Dr. Miriam M. Ahmed
Teaches graphic design at Howard University in Washington, DC, and was previously an assistant professor of visual communication at the American University in Dubai, UAE. Her research interests include typeface persona, responsible design, and visual communication in politics, and her visual work is driven by a passion for functionality and the unanticipated in design.
Area of Practice
Is a collaborative brand consultancy with expertise in brand strategy, content creation, art direction, design, user experience, and information architecture. The studio’s work has been recognized nationally and internationally by most major professional organizations and publications.
Leslie Becker
Is the former director of design at CCA, a design practitioner, educator, and writer. Her research area is design and ethics, specifically methods of ethics, with a particular emphasis on the workings of graphic images in popular culture and their influence on the construction of values. Her practice includes identity, print graphics, large-scale signage systems, custom furniture, and pro bono work for nonprofits.
J. D. Biersdorfer
Writes about technology and pop culture—and sometimes about the collision between the two—for the New York Times and other publications.
Thomas Bohm
Studied graphic communication design at college (BTEC, Leicester College, UK) and university (BA, Norwich University of the Arts, UK), now works for book publishers and businesses, and continues to run User Design, Illustration and Typesetting (userdesignillustrationandtypesetting.com), a graphic communication design, illustration, and production service. He writes, researches and occasionally publishes, including Punctuation..? (2nd edition, User Design, 2012), a fun and fully illustrated book on punctuation. He has been published in the Information Design Journal, Baseline, Slanted, Typography.Guru, and Usability Geek, and is a member of the Association of Illustrators and the International Institute for Information Design. He has won awards from the following competitions: British Book Design and Production Awards, 3×3 Magazine and European Design Awards. He is a fellow of the Communication Research Institute.
Robbie Conal
Is one of the country’s foremost satirical street poster artists. His work has been featured on CBS This Morning and Charlie Rose, and in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, People Magazine, Interview, and the Washington Post. Most recently, his work has been collected by—and featured in exhibitions at—LACMA and MOCA in Los Angeles, the San Jose Museum of Art, and his beloved hometown favorite, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. He has authored three books: Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a Guerrilla Poster Artist, 1992 (HarperCollins); Artburn, 2003 (Akashic Books); and Not Your Typical Political Animal, with wife Deborah Ross, 2009 (Art Attack Press). He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
Mike Davis
Is a Minneapolis-based graphic artist and one of the co-owners of creative studio Burlesque of North America. He’s obsessed with rap music, typography, 1970’s graphic design, and Caribbean food. Together with his crew at Burlesque, he has completed numerous projects for Nike Sportswear, Target, Rhymesayers, 3M, Chromeo, Arcade Fire, and Phish.
Stuart Ewen
Is a professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunger College, CUNY. He is the author of influential books on the history of consumer society, visual culture, propaganda, and modernity, including PR! A Social History of Spin; All Consuming Images: On the Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture; Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture; and, with Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness and Typecasting: On the Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality.
Thomas Frank
Is an American political analyst, historian, journalist, and columnist for Harper’s Magazine. He wrote “The Tilting Yard” column in the Wall Street Journal from 2008 to 2010, and he co-founded and edited The Baffler. He has written several books, most notably What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004). His other books include One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (2000) and Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016).
Ken Garland
Is founder of Ken Garland & Associates, which is mainly concerned with work for social and political causes. He is also founder of Ken and Wanda Garland’s publishing venture, Pudkin Books, founded in 2008.
Fabrizio Gilardino
Is a Milanese graphic designer, artistic director, filmmaker, composer, and musician. He was, with Denis Dulude, the cofounder the Montreal-based 2Rebels digital typefoundry. Currently, he curates live experimental music performances and small-venue animation festivals.
Milton Glaser
Designed the I
NY logo to help the state of New York in its tourism campaign. It was a reasonable problem with a simple enough solution. Little did Glaser, or anyone for that matter, know how incredibly popular INY would be. Not only did it quantifiably aid the fundamental campaign, it became an icon first for New York, and ultimately for virtually every city and town throughout the world. It is the most borrowed visual idea since Grant Wood’s American Gothic or Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker cover. In the wake of the World Trade Center attack on September 11, INY has taken on an entirely new relevance.
Jessica Helfand
Is a founding editor of Design Observer and an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye, and Communications Arts magazines, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University, where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA Medal.
Cheryl Heller
Is an American designer and brand strategist who is a specialist on how design and technology can accelerate social and environmental change. She is the founding chair of the first MFA program in Design for Social Innovation at SVA and the founder of the design lab CommonWise. She is committed to helping clients accomplish their missions by developing powerful brand strategies and communication systems.
Steven Heller
Is the cochair of the School of Visual Arts NYC’s MFA Design: Designers as Author + Entrepreneur program. He is the author or editor of over 170 books on design and popular culture and the recipient of the 2011 National Design Award for Design Mind.
Mr. Keedy
Is an educator, designer, type designer, and writer, who has been teaching in the Graphic Design program at California Institute of the Arts since 1985. He has been recognized for his design work for institutional and commercial clients in branding, packaging, and publication design. His essays have been published in Eye; I.D.; Emigre; Critique; Idea; Adbusters; Looking Closer One, Two, and Four; and The Education of a Graphic Designer. His work has most recently been exhibited at MoMA, SFMoMA, CAM Raleigh, and the Biennial of Graphic Design, Brno, Czech Republic.
Adam Harrison Levy
Is a writer and documentary film producer and director. He specializes in the art of the interview. For the BBC he has conducted interviews with a wide range of artists, writers, and actors. He wrote catalogue essays for Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 at the International Center of Photography and Saul Leiter: Retrospective. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts.
