35 Most Famous Graphic Designers Of All Time

35 Most Famous Graphic Designers Of All Time

The evolution of the field of graphic design has been driven by the consistent pursuit of creativity witnessed by a couple of individuals in that industry. These graphic designers have been masterminds of their time, pushing boundaries and challenging norms that have previously limited the industry. They have left indelible marks and reshaped the culture associated with graphic design. 

In this article, we highlight the 35 most famous graphic designers of all time. We look at their groundbreaking, innovative and influential works over time. Their designs are reflective of a wide range of styles of graphic design. Some represent minimalist and functional designs, while others are known for their bold and experimental work. Let’s delve into the article. 

1. Paul Rand

Paul Rand was an American art director and graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT. He was one of the first American commercial artists to embrace and practice the Swiss Style of graphic design.

During Rand’s later career, he became increasingly agitated about the rise of postmodernist theory and aesthetics in design. The core ideology that drove Rand’s career, and hence his lasting influence, was the modernist philosophy he so revered. He was inducted into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1972.

2. Saul Bass

Rochester Institute of Technology, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Saul Bass was an American graphic designer and Oscar-winning filmmaker, best known for his design of motion-picture title sequences, film posters, and corporate logos. During his 40-year career, Bass worked for some of Hollywood’s most prominent filmmakers. 

Bass designed some of the most iconic corporate logos in North America, including the Geffen Records logo, Continental Airlines’ 1968 jet stream logo, United Airlines’ 1974 tulip logo and the 1972 Warner Bros. Big W logo.

3. Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser was an American graphic designer. His designs include the I Love New York logo, a 1966 poster for Bob Dylan, and the logos for DC Comics, Stony Brook University, and Brooklyn Brewery. His artwork has been featured in exhibits, and placed in permanent collections in many museums worldwide.

Throughout his long career, he designed many posters, publications and architectural designs. He received many awards for his work, including the National Medal of the Arts award from President Barack Obama in 2009 and was the first graphic designer to receive this award.

4. Massimo Vignelli

Wikimassimovignelli, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Massimo Vignelli was an Italian designer who worked in a number of areas including packaging, houseware, furniture, public signage, and showroom design. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella. His motto was, If you can design one thing, you can design everything,

This motto is reflected in the broad range of his work. Vignelli worked firmly within the modernist tradition. His style stressed simplicity by using basic geometric shapes.

5. David Carson

David Carson is an American graphic designer and design director. Carson surfed professionally before finding employment with magazine Self and Musician. He then moved on to work at Transworld Skateboarding for four years and was then hired as an art director at Beach Culture in 1989. 

Three years later Carson was hired by Ray Gun (magazine), where he stayed for three years. He later created his own design firm named David Carson Design. Carson received the AIGA medal in 2014.

6. Stefan Sagmeister

Merinda123, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Stefan Sagmeister is an Austrian graphic designer, storyteller, and typographer based in New York City. In 1993, Sagmeister founded his company, Sagmeister Inc., to create designs for the music industry.

He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Jay Z, Aerosmith, Talking Heads, Brian Eno and Pat Metheny. He is the author of the design monograph Made You Look which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions. He also teaches in the graduate design department of the School of Visual Arts in New York. Stefan has received two Grammy awards for his work.

7. Herb Lubalin

Herb Lubalin was an American graphic designer. Lubalin created the trademark for the World Trade Center at its opening in 1973. Lubalin spent the last ten years of his life working on a variety of projects, playing a pivotal role in the International Typeface Corporation and its typographic journal U&lc.

In Lubalin’s private studio, he worked on a number of wide-ranging projects, from poster and magazine design to packaging and identity solutions. It was here that he became best known for his work on a series of magazines published by Ralph Ginzburg: Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde.

8. Chip Kidd

Luigi Novi, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Chip Kidd is an American graphic designer known for book covers. Throughout his career, Kidd has been a graphic designer and book designer. According to Graphic Design: American Two, he has been credited with helping to spawn a revolution in the art of American book packaging in the last ten years.

Kidd is a huge fan of comic book media, particularly Batman, and has written and designed book covers for several DC Comics publications. Chip continues to edit comics at Pantheon and frequently writes about graphic design and pop culture for publications including McSweeney’s, The New York Times, Vogue, and Entertainment Weekly. Read more about 25 Most Talented Children’s Books Illustrators. 

9. Neville Brody

Neville Brody is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director. Brody’s experimentation with his self-made sans-serif typography, along with his Pop Art and Dadaism influence, caught the attention of music record companies such as Fetish Records and Stiff Records after he left college. His record cover designs largely consist of work with grunge and punk rock bands. 

Brody created the company Research Studios in 1994 and is a founding member of Fontworks. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He was the Dean of the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art, London until September 2018. He is now a Professor of Communication.

10. April Greiman

Thmonline, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

April Greiman is an American designer widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s.

Greiman finds the title graphic designer too limiting and prefers to call herself a transmedia artist. Her work has inspired designers to develop the computer as a tool of design and to be curious and searching in their design approach. Los Angeles Times called her graphic style an experiment in creating hybrid imagery.

11. Wim Crouwel

Wim Crouwel was a Dutch graphic designer, type designer, and typographer. From 1964 onwards, Crouwel was responsible for the design of the posters, catalogues and exhibitions of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Later, Crouwel designed the Number Postage Stamps for the Dutch PTT, well known in the Netherlands during its circulation from 1976 to 2002.

Crouwel’s graphic work is especially well known, and respected for the use of grid-based layouts and typography that is rooted in the International Typographic Style.

