Speaker Biographies
BRIAN COLLINS & LELAND MASCHMEYER
Founder & Director of Strategy, COLLINS:
Brian Collins is the Chairman and Chief Creative Office for COLLINS:. For almost a decade Collins led the brand and innovation division of Ogilvy & Mather. His team built communications and design solutions for some of the world’s most iconic companies, including Unilever, Kraft, Mattel, Motorola, AT&T, Coca-Cola and American Express. In response to the events of 9/11, his team produced the exhibit and book Brotherhood, a tribute to New York City’s firefighters. Collins’ team also produced a traveling international photo exhibit that explored what “beauty” meant to 60 female photographers. The intent of the exhibit and website, entitled Beyond Compare, was to broaden the definition of beauty to include women of all ages, shapes, and colors. As such, it helped launch Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty.”
Brian Collins produced The Ecology of Design, a handbook on environmental design thinking, published in 1996 by the AIGA. He also initiated the annual forum “Designism: Design for Social Change,” sponsored by the Art Directors Club of New York. Panelists discuss the direction of the design industry and explore whether design and advertising demand a “social context.”
He created COLLINS: because he wished to explore ways to take better advantage of the changes driving technology and marketing, as well as to connect people with emerging ideas and brands.
Leland Maschmeyer is the Director of Strategy for COLLINS:. Most recently at McKinney Advertising in North Carolina, Leland helped bring imagination to bear on the stories and fortunes of companies such as Virgin Atlantic, Travelocity, NASDAQ and others. These efforts were awarded a collection of honors including the AAAA’s Jay Chiat Gold for strategic excellence and creative inspiration, Gold and Silver MIXX awards for interactive excellence as well as Silver and Bronze Effie awards for outstanding campaign efficacy. In 2005, Leland was awarded the AAAA’s Pick of the Litter honor as one of the outstanding up-and-coming strategists in the industry. He also teamed with communications researchers to examine the interactive space. Their resulting paper, “Interruptions and Online Information Processing: The Role of Interruption Type, Interruption Content, and Interruption Frequency,” was selected for presentation at the 2005 International Communication Association conference.Leland graduated with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, during his time with McKinney, regularly lectured at the University.
Blending a strategic mind with an artistic soul, Leland believes companies can create abundant economic value by facilitating positive personal and social change. His blog, maschmeyer.blogspot.com, explores this idea and extends to readers the chance to step into a new way of thinking and be challenged by it.
JESSICA HELFAND & WILLIAM DRENTTEL
Partners, Winterhouse Studio
Jessica Helfand is an author, columnist and lecturer on graphic design. She is the partner of William Drenttel of Winterhouse Studios, Winterhouse Editions and Winterhouse Institute located in Falls Village, Connecticut. She is a critic in graphic design at Yale University, where she earned her M.F.A. in graphic design and her B.A. in graphic design and architectural theory. Winterhouse was formerly known as Jessica Helfand | William Drenttel. Its website describes the studio as “a design consultancy that concentrates on editorial design and the development of new models for old and new media.” In 2002, Helfand and Drenttel co-founded Design Observer, a blog of design and cultural criticism: today, the site is the largest design publication in the world with over a million site visits a month.
William Drenttel is a graphic designer, editor and currently a partner in Winterhouse Studios and president emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). Drenttel received a BA in European Cultural Studies from Princeton University. Drenttel has enjoyed many major commissions and positions in the graphic design community. From 1985 to 1997 Drenttel was a partner in the New York design firm Drenttel Doyle Partners. Drenttel is the partner of Jessica Helfand of Winterhouse Studios, Winterhouse Editions and Winterhouse Institute located in Falls Village, Connecticut. He is also co-editor of Below the Fold:, a new journal of visual culture published by Winterhouse, and the founder of the Polling Place Photo Project, an online election documentation project. In 2006, Drenttel co-founded the Winterhouse Writing Awards: this $5000 prize for innovation in design writing seeks to develop new writers interested in design and cultural criticism. In 2008, Drenttel will be a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management.
Partner, Pentagram Design
Abbott Miller was born in Indiana and studied design at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. In 1989 he founded the multidisciplinary studio Design/Writing/Research where, in collaboration with Ellen Lupton, he pioneered the concept of “designer as author” undertaking projects in which content and form are developed in a symbiotic relationship. He joined Pentagram’s New York office as a partner in June 1999.
