The Art Directors Club has unveiled the latest group of inductees into its prestigious ADC Hall of Fame. The honorees, representing advertising, design, typography, illustration, photography and education, will be inducted at a creative black-tie benefit dinner on November 4, 2010, at the ADC Gallery in New York, with proceeds going toward ADC scholarship programs.
ADC Hall of Fame laureates for 2010 are:
• Fabien Baron, creative director; currently editorial director, Interview magazine.
• Matthew Carter, typographer.
• William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand, founders, Winterhouse.
• Philip Hays (posthumous), illustrator, educator.
• Brigitte Lacombe, photographer.
• George Nelson (posthumous), designer, author.
• Christoph Niemann, illustrator.
• Dan Wieden, cofounder, Wieden+Kennedy.
ADC established the ADC Hall of Fame in 1971 as a cross-disciplinary acknowledgement of the most renowned professionals in visual arts and communications. Past inductees represent a diverse group of luminaries in those fields, including Richard Avedon, Saul Bass, Leo Burnett, Jay Chiat, Walt Disney, Charles and Ray Eames, Milton Glaser, Annie Leibovitz, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul Rand, and Andy Warhol.
An exhibition of work by this year’s crop of ADC Hall of Fame laureates will be on display and open to the public free of charge at the ADC Gallery from November 5-23.
Here’s a more detailed rundown of each 2010 inductee:
Fabien Baron
As the founder and creative director of Baron & Baron, Fabien Baron has crafted award-winning identities, package designs, logos, graphics and ads for many of the fashion, cosmetic and fragrance worlds’ most visible and influential brands. He has also applied his talents to the design of prominent magazines and books, and is renowned for his photography and directing of groundbreaking television commercials and music videos.
He started his career in 1982 as creative director for Barney’s, New York, soon after redesigned Italian Vogue under editor Franca Sozzani and later became creative director of Interview magazine. After founding Baron & Baron, Inc., he relaunched Harper’s Bazaar, served as creative director at Calvin Klein, worked with Madonna as art director on her provocative book “Sex,” and to this day continues to shape the image of fashion and fragrance brands by creating iconic print, television and package designs.
Baron worked as editor-in-chief and design director of Arena Homme + from 2000-2002, while also debuting his first residential furniture line with Cappellini and contract furniture line with Bernhardt. In 2004, he became creative director of French Vogue under editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld, and last October rejoined Brant Publications’ Interview as editorial director. He also continues to work on a broad range of assignments for a select group of international clients.
Matthew Carter
The son of the typographic historian Harry Carter, Matthew Carter first learned to make metal type by hand before earning a living drawing alphabets for modernist designers in London who at the time were frustrated by the lack of contemporary san serif typefaces. A self-taught designer, his work for the past 50+ years has consistently involved the relationship of design to technology, and he has made type by every imaginable method: metal by hand, metal by machine, photoset, digital, desktop, screen and woodtype for letterpress posters.
In 1965, Carter joined Mergenthaler Linotype, New York as staff designer and helped develop Snell Roundhand, which took advantage of the new medium by introducing a joining script, a style of type that had been impossible to make in metal but worked well in film. He went on to develop Bell Centennial for AT&T phone directories, providing a more legible alternative that also saved space in directory columns. Since computer tools capable of converting an analog image to a digital bitmap did not yet exist, Carter had to draw every character on graph paper, pixel by pixel, and have it encoded at a keyboard, an epic task of hands-on designing.
In a long association with the Linotype companies, he designed ITC Galliard, Helvetica Compressed, Shelley Script, Olympian (for newspaper text), and faces for Greek, Hebrew and Devanagari. In 1981 he joined with three ex-Linotype colleagues to start Bitstream, a digital typefoundry, in Cambridge, Mass., and 10 years later left with a cofounder to start Carter & Cone Type at a time when the personal computer and open font formats made independent typefounding a viable business.
