anderson’s work, which has received awards from the Society of Publication Designers, the Type Directors Club, AIGA, the Art Directors Club, Graphis, Communication Arts and Print, is in the permanent collections of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, and the Library of Congress. She has co-authored, with Steven Heller, several books including Graphic Wit, The Savage Mirror and American Typeplay. Anderson teaches in the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts and has lectured at colleges and design organizations throughout the country. She also serves on the advisory board for the Adobe Design Achievement Awards, among others.
Rolling Stone magazine spreads (from top): Alicia Keys, 2001 (Art director: Fred Woodward; Designer: Gail Anderson; Photographer: Mark Seliger); Axl Rose, 2000 (Art director: Fred Woodward; Designer: Gail Anderson; Illustrator: Alex Ostroy)