Logo design is very specialized because it must visually represent a company’s identity. It’s now a new profession where everything – naming, designing, campaigning, social media – can all be designed and created within one studio or office. Now there is additional media connected to the job – sound, sight, motion – so graphic design is not your old graphic design anymore. A graphic designer used to just layout type and images in an aesthetically pleasing and powerful way. What it’s done from a content or conceptual point of view is added more layers of media to the job. Also, so much of what graphic design firms used to outsource, like typesetting and Velox making, is now self-contained in the computer. Firstly, it has streamlined all those tedious layout procedures and made it easier to try things out with a certain amount of economy. Well, the digital world has done two things. How has moving from the mechanical to the digital world affected the graphic design industry? I am the co-founder and co-chair of the SVA MFA Design / Designer As Entrepreneur at the School of Visual Arts in New York. For 33 years I was an art director at the New York Times, originally on the OpEd Page and for almost 30 of those years with the New York Times Book Review. I’ve edited various publications including the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) Journal of Graphic Design and contributed to several magazines. Since the 1970s I have worked on over a hundred and eighty books. Please give us some highlights of your very distinguished and extensive career. With his decades of experience in graphic design, we were fortunate to sit with him and discuss the components of successful logo design as well as his thoughts on how the advent of the digital age and its tools has affected the graphic design industry. With the release of his latest book, The Logo Design Idea Book which he authored with Gail Anderson, Steven Heller has brought the Idea Book series to completion.

Steven heller graphic design