VCUQatar Presents ‘Design and Branding: Logo, System, Experience’

The contemporary practice of design for branding has evolved over the past fifteen years from a fixation on the singular graphic mark to a broader practice encompassing experiences, services, environments, and systems. Illustrated with lively examples ranging from the critical experiments of Metahaven to popular product packaging by innovation and design firm IDEO, the lecture reveals the diverse roles designers are playing in today’s global society as makers, thinkers, and planners.

Ellen Lupton is Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City. As curator since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including museum project “Graphic Design—Now in Production,” an exhibition on national tour through 2014, co-organized by Cooper-Hewitt and the Walker Art Center, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002).

She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking.

Her book Thinking with Type (2004) is used by students, designers, and educators worldwide. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), co-authored with her graduate students at MICA, explains design processes to a general audience. D.I.Y. Kids (October 2007), co-authored with Julia Lupton, is a design book for children illustrated with kids’ art. The Lupton twins’ latest book is Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (St Martin’s Griffin, 2009). Other books include Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips, 2008) and Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008). She is the co-author with Abbott Miller of several books, including The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (1992), Design Writing Research (1996), and Swarm (2006).

Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design educator in the U.S. Lupton has contributed to various publications, including Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis. She has published essays and illustrations in The New York Times. A frequent lecturer around the U.S. and the world, Lupton will speak about design to anyone who will listen.

Other exhibitions she has curated and co-curated include the National Design Triennial series (2000, 2003, 2006, 2010), Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005 (2006), Solos: New Design from Israel (2006), and Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age (1999), all at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.VCUQatar’s Crossing Boundaries Lecture Series reflects the cross-disciplinary nature of the featured speakers who are representatives of excellence in creative and innovative thinking.

‘Design and Branding: Logo, System, Experience’ is the last lecture in the series for the academic year and will be presented on Wednesday, 20 February, 2013 at 6:00 pm at the atrium at VCUQatar. The lecture is open to the public.