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Iconic Typographer / Designer Doyald Young
Receives Graphic Design Profession’s Highest Honor
Young Receives AIGA Gold Medal,
Culminating 50+ Years in Design and Lettering Arts
Award Underscores Young’s Stature as Author of Visual Pop Culture
Award presented at AIGA’s 6th Annual Design Legends Gala
September 17, 2009
The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City
(Sherman Oaks, CA) March 30, 2009—Internationally renowned typography icon Doyald Young has been named a 2009 recipient of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Gold Medal, the highest honor given by the graphic design profession, according to an announcement made by the AIGA. Mr. Young is recognized as master typographer, celebrated author and educator, with a legendary design career spanning 50+ years, culminating a body of work that has elevated his status from graphic designer to author of visual pop culture.
"Doyald Young is without question one of the greatest letterform virtuosos of our time," says Nik Hafermaas, Chair of Graphic Design and Acting Provost at Art Center College of Design. "An eternal student of culture and society, Doyald’s uncompromising craftsmanship has produced unmistakable typefaces and logotypes, many of which we see in the everyday. Whether his letterforms are used for socialite Paris Hilton’s night club, or as the cornerstone of the Prudential identity system, Doyald’s work has become an indelible part of design as visual pop-culture."
Mr. Young’s typefaces have been used in countless pop-culture applications, including the recent use of his Young Baroque typeface for Paris Hilton’s Club Heiress; for the Princess Grill, the haute cuisine restaurant of the Queen Mary II; for Stefan Sagmeister’s award-winning poster for the School of Visual Arts; for Madonna’s Reinvention Tour, and as a stand-up initial for the title and cover of Random House Webster’s book Quotationary. For the entertainment industry, he has designed logotypes for Elvis, Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Disney’s 30th Anniversary Celebration, Harry Connick Jr., k.d. lang, Bette Midler, Prince, Motown, Joan Rivers, Sinatra, The Grand Reopening of Carnegie Hall, The Grammy Awards, The Annual Academy of Country Music Awards, The Golden Globe Awards, The Tony Awards, and most recently the Art Directors Guild logo. His typeface Eclat can be seen as a titling face on Comedy Central, NBC’s EXTRA; the skateboarding magazine Vapors; and as titles for Queen Latifa’s movie Beauty Shop. He has designed logotypes and trademarks for the California Institute of Technology, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles Marathon Seal, the update of the Prudential Insurance Company of America’s corporate name, the General Electric logo font for the company’s corporate identity program (for Smith+Bartels), and logotypes for Mary Sheridan for The Music Center of Los Angeles County and Los Angeles Philharmonic/Hollywood Bowl.
"The AIGA Medal honors not only the individual design achievements of Doyald Young, but the impact that his teachings had on generations of designers, letterers and typographers over the past half-century," says Pentagram design firm partner Kit Hinrichs, a past recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal and a former student of Mr. Young’s at Art Center College of Design. "Echoes of his influence are found in advertising agencies, design consultancies, publishing houses and on the packaging of products marketed around the world. Doyald will find a comfortable space among the past and present AIGA Medalists—even if he may want to kern the space around them, just a little bit."
Allan Haley, Director of Words & Letters for Monotype Imaging, says, "Doyald Young is the grand master of the lettering arts—and more. His lettering tener duende. I met Doyald over 30 years ago when I was in Southern California looking for lettering artists who might be interested in designing typefaces. I had several appointments and at the end of each, the artist invariably said, ‘Be sure to meet with Doyald Young. He’s the best.’ True then. True now."
