SVA’s Gail Anderson to Receive Prestigious 2018 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement

October 18, 2018

Cooper Hewitt, Smithonian Design Musuem 

2 East 91st Street, New York, NY

May 10, 2018, New York, NY—School of Visual Arts is pleased to announce that Gail Anderson, BFA Design faculty member, SVA alumnus and creative director of SVA’s Visual Arts Press, has been named the recipient of the 2018 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement, the design industry’s highest honor. Anderson is the first SVA alumnus to receive the Lifetime Achievement honor. She will be presented with the award at a gala celebrating design excellence and innovation on Thursday, October 18, 2018 at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Gail Anderson is a celebrated New York-based designer, writer and educator whose interest in the field was crystallized during her undergraduate years at the School of Visual Arts in the 1980s. Over the course of her 30-plus-year career, she has applied the principles and practices she learned at SVA to establish her place among the leading figures in graphic design and typography.

“Gail’s accomplishments are a wonderful example of SVA education in action,” says Anthony Rhodes, Executive Vice President of SVA and Executive Creative Director of the Visual Arts Press. “Her work, much like her presence and leadership as a creative director, faculty member and alumnus, leaves an indelible mark on those who experience it. With this prestigious honor Gail's work will be amplified and more people will discover her true ingenuity.”

In addition to leading SVA’s Visual Arts Press, the College’s in-house design studio, Anderson is a partner at Anderson Newton Design, serves on the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee for the U.S. Postal Service and lectures about design at organizations, colleges and conferences around the world. She is the author and co-author of over a dozen books on type, design and pop culture, including Type Tells Tales (Yale University Press, 2017), co-authored with Steven Heller, co-chair of SVA’s MFA Design Department.

“Gail Anderson’s extraordinary talent for type, typography, word and image is an explosive critical mass that’s produced an original and inspiring vision,” Heller says. “Gail is a model for the holistic designer—a master typographer, conceptualizer, art director and author, for whom design is not just a profession, but a life force. Her work is at once seriously fun and playfully intense—the essence of memorable graphic design.”

Previously, Anderson served as creative director of design at SpotCo, an advertising and marketing agency known for its work in the theater world, and as senior art director at Rolling Stone, where she worked for 14 years. Her high-profile projects include a bestselling stamp for the United States Postal Service honoring the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation; book jackets for musician Ahmir Khalib Thompson (a.k.a. Questlove) and playwright Glen Berger; and crafting the look and direction of Broadway campaigns for Avenue Q and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, as well as several seasons of productions at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater.

Anderson has received numerous awards, including the 2008 AIGA Medal and the Society of Illustrators’ 2009 Richard Gangel Art Director Award. Her work is in the permanent collections of Cooper Hewitt, the Library of Congress, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Milton Glaser Design Archives at SVA, the college where she has remained dedicated to teaching new generations of designers for the past 25 years.

“I am absolutely floored to be the recipient of the 2018 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement,” Anderson says. “I’m looking forward to working closely with the Cooper Hewitt on programming in the coming year and beyond. The opportunity to help introduce design to young people across the country is a dream come true for me—it’s a wonderful extension of teaching at SVA.”

As a Lifetime Achievement laureate Anderson will join previous honorees such as SVA’s Acting Chairman of the Board of Directors and faculty member Milton Glaser (2004), Hartmut Esslinger (2017), Moshe Safdie (2016), Michael Graves (2015), SVA faculty members Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar (2014), James Wines (2013), Richard Saul Wurman (2012), Matthew Carter (2011) and Jane Thompson (2010), among others.

Established in 2000 as a project of the White House Millennium Council, the National Design Awards promote design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world and are accompanied by robust educational programs in cities nationwide. Winners are selected based on the level of excellence, innovation and public impact of their body of work by an interdisciplinary jury of design leaders and educators, design experts and enthusiasts.

MEDIA CONTACT: Folake Ologunja fologunja@sva.edu 212.592.2164

Founded in 1897, Cooper Hewitt is the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. Housed in the renovated and restored Carnegie Mansion, Cooper Hewitt showcases one of the most diverse and comprehensive collections of design works in existence. The museum’s restoration, modernization and expansion has won numerous awards and honors, including a Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award from the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a Gold Pencil Award for Best in Responsive Environments and LEED Silver certification. Cooper Hewitt offers a full range of interactive capabilities and immersive creative experiences, including the Cooper Hewitt Pen that allows visitors to “collect” and “save” objects from around the galleries, the opportunity to explore the collection digitally on ultra-high-definition touch-screen tables, and draw and project their own wallpaper designs in the Immersion Room.