Abbott’s projects are often concerned with the cultural role of design and the public life of the written word. At Pentagram he leads a team designing books, magazines, catalogs, identities, exhibitions, and creating editorial projects.
Abbott has received numerous design honors, including medals from the Society for Publication Designers and three nominations for National Magazine Awards. In 1994 Abbott, together with Ellen Lupton, was awarded the first annual Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Graphic Designers (SEGD) and of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). He teaches in the Graphic Design Department of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He is a contributing editor of Eye magazine and the co-author of four books, most recently Design/Writing/Research: Writing on Graphic Design.
Partner, Rizco Design
Debra Rizzi is a founding partner of Rizco Design and dedicated 2007 to going green. In May 2007, Debra led the design firm in the launch of Beleaf, a measurable sustainability program that ensures that a percentage of each client’s job is environmentally friendly. Since its inception, the program has been featured by Graphic Design USA, Biz Bash and Renourish.com. Additionally, Debra has delivered presentations on green design initiatives to the New York Celebrity Assistants Association, Graphic Arts Association Green Printing Conference in Philadelphia and Art Directors Club of New Jersey’s Thinking Creatively Conference. Debra was recently named to NJ Biz’s 2008 “Top 40 Under 40” Awards Program that honors men and women who have been making headlines in their field and who share a commitment to business growth, professional excellence and to the community.
Prior to Rizco Design, Debra was a manager of the creative department at Porter Novelli, a marketing-based public relations firm where she handled creative strategy, design and production for a variety of clients and contributed to the launch of Kellogg’s Smart Start Cereal, Gillette Mach 3 Razor, GlaxoSmithKline’s World No Tobacco Day and the Rolling Stones Bridges to Babylon Concert Tour.
In between being a mom and businesswoman, Debra acts as Awards Co-Chair for the Jersey Shore Public Relations and Advertising Association, Awards Chair for the 2008 Art Directors Club of New Jersey and is an active member of the NJ Ad Club and writes for Printing News and the Art Directors Club of NJ’s New Directions newsletter. Debra is a graduate of Bucknell University with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and a second major in Art History.
Partner, Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios
Jurek Wajdowicz is co-founder and Creative Director of Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios. He began his career as a graphic artist in Lodz, Poland, where he graduated summa cum laude from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design. He came to New York to become the art director at Lubalin, Burns & Co., and in 1982 co-founded Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios, now widely recognized as one of the leading practitioners of socially responsible design. Wajdowicz and his partner, Lisa LaRochelle, have earned top honors from many prestigious design forums including the AIGA, the AR 100 Show, the British Design & Advertising Awards, the Art Directors Club and numerous major design publications.
Works from the studio for The Rockefeller Foundation, Medecins Sans Frontieres, the United Nations, SMART Papers, Magnum Photos, Domtar and the International Rescue Committee are represented in the permanent collections of the U.S. Library of Congress, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Switzerland, the Warsaw Museum of Posters and the Hamburg Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe. Wajdowicz is recognized internationally as a passionate advocate of issue-driven, photojournalistic approach to modern graphic design.
Founder, Happy Cog Studios
Jeffrey Zeldman is a lecturer and author on web design. He also runs his own web design studio, Happy Cog, and has maintained a blog, Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report, on the topic since 1995. His most recent book is titled Designing With Web Standards. Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a group of professional website designers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the standards promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Zeldman is held to be one of a vanguard of proficient visual designers who have adopted and promoted the use of standards-based, cross-browser solutions to web design problems. His books and websites have helped promote a general improvement in the technical, visual design, usability and accessibility of websites, through the use of XHTML code and CSS.
In 1998, he began the e-zine A List Apart, which focuses on best practices in web design and development, and co-founded The Web Standards Project, which persuaded Netscape and Microsoft to support the same standards in their web browsers. Once browsers supported standards, A List Apart taught designers to use them. Zeldman’s book Designing With Web Standards brought standards awareness to a new international audience. In 2007, A List Apart conducted a survey of web designers, creating one of the first public pictures of the profession as it is practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.
