Louise Fili, recipient of the 2016 Masters Series Award, discusses her singular career in logo, graphic and book design. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition "The Masters Series: Louise Fili," on view at the SVA Gramercy Gallery Friday, October 14 - Saturday, December 10.

Louise Fili is probably best known for the food and hospitality branding and packaging work she has done through her eponymous design studio, founded in 1989. Her wine bottle and jam jar labels, cookie and cracker boxes and coffee bags can be found in countless pantries and shops, and her visual-identity work has defined the look of dozens of popular bakeries, cafés and restaurants.

But her design career, begun in the 1970s, encompasses much more. For 11 years, Fili was art director at Pantheon Books, where she designed more than 2,000 book covers. Logos that she has created include redesigned marks for the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and Paperless Post. Her past and present clients include Hyperion Books, Rizzoli, Sarabeth’s, Tate’s Bake Shop, Tiffany & Co., Williams-Sonoma and the U.S. Postal Service. She has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on design and typography is a longtime faculty member of SVA’s BFA and MFA Design departments.

Much of Fili’s work reflects her deep respect for Italian culture, a passion ignited at the age of 16 during a trip to the country, her family’s ancestral home. Fili has continued to fuel her passion for all things Italian with annual trips taken ever since. During a stay in 1990, while researching Italian Art Deco, Fili fostered her penchant for Italian 1930s poster design and discovered a collection of pasticceria papers that would foreshadow a switch in her career from book design to food packaging.

Fili’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Her many honors include medals for life time achievement from the AIGA and Type Directors Club, gold and silver medals from the Society of Illustrators and the New York Art Directors Club, the Premio Grafico from the Bologna Book Fair and three James Beard Award nominations.

Talk

An Evening with Louise Fili

SVA Theatre