For International Design Associates of Japan, Mr. Young designed logotypes for over a dozen hotels, including their restaurants and lounges: Hilton International Japan; Tokyo Hilton; Osaka Hilton; Narita Golf Club; ANA Hotel Tokyo; Pacific Star Hotel of Guam; the Palace Hotel Tokyo & Guam; the new 30-story Kintetsu Hotel at Universal City, Osaka, for Bikohsha, Inc., he designed the Hawaii Sony Open logo for Mari Makinami, Design Resource. Mr. Young has designed logos for the cosmetic industry’s Max Factor and Vidal Sassoon, and in Japan, Mikimoto Pharmaceuticals and Shu Uemura Cosmetics with boutiques in London, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manhattan and Beverly Hills.
Mr. Young has served as a typographical consultant to Xerox Corporation, Southern California Edison Company and Bechtel Corporation, designed fonts for Esselte Letraset, Agfa/Monotype, Visual Graphics Corporation, and Max Factor, consulted with Emerson Stern, and the Salk Institute on the development of a written American Sign Language alphabet for the National Institutes of Health. For Henry Dreyfuss, he designed a monocase font for Teletype Corporation.
In 2008, Mr. Young unveiled his fourth and most ambitious book, Dangerous Curves: Mastering the Art of Logotype Design, an elegant, thoughtful exploration into the mastery of hand-drawn logotypes in the digital-design age, with the book receiving its debut at the world launch party in the Harvard Club of New York City’s historic Harvard Hall. The handsome, 372 page hard-cover volume complements Mr. Young’s other critically-acclaimed books—Logotypes & Letterforms and Fonts & Logos—and features more than 900 hand-drawn logotype sketches, culminating the iconic designer’s 50-year oeuvre in graphic design and lettering. Fonts & Logos contains a detailed analysis of shapes of letters and relationships among shapes within a font, as well as a discussion of the relationship between a font and a logo, and the creation of logos by type modification. Logotypes and Letterforms contains more example logos (169 finished art and 300 comps drawn by the author).
Mr. Young is a celebrated lecturer and presenter, and has lectured at Portfolio Center in Atlanta; Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, AType I (Association Typographie Internationale) in Vancouver; the California State University system; Brigham Young University; International Diseno Grafico Conferences in Mexico City and Guanajuato; Bergh School of Communication of Stockholm; The Royal Academy of Fine Arts at The Hague; The Chartered Society of Designers in London and Glascow; Ecole Arts Visuelle, Paris; Landor Associates, Tokyo; Hong Kong Technical University; Seoul’s Hong-ik University and Daejon’s Woosong University; Mr. Young has been the featured lecturer and presenter in 40 major cities across the United States for AIGA, the events sponsored by SMART Papers, publishers of his tour-de-force, award winning book The Art of the Letter. He spoke to The Type Club of Toronto, and recently Unisource Canada and SMART Papers, sponsored his talks in Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver. He collaborated on the book The Ligature on Ligatures, an extravagantly-printed and acclaimed book designed by Deanna Kuhlman of Kulhman/Leavitt, St. Louis, with additional text by Penny Benda.
His two fonts: ITC Young Baroque and ITC Eclat are included in Monotype Imaging’s font library; Young Baroque is available from Linotype Library and a variety of distributors. Mr. Young has recently introduced three new fonts: Home Run Script, Home Run Sanscript, and Young Finesse (the latter was featured in HOW Magazine and Communication Arts magazine, respectively). His fonts are available on his website: www.DoyaldYoung.com and on MyFonts.com.
Mr. Young lives in Southern California, and is published by Delphi Press. He holds the title Inaugural Master of the School at Art Center College of Design—the school’s highest faculty title—where he has taught lettering and logotype design for nearly 30 years.
For more information about Doyald Young, or to purchase typefaces or books, please visit www.DoyaldYoung.com.
ABOUT THE AIGA GOLD MEDAL
According to the AIGA, The AIGA Medal has been given to its distinguished practitioners, educators and role models since 1920, recognizing professionals who have inspired the profession with creativity, intelligence, perception and skill. Recipients of the 2009 AIGA Medal will be honored at the sixth annual Design Legends Gala given by AIGA on September 17, 2009 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. For more information about the AIGA, please visit www.aiga.org.
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