Brian Boyd

Creative director and managing principal

RBMM

Brian Boyd began his career at The Richards Group in 1978 after graduating from the University of North Texas with a bachelor’s of fine arts degree in advertising design. He is a founding member of RBMM, where he is creative director and managing principal. He also has served as a consultant for Click Here, guiding Web site design for The Richards Group’s interactive subsidiary. Boyd’s work has been recognized in every major national and inter-national creative competition, including works chosen for inclusion in the Library of Congress. Brian has taught graphic design at his alma mater and Texas A&M Commerce.

Tom Brown

founder and creative director

Tom Brown Art+Design

Tom Brown is the founder and creative director of Tom Brown Art+Design located in Port Moody, a small town outside of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The studio has specialized in the creation of award winning books and magazines since 1997. Beginning his career as a magazine art director, he ended up in New York redesigning Jann Wenner’s Men’s Journal and becoming the founding design director of Travel and Leisure Golf for American Express Publishing. Brown is currently the art director of Money Sense magazine, the consulting art director and designer of SKI magazine, and the creative director and designer of DestinAsian and Fine Interiors magazines.

Dan Ibarra

co-founder

Aesthetic Apparatus

Dan Ibarra is co-founder, with Michael Byzewski, of Aesthetic Apparatus, a two-man Minneapolis, Minnesota, design/print studio. The duo first met in 1998 at Planet Propaganda (formerly Planet Design Company) in Madison, Wisconsin. Combining their mutual interest in printmaking and music, the two began to build a ground-work of limited-edition hand-printed concert posters that gained enough recognition to convince them to uproot to the Twin Cities in 2002. They walk a fine line between design and fine art by hand printing all their own limited- edition print and poster work for clients and teaching design at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Janine James

founder/principal

The Moderns

Janine James is the founder/principal of The Moderns in New York City. Before founding The Moderns in 1992, James was director of design and product development for ICF. Prior to that, she worked at Swanke Hayden Connell and was part of the innovative design lab at Herman Miller’s London office. She lectures extensively on strategy-based culture-building and how companies can leverage sustainable practices to build brand equity and gain market share. She was recently a teaching fellow at Harvard University, also a keynote speaker at the AIGA Conference in Vancouver and a visiting Walsh professor at the University of Oregon.

Rick Landesberg

Founder

Landesberg Design

Rick Landesberg founded Pittsburgh-based Landesberg Design in 1982. His ten-person practice provides branding and identity programs, print and interactive communications, and environmental graphic design and signage to clients including The Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations, The Heinz Endowments and Kenyon College. Landesberg has lectured on design issues nationally and abroad, and taught design at Carnegie Mellon University for fifteen years. Rick was a founding board member of AIGA Pittsburgh and is a member of the Association of Professional Design Firms and the Society for Environmental Graphic Design.

Jeff Matz

Founding partner

Lure Design

Jeff Matz is a founding partner of Lure Design in Orlando, Florida, a full-service design studio working in corporate communi-ca-tions, branding, packaging and book design. Most notably, Jeff has been recognized for his hand screen-printed posters for such artists as Wilco and the Dave Matthews Band. His work has been published in publications such as Communication Arts, Paste, Print and a number of books including Graphis Posters, Swag-Art Rock of the 90s, The Art of Modern Rock and Rockport’s One Color Graphics. A graduate of Ringling School of Art & Design, Jeff currently serves on the board of the Orlando chapter of the AIGA.

Noreen Morioka

Partner

AdamsMorioka,

Noreen Morioka is a partner at AdamsMorioka in Beverly Hills, California. AdamsMorioka’s clients include ABC, Adobe, Gap, Old Navy, Frank Gehry Associates, Nickelodeon, USC, Sundance and The Walt Disney Company. In 2000, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibited the firm’s work in a solo retrospective. Sean and Noreen are both Fellows of the Inter-national Design Conference at Aspen. Noreen is a past president of the Los Angeles Chapter of AIGA and chair of the AIGA National President’s Council. AdamsMorioka’s book, Logo Design Workbook, was published in 2004 and their new book, Color Workbook, will be published later this year.

Ann Willoughby

Ann Willoughby is the founder/president of Willoughby Design Group, a brand strategy and identity design firm formed in 1978. The firm provides strategic oversight for design programs for Fortune 500 companies as well as brand start-ups. Ann and her seventeen associates holistic approach to design and business is reflected in the company’s unique studio environment. The office, complete with a meditation room and the off-site Willoughby Design Barn retreat destination, helps attract and retain top creative talent and brings blue chip clients to Kansas City. Ann serves as a director on the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) National Board.

Kym Abrams

Founder

Kym Abrams Design

Kym Abrams founded Chicago, Illinois-based Kym Abrams Design in 1982 on a philosophy of doing great work for and with great people. Her firm collaborates with foundations, museums, publishers, educators and nonprofits to create integrated design and editorial strategies. Her work has received over 100 national and inter-national design awards from industry magazines including Communication Arts, Graphis, Print and AR100. She holds a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Illinois Champaign/Urbana. Abrams served as a board member of AIGA/Chicago and received Chicago Women in Design’s first Woman of the Year award.