In addition to creating retail fonts for general license (Mantinia, Sophia, Big Figgins, Big Caslon, Miller), his typefaces have been commissioned by Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Sports Illustrated, BusinessWeek, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times (the paper and the magazine), The Guardian and Le Monde. Other custom types have been designed for the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art and Yale University. In the mid-’90s, Carter worked with Microsoft to develop the “screen fonts” Verdana and Georgia, whose priority was legibility in the inhospitable technical environment of computer monitors.
He has taught classes at the Yale University graphic design school for 30 years, and lectures frequently at conferences and schools. An exhibition of his work, “Typographically Speaking,” opened in 2002 and traveled to several American cities. A book of the same name was published by Princeton Architectural Press.
Philip Hays
Upon graduating from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., Philip Hays moved to New York and enjoyed immediate success, stretching the conventions for romantic illustrations in magazines such as Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and McCalls. “His early watercolor approach, partly inspired by Vuillard, was often quite loose but also extremely detailed, ” wrote Steven Heller, who described him as “one of a young band of expressive and interpretative illustrators, including Robert Weaver, Jack Potter, Tom Allen and Robert Andrew Parker who, rather than paint or draw literal scenes based entirely on an author’s prose, interpreted texts with an eye toward expressive license. Hays said that representational illustration was an art of nuance, and his work routinely dug below the surface, drawing on Impressionist, Expressionist and Surrealist influences.”
He was hired by the School of Visual Arts in 1957 to teach and later chair the illustration department. Younger than many of his students who were attending on the G.I. Bill, Hays introduced novels, plays and films as a way to increase visual and verbal literacy. By the mid-1960s, Hays illustrated fiction in Esquire and visual reportage in Sports Illustrated, and in the 1970s created emotionally arresting portraits of musicians from blues singers Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday to rock’n roll legends Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Eric Clapton which set a new standard for album art and the covers of Rolling Stone.
Hays set aside his career as a professional illustrator in 1978 and accepted an invitation to return to California and join the Art Center as head its illustration department. For the next 24 years, he proved to be as much of a force in education as he had been in illustration, with the Art Center presenting him with the Don Kubly Award for Professional Attainment in 2002. “Philip Hays probably inspired more successful artists than any other teacher I can think of,” said Paul Davis of his mentor and friend when Hays received the Society of Illustrators 2000 Distinguished Educators in the Arts award. He retired that year, and passed away in 2005 at age 74.
“I never wanted to be anything but an illustrator,” Hays once said. “There were those who separated fine art from illustration, looking down their noses at the latter. Sometimes people would ask if I ever wanted to do my own work, and I always replied, ‘Everything I do is my own work.’ I loved working against a hard edge, getting an assignment and turning it into my own — pleasing the client and myself. I was never tempted to be a painter. Andy Warhol, Ben Shahn and Richard Lindner were heroes of mine, primary influences. They instigated the movement, and if I am considered part of the next generation that helped revive the aesthetics of illustration, I am proud.”
Brigitte Lacombe
French photographer Brigitte Lacombe has built an illustrious career as a portrait photographer, as a photographer documenting films from “behind-the-scenes,” and as one of the world’s most recognized travel photographers.
After first serving as an apprentice in the black & white lab of Elle in Paris, she attended the Cannes Film Festival in 1975 and met actors Dustin Hoffman and Donald Sutherland, who invited her to the film sets of Fellini’s Casanova and All the President’s Men. Later that year, she worked on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and was first and only staff photographer for the Lincoln Center Theater in New York for seven years.
Lacombe works with directors Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Sam Mendes, Michael Haneke, David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino and Spike Jonze on many of their films, including The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Shutter Island, The Departed, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Inglourious Basterds, Nine, The Road, Revolutionary Road, The Reader and Doubt.
She is also a renown travel photographer, winning the Einsenstaedt Award for travel photography in 2000. Under contract with Condé Nast Traveler magazine for more than 25 years, her recent assignments include visits to Lebanon, Oman, Cuba, Haiti, Senegal, Egypt, Mozambique, Syria, Jordan, Bosnia and India.
Lacombe contributes to many publications, including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Time, GQ, German Vogue and Paris Vogue. Her advertising clients include Prada, Hermés, Nespresso, Lancôme, Movado, Rolex, The Metropolitan Opera, HBO, Paramount Pictures and the Weinstein Company.
