Contributors: Steven Heller, Lita Talaric, Rita Siow, Paula Scher (through the kind permission of AIGA).

Steven Heller and Lita Talarico are keynote speakers at ‘Optimism’, the Icograda Design Week Conference hosted by AGDA from the 14-15 October in Brisbane. Since 1986, Heller has been collaborating, co-authoring and co-founding many initiatives in publishing and education with Talarico, starting with Art Against War, of which Talarico was the Associate Editor.

Steven Heller is the author and editor of over 130 books on graphic design, satiric art and popular culture, and is the co-founder and co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He is also co-founder of the MFA in Design Criticism, MFA in Interaction Design, MFA Social Documentary Film and MPS Branding programs. Although he does not hold an undergraduate or graduate degree he has devoted much of his career to fostering design education venues, opportunities and environments.

On the editorial side, for over 40 years he has been an art director for various underground and mainstream periodicals. For 33 years he was an art director at the New York Times (28 of them as senior art director New York Times Book Review) and during which he ‘launched and nourished the careers of innumerable successful and influential illustrators’. He currently writes the ‘Visuals’ column for the Book Review and ‘Graphic Content’ for the T-Style/The Moment blog. He is editor of AIGA VOICE: Online Journal of Design, a contributing editor to Print, EYE, and Baseline, and a frequent contributor to Metropolis and ID magazines. He contributes regularly to Design Observer and writes the DAILY HELLER blog for Print (http://blog.printmag.com/dailyheller). His 130 books include Design Literacy, Paul Rand, Graphic Style (with Seymour Chwast), Stylepedia (with Louise Fili), The Design Entrepreneur and Design School Confidential (both with Lita Talarico), and most recently New Ornamental Type (with Gail Anderson).

In 1968, his leftist leanings led him to the New York Free Press. He was seventeen years old and became art director. He had no qualifications whatsoever for that job. He used his press pass to attend some New York University lectures on a variety of subjects during the student sit-in strikes. In 1974, after brief stints at Interview, Rock, Screw, Rat, and the Evergreen Review, he wound up as art director for the New York Times Op-Ed page, home of political illustration, surrealism, and social comment. His respect and passion for illustration led him to produce a variety of collections on the subject. The first, Artists’Christmas Cards, were followed by Man Bites Man: Two Decades of Satiric Art, Jules Feiffer’s America and a number of others.

By the early ‘80s Heller had become interested in design, an interest that was ignited by two important relationships. The first was his friendship with Seymour Chwast. Both had a passion for publishing. Heller was interested in politics and history, while Chwast was interested in type and imagery. Heller knew what was important; Chwast knew what was good. Together they produced a slew of books, including Art Against War, The Art of New York, and Graphic Style, a compendium that has become a bible for graphic designers.

In the early ‘80s Heller also became editor of the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design. He turned a chatty, amateurish newsletter into a serious journal of critical writing, inviting academics, practitioners, sociologists, lawyers, and so on to contribute articles on a broad variety of topics in themed issues. Looking Closer, volumes one and two, are compilations of articles culled from the AIGA Journal as well as other publications. The Journal became a forum of lively debate and ushered in a mature age of critical design writing.

We easily take for granted our design history books, our magazines, and our conferences. We are accustomed now to seeing design work from all over the world and from any time in history without working terribly hard to find it. But before 1980, design books, magazines and design conferences were few and far between. Steven Heller has immortalized our graphic past and made coherence of our present. The debt that future graphic designers owe him simply cannot be calculated.

Since 1986, Heller has been collaborating, co-authoring and co-founding many initiatives in publishing and education with Lita Talarico, starting with Art Against War of which Talarico was the Associate Editor. Talarico has been active for over 20 years as a producer, editor, writer and educator in the worlds of architecture and graphic design. She was the founding managing editor of American Illustration and American Photography producing its annual events and conferences 1981-1985, was special projects director at Cooper Union College of Art and Architecture 1985-1988, co-authored Design Career: Practical Knowledge for Beginning Illustrators and Graphic Designers, Van Nostrand Reinhold in 1987 and served as reporter at large on Italian design from 1989-1992 for Graphis magazine.

In 1997, Talarico and Heller co-founded the MFA Design Progam, School of Visual Arts, New York serving as co-chairs for the last twelve years, during which time the program has consistently been ranked as one of the ‘Top Ten Graduate Design Programs’ in US News & World Report and was recently listed in Business Week’s ‘World’s Leading Design Schools’. Talarico teaches and lectures on design entrepreneurism, with special emphasis on Charles and Ray Eames. She references the studio setting and unique approach of the program for its success – the small number of students (20), the one-on-one interaction with their educators and mentors, 24-hour studio access, and above all, working from the premise of designer as author – in other words, to give form to an idea, to bring it to market and to have the confidence to speak with their own voice.

This unleashing and transformation in educational thinking and process then provided the inspiration for The Design Entrepreneur, co-authored by Talarico and Heller in 2008, followed by Design School Confidential (Rockport Publishers 2009) and the recent Graphic Design Sketchbook (Thames & Hudson Company, Fall 2010).

While continuing to develop publications and periodicals, Talarico also serves as a member of the AIGA Visionary Design Council which is guiding the definition of the ‘Designer of 2015’ research initiative and Board Member Emeritus, Adobe Education Partners by Design program.

Useful Links
www.agda.com.au
www.designweekbrisbane.com