Sébastien Marchal
Is a French type designer, graphic artist, lecturer, and activist. He teaches a course on the history of political imagery at the Université Paris XIII.
Victor Margolin
Is Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is a coeditor of the academic design journal Design Issues and is the author, editor, or coeditor of a number of books, including Design Discourse, Discovering Design, The Idea of Design, The Designed World, and The Politics of the Artificial. Currently he has finished two of a three-volume World History of Design published by Bloomsbury.
Katherine McCoy
Cochaired Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Design Department for twenty-four years, and was a senior lecturer at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design in Chicago and a distinguished visiting professor at the Royal College of Art. Katherine holds an honorary doctorate from Kansas City Art Institute and is a Medalist of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and an elected member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. She consults in communications design for cultural and environmental clients and writes on design criticism and history.
Bob McKinnon
Is founder and president of GALEWiLL Design, a firm focused exclusively on social change. He is author of Actions Speak Loudest and creator of the online platform Moving Up. Bob also writes for Fast Company, Thrive Global, and the Huffington Post. He has served as Entrepreneur in Residence at the New School and as an instructor at the School of Visual Arts Impact Program.
Kofi Opoku
Is an assistant professor at West Virginia University. His specialties include web and interaction design and computer animation. He is interested in design as a material for inspiring social change, and his research has led him to explore ways by which human-computer interaction can aid understanding of social issues. His work has been recognized by Graphic Design USA and by the curated advertising website adsoftheworld.com.
Carol Overby
Is a financial consultant to creative industries who teaches a course on management skills in the the New School/Parsons BBA program. She is fascinated by the many ways that individuals (mis)understand finance and numbers and cofounded the Visualizing Finance Lab to research ways of improving financial literacy through visual storytelling. Carol also promotes quantitative literacy across the university, and serves on the board of the National Numeracy Network.
Irene Pereyra
Is the cofounder of the interaction design studio Anton & Irene. She has created the interactive experiences for many large-scale clients and projects, including the redesign of USAToday.com and Metmuseum.org. The studio also spends three months a year on self-initiated design projects.
Vincent Perrottet
Is a French graphic artist who was one of the founders of the design collective Les Graphistes Associés. A junior member of the legendary Grapus studio, he is now working independently, or in close collaboration with other designers. In association with Anette Lenz, he created a number of award-winning public theater campaigns. Well known for his bold and colorful typographical posters, he gives new meaning to words by breaking them into provocative politically inspired puns.
Mark Randall
Is principal of Worldstudio, a New York City marketing and design agency which serves major clients in the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors. World-studio’s unique area of expertise is creating projects that support its clients’ social responsibility platform. Formerly at Vignelli Associates, Randall was project manager for the redesign of Fodor’s Travel Guides. He was also a designer for the environmental graphics firm Whitehouse and Katz. In addition to lecturing on design and social responsibility, Randall has taught at Parson’s School of Design, Fordham University in New York, and at Hartford University, Connecticut.
Chris Riley
Is founder of Studioriley in Portland, Oregon, where he does strategic planning for business as well as marketing and communications. He is interested in decoding the patterns that link the macro to the micro, the global shifts that influence local change. Geographic discipline demands rigor and insight, data and narrative, as well as the ability to zoom in from 30,000 feet to an individual’s daily experience. To have an effective strategic plan is to have prepared for a future you want to create.
Michael Schmidt
Is an associate professor teaching undergraduate and graduate graphic design courses at the University of Memphis. He volunteers at the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center’s Global Goods store, selling fair trade items made in developing nations.
Karisa Senavitis
Is a researcher, writer, and designer based in NYC and the Jersey shore. Cofounder of Will Work for Good (WWFG), Knowledge Is a Does, Policy People, and Bodies + Data, she works at the intersection of culture and care.
Henry Singer
Is a documentary filmmaker. Born in 1957, he holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree from Cambridge University. He produced the documentary 9/11: The Falling Man, which dealt with the attempts to name an individual who jumped to his death from the burning World Trade Center following the 9/11 attacks. His work has a BAFTA nomination and a New York film festival Gold Medal.
Stanley Tigerman
Is an architect and partner at Tigerman McCurry Architects, an educator, and the director of Archeworks, a nonprofit organization in Chicago. In 1976, he was known as the central figure of the Chicago Seven, a group that emerged in opposition to the doctrinal application of modernism. An idiosyncratic theorist, he has designed both mixed-use high-rise and low-rise housing throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the urban plan for London’s Kings’ Cross and St. Pancras projects.
Véronique Vienne
Is a design critic who has written extensively on design history, lifestyle trends, and business practices. She has edited, art-directed, and written essays for several design publications in the USA and in Europe. She now lives in Paris, France, where she conducts workshops on design criticism as a creative tool and acts as a communication consultant for a number of corporate clients.
Cheryl Towler Weese
Is the founding partner of Studio Blue, a Chicago-based firm that works with museums, universities, and other organizations that serve the public. Her work has been widely published, honored, and exhibited, including exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, medals from the Stiftung Buchkunst and the Carl Hertzog awards, and recognition from AIGA, Eye, Graphis, Novum, I.D. (the iconic design magazine), the Type Directors Club, and the Webbys, among others. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Newberry Library, and the Denver Art Museum.
Laetitia Wolff
Is the AIGA director of strategic initiatives, a design curator, writer, educator, author, and self-described cultural engineer. She is interested in building bridges between design and communities. She is known for creating highly successful collaborative projects that generate new discourses, practices, and experiences around design’s potential as a tool for change and engagement.