Earlier this year, in support of the fight against AIDS, Lacombe directed video portraits of 30 actors and musicians for PROJECT (RED). She has also produced a pair of books: “Lacombe anima | persona,” her retrospective of photographs from 1975-2008 published by SteidlDangin with an essay by Frank Rich, and “Lacombe cinema | theater,” published by Schirmer/Mosel with essays by David Mamet and Adam Gopnik.
Christoph Niemann
Born in Waiblingen, Germany, Christoph Neimann’s first professional jobs in New York were internships for Paul Davis in 1995, and a year later for Paula Scher at Pentagram, when he did his first drawings for Rolling Stone and The New York Times Book Review. After his graduation from the art academy in Stuttgart in 1997, he moved to New York and started working as an editorial illustrator.
Niemann quickly became a regular contributor to many major magazines and newspapers. His illustrations have appeared on the covers of The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Time, Newsweek, Fast Company and Atlantic Monthly. His obsession with politics, economics and culture have made him a staple on the pages of The New York Times Op-ed page and The New York Times Book Review, as well as the financial page of The New Yorker, which has featured his drawings since 1999. He has also illustrated ads for Nike, Microsoft, The Royal Mail, MoMA and Amtrak, and created popular animations for Google.
Neimann has written and illustrated many books, among them “The Pet Dragon”, a book that teaches Chinese Characters to young children and “I LEGO N.Y.”, in which he has created ultra-abstract miniature sculptures of all things New York. With Nicholas Blechman, a frequent collaborator, he is the creator of the art book series “100%”.
In 2008, Neimann started the popular Abstract City visual blog for The New York Times website in which he explores his obsessions with New York, pop culture, food, music and family life by using a wide range of media — from drawing with coffee on napkins to Legos, from hand-sewn Voodoo puppets to autumn leaves. “Subway,” his latest children’s book, is based on the Abstract City post “The Boys and the Subway” where he describes a day of riding the subway with his two sons just for fun.
His work has garnered awards from all major design organizations including the Art Directors Club (an ADC Young Gun, the only international, cross-disciplinary, portfolio-based awards competition that identifies the vanguard of creatives under age 30), SPD, AIGA and American Illustration, and has lectured at design conferences in the US, Mexico, Europe, South Africa, Japan, and Australia. At the age of 29, Neimann became the youngest member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale).
George Nelson
George Nelson has been called the “Designer of Modern Design”. A prolific writer, designer and creative thinker, Nelson’s work includes architecture, furniture, lamps, clocks, exhibits, identity programs, graphics, urban development, numerous books, articles and visual documentaries.
When writing on his own remarkable 50-year career, Nelson described a series of creative “zaps”–moments of out-of-the-blue inspiration “when the solitary individual finds he is connected with a reality he never dreamed of.” An early zap came when he was struck by an idea while at the American Academy in Rome: he would travel Europe and interview leading modern architects, hoping to get the articles published in the US. He succeeded, and in the process introduced the domestic design community to the European avant-garde.
Upon returning to the States, Nelson was being named an editor of Architectural Forum magazine. Working on a story in 1942, he was looking at aerial photos of blighted cities when — zap — he developed the concept of the downtown pedestrian mall, which was unveiled in the Saturday Evening Post. Dubbed ‘The Greening of Main Street”, this led the way for urban revitalization. Another zap led to the Storagewall, the first modular storage system and a forerunner of systems furniture. The Storagewall was showcased in a 1945 Life magazine article, and caused a sensation in the furniture industry. Herman Miller founder D.J. DePree saw the article and was so impressed that he paid a visit to Nelson and persuaded him to be the company’s director of design, which spurred Nelson to found his design firm, George Nelson & Associates.
The warm personal and professional relationship between Nelson and DePree yielded a stunning range of products for over 25 years, from the playful Marshmallow Sofa to the first L-shaped desk, a precursor of today’s workstation. During this period, George Nelson & Associates also created many landmark designs of products, showrooms, and exhibitions for a variety of companies and organizations.
