When I started in the brand design industry in 1992, I was struck by the lack of women in senior positions in the business. I was working for a company then called The Schechter Group (now Interbrand), which was founded by Alvin Schechter several decades before. Our competitors were firms such as Wallace Church, Gerstman + Meyers, and, of course, Landor. All of these companies had tremendous reputations, and all—every single one—were founded and run by men. As a newly minted business development executive, my job was to call on consumer goods companies for their business. In doing so, I found that the corporate design directors in senior positions were also men. There was nary a woman to be found. The graphic design business fared slightly better back then, but just barely. Paula Scher had recently become the first female partner at Pentagram, and for a brief moment, designer and brand strategist Cheryl Heller was a partner at Frankfurt Gips Balkind. But for the most part, if a woman wanted to be at the helm of a design firm, she had to start her own agency. But that didn’t always work, either: when Charles and Ray Eames jointly ran their eponymous business, Ray often played second fiddle to her more famous husband (assuming she wasn’t mistakenly referred to as Charles’s brother Ray, rather than his spouse). The stewardship of the brand and graphic design communities represented this state of affairs accurately: in its first one hundred years, AIGA, the professional association for design, elected only four women to preside over the largest design organization in the world. And despite a mission of “championing the very best in commercial creativity,” it took the Art Directors Club fifty-five years to allow any woman to become a member.

That woman was Cipe Pineles. The year was 1948, and despite repeated nominations from well-known ADC members, she was continually denied membership to the venerable organization. When the ADC invited Pineles’s husband, CBS designer William Golden, to join, he refused and emphatically stated that the ADC could not be considered a “serious, professional organization if it would not admit his wife, a well-qualified, award-winning art director for many years.” According to Martha Scotford’s biography of Pineles, the club extended an invitation to both Golden and Pineles the next day; they both immediately accepted.

Cipe Pineles’s success was often hard-won. A young immigrant growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Pineles showed an early affinity and talent in art. Despite numerous accolades and awards while studying at Pratt Institute (including earning one of sixteen scholarships available during her senior year) and winning a fellowship to the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Cipe spent over a year after her graduation searching for a job.

Cipe found her first position in graphic design at Green Mansions, the adult resort and summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, and at Contempora, Ltd, an association of European and American artists and designers, before being hired at Condé Nast under the esteemed head of design, Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha.

Cipe Pineles spent fourteen years at Condé Nast, first assisting and learning from Dr. Agha at Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House & Garden. She honed her skills in typography, photo editing, collage, page layout, and art direction. She was appointed art director of Glamour in 1941 and began to experiment with a signature style. Cipe quickly applied her uniquely inquisitive eye with a distinct creative elegance and transformed the magazine. Her illustrative flair, confidence with white space, and her witty, joyful use of materials created an utterly unmistakable visual language for Glamour. Through these years, she developed the holistic, multidisciplinary perspective that one needs in order to bring a brand to life.

In late 1946 Cipe was invited by former Condé Nast colleague Helen Valentine to join her at a magazine she had recently launched. Titled Seventeen, the magazine was the first ever to treat and appeal to teenagers as exuberant young adults. By 1948, Cipe was appointed art director and was given free rein to create the visual essence of the publication in its entirety. She began to invite fine artists to create illustrations for the magazine and stated, “To label art that is printed as ‘commercial’ has done and is doing an enormous amount of damage to artists and to everyone in the Graphic Arts. This label has kept some great talent away from us.” Cipe invited artists such as Andy Warhol, Carol Blanchard, Louis Bouché, Alexander Brook, Jacob Lawrence, Karl Zerbe, and many, many others to contribute to Seventeen and the vibrancy, vitality, and unique cultural voice elevated the new publication to become one of the most successful launches in magazine history, even to this day.

“To label art that is printed as ‘commercial’ . . . has kept some great talent away from us.”

In 1950 Cipe transitioned to become the art director of Charm magazine, a new publication for “women who work.” Not content to appeal to “the girl behind the typewriter,” the magazine set out to help the “girl just out of school, get her first job . . . and balance her time and energies between home and office.” Cipe’s work on Charm was nothing short of a tour de force. Her skills as a photography editor and typographer were miraculous: elegant but approachable, dignified but whimsical. It is during this time—in her third major role at a publishing house—that Cipe became more than an art director with a great eye and a superb hand with typography. At Charm, Cipe came into her own as a master brand designer. During Cipe’s tenure at Charm, she proved that her talents defining the visual equities of a brand weren’t based on her personal style or individual point of view. She could create singular worlds readers could effortlessly enter and be enveloped by. She created deliberate, differentiated brand personalities with individual traits and values and beliefs. And each—especially Charm—were imbued with an integrity designed by someone with more than mere “design” talent. Cipe Pineles used the very foundation of branding—positioning—to understand and appeal to a variety of disparate, fundamentally different audiences. That each effort resulted in resounding success has as much to do with her talent as a designer as it does her talent as a cultural anthropologist, behavioral psychologist, economist, and marketer. In short, Cipe Pineles was a brand consultant before the discipline was even invented.

Beginning in 1961, Cipe joined her second husband, Will Burtin, in his design consultancy. There she was commissioned by clients including Lincoln Center, AIGA, Print magazine, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Museum of Early American Folk Arts, and Ladies’ Home Journal. She crafted logos, brochures and publications, posters, calendars, and magazine illustrations. She also began an entirely new phase of her career: academia. In 1962, Cipe began teaching at Parsons School of Design, and in 1970 she took on the additional mantle of Parsons’ Director of Publications. There, she educated and worked with students and staff to remake the college’s many books, brochures, and posters. And once again, Cipe brought a unique personality and verve to the materials that not only captured the imagination of the student body, they—like any successful brand expression—helped clarify and define the school’s mission, vision, and values to the public.

Over her long and illustrious career, Cipe Pineles not only broke new ground as a woman in design, she also singlehandedly injected the art and discipline of branding into the rarefied worlds of publishing and education. Without ever knowing it, Cipe Pineles made it possible for designers, artists, editors, and entrepreneurs including Martha Stewart, Ina Garten, Anna Wintour, Tavi Gevinson, Iris Apfel, Heidi Klum, Kate Bingaman-Burt, Jessica Hische, Sophie Blackall, hundreds of male and female brand consultants, and millions of bloggers, writers, and stylists working today to follow in her footsteps and create or invigorate brands based on the use of innovative visual language. Despite her death in 1991, the exquisitely timeless work of Cipe Pineles continues to inspire designers from every genre to invent beautiful new visual worlds, and still profoundly inspires us all to want to live in them.