His many honors include work in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Henry Ford Museum and other institutions; Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts; Scholar in Residence, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Design; chairman, International Design Conference in Aspen; Good Design Award, Museum of Modern Art; Trailblazer Award, National Home Furnishings League; Best Office of the Year, The New York Times; Gold Medal, Art Directors Club, and Prix de Rome for architecture. He died in 1968 at age 78.
Dan Wieden
After graduating from the University of Oregon, Dan Wieden spent a few years in public relations before he applied his writing talent to the advertising business. Twenty-eight years ago, he was a copywriter at a small Portland agency working on the Nike account with his partner David Kennedy when they had a conversation with Nike CEO Phil Knight. He said he wasn’t thrilled with the agency but appreciated their talent, and wondered if they had ever thought of starting up their own agency. Shortly after that conversation in 1982, the pair went out on their own and formed Wieden+Kennedy with one small client and five employees.
Almost three decades later, the legacy is still unfolding with nearly 1,000 employees in Portland, New York, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Shanghai and Delhi working on projects as varied as branding international companies, producing sports documentaries and releasing some of Japan’s best music through W+K Tokyo Lab. While the growth has been satisfying, it’s really never been what motivates Wieden: his goal was to start a different type of advertising agency where people could perform at their best without the structures and bureaucracies that plague larger agencies, and an agency that wouldn’t lose its creativity as it grew.
While he has won industry recognition and many top awards over the years, Wieden is still known by colleagues and clients as “just a regular guy” trying to make a difference, with a relentless ability to dream and inspire. His fight to remain independent and provide a place where fellow dreamers can work has resulted in some of the industry’s best work, and an environment where people and clients can both flourish.
Wieden+Kennedy reported $2.08 billion annual capitalized billings in 2009, working with some of the world’s most recognizable brands such as Nike, Target, Levi’s, ESPN, Coca-Cola, Electronic Arts, Honda, P&G and Nokia.
Winterhouse (William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand)
Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel are partners at Winterhouse, a design studio in northwest Connecticut. Their work focuses on print and online publishing, educational and cultural institutions, and design programs of social impact.
They are the 2009-10 recipients of Rockefeller Foundation funding to develop a global initiative around design and social innovation; the winners of a 2010 Sappi “Ideas That Matter” grant; and were appointed in 2010 as the first Henry Wolf Residents in Graphic Design at the American Academy in Rome. They are co-founding editors of Design Observer, the leading international website for design, visual and cultural journalism online. In 2006, they founded the Winterhouse Institute, whose initiatives include creation of the AIGA Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing and Criticism and its annual $10,000 award for design writing. More recently, it created the Polling Place Photo Project, a national initiative to document citizen experiences at polling places, conducted during the 2006-08 election cycles.
Jessica Helfand has been senior critic in the graduate program in graphic design at Yale School of Art since 1996. She also teaches the Yale College freshman art seminar Art 001: Studies in Visual Biography, which was inspired by her book, Scrapbooks: An American History, published by Yale University Press. She is the author of three other books on design and cultural criticism: Reinventing the Wheel (2002), Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture (2001), and Paul Rand: American Modernist (1998). She has written for many publications including Aperture, Communications Arts, Eye Magazine, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Print, and The New Republic.
In 2006, Helfand was appointed by the Postmaster General to the U.S. Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, where she chairs the design subcommittee. She is a life fellow of the American Antiquarian Society. Before founding Winterhouse, Helfand was an award-winning editorial and interaction designer, working with leading publications and newspapers.
William Drenttel is the editorial director of Design Observer, and directs Winterhouse Institute and its recent work at the intersection of design and social innovation. He is also design director of Teach For All, an international initiative working towards educational equality globally, and previously served as the creative director of two large literary foundations, Poetry Foundation and Nextbook. He has also published and designed more than 20 books under the Winterhouse imprint, many of them co-published with leading academic publishers.
He is president emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, a senior faculty fellow at Yale School of Management, and a fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University. He has served on the boards of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Lingua Franca, Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, Poetry Society, and Susan Sontag Foundation. Prior to founding Winterhouse, Drenttel was president of Drenttel Doyle Partners and a senior VP of Saatchi & Saatchi.