12. Alexey Brodovitch

See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Alexey Brodovitch was a Russian-born American photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his art direction of the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958. Brodovitch was responsible for fitting together type, photographs, and illustrations on the pages of the magazines.

Brodovitch embraced technical developments from the spheres of industrial design, photography, and contemporary painting. By the age of 32, Brodovitch had dabbled in producing posters, china, jewellery, textiles, advertisements, and paintings. Eventually specializing in advertising and graphic design, he had become one of the most respected designers of commercial art in Paris. 

13. Lorraine Wild

Lorraine Wild is a Canadian-born American graphic designer, writer, art historian, and teacher. She is an AIGA Medalist and principal of Green Dragon Office, a design firm that focuses on collaborative work with artists, architects, curators, editors and publishers. 

During her time as director at the California Institute of the Arts, she developed and implemented a new model for graphic design education that emphasized the process of conveying meaning through experimental, conceptual, and formal development. The program challenged modernist graphic design methodology by encouraging students to use personal and emotional experiences in their work.

14. Jessica Walsh

Jessica Walsh, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Jessica Walsh is an American designer, art director, illustrator and educator. She was a partner of the design studio Sagmeister & Walsh, and the founder of the creative agency Walsh&Walsh which is one of the .1% of creative agencies owned by women. In her early career, she worked as an associate art director at Print magazine and had design work and illustrations featured in various books, magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times and New York Times Magazine.

In reflections about her time at Print magazine, she identifies it as one of the best things to happen in her career as it was how she found and developed her personal style. Some of her notable clients Walsh has worked with include; BMW, Snapchat, Barneys New York and Parle Argo.

15. Wolfgang Weingart

Wolfgang Weingart was an internationally known graphic designer and typographer. His work was categorized as Swiss typography and he was credited as the father of New Wave or Swiss Punk typography.

According to Weingart, he took Swiss Typography as his starting point, but then he blew it apart, never forcing any style upon his students. He never intended to create a style. It just happened that the students picked up and misinterpreted the so-called Weingart style and spread it around. In 2014, the Museum of Design in Zurich presented a retrospective of Weingart’s work. Weingart: Typography was the first exhibition in Switzerland which featured his personal work as well as results from his teaching.

16. Michael Bierut

FontShop, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Michael Bierut is a graphic designer, design critic and educator, who has been a partner at design firm Pentagram since 1990. Bierut’s work is in permanent collections around the world in various museums. Bierut began working for Vignelli Associates in New York. 

In 1990, Bierut became a partner in the New York office of Pentagram after a discussion with partner Woody Pirtle. At Pentagram, he has championed the democratization of design to make his design work easily digestible to the viewer. In 2016, he joined the Yale School of Management to integrate design thinking into the program. He designed the logo for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

17. Ruth Ansel

Ruth Ansel is an American graphic designer. She became a co-art director of Harper’s Bazaar in the 1960s alongside Bea Feitler. In the 1970s she was art director of The New York Times Magazine and in the 1980s House & Garden, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. She was the first woman to hold these positions.

In 1992, Ansel opened her own design studio where she continues to produce groundbreaking content today. In 2010 Hall of Femmes: Ruth Ansel was published, highlighting her forty-year career and taking a look at what it was like to be the first woman in these positions. In 2011, Ansel was the recipient of the Art Director’s Club prestigious Hall of Fame Award.

18. Paula Scher

OnCreativity, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Paula Scher is an American graphic designer, painter and art educator in design. She also served as the first female principal at Pentagram, which she joined in 1991.  During her eight years at CBS Records, she is credited with designing as many as 150 album covers a year. 

Scher’s designs were recognized with four Grammy nominations. She is also credited with reviving historical typefaces and design styles. Scher developed a typographic solution based on Art Deco and Russian constructivism, which incorporated outmoded typefaces into her work.

19. Erik Spiekermann

Erik Spiekermann is a German typographer, designer and writer. Between 1972 and 1979, he worked as a freelance graphic designer in London before returning to Berlin and founding MetaDesign with two partners. MetaDesign combined clean, Teutonic-looking information design and complex corporate design systems for clients like BVG, Düsseldorf Airport, Audi, Volkswagen and Heidelberg Printing, amongst others.

In April 2006, the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena awarded Spiekermann an Honorary Doctorship for his contribution to design. Spiekermann is considered a very influential personality in the field of typeface design and information design.

20. Otl Aicher

See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Otl Aicher was a German graphic designer and typographer. Aicher co-founded and taught at the influential Ulm School of Design. He is known for having led the design team of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, and for overseeing the creation of its prominently used system of pictograms.

Aicher was heavily involved in corporate branding and is considered one of the pioneers of Corporate design. Among others, he was influential in the corporate identity of the company Braun, and he designed the logo for the German airline Lufthansa in 1969. Otl Aicher also helped to design the logo of the Munich Olympics. 

21. Rick Valicenti

Rick Valicenti is an American graphic designer. Valicenti found the photography scene in Chicago boring, so he worked to create a commercial design portfolio, securing a position at Bruce Beck Design. After Beck retired, he opened his studio, R. Valicenti Design, in 1981. 

In 1989, looking to change the direction of his studio practice, he founded Thirst, a Chicago-based design collaborative devoted to art, function, and authentic human presence. The studio is known for taking risks and doing conventional jobs unconventionally. Read more about Top 30 Abstract Artists of the 20th Century. 

22. Bradbury Thompson

Rochester Institute of Technology, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bradbury Thompson was an American graphic designer and art director known for his work designing magazines and postage stamps. A signature design from Thompson was his redesign of the King James Bible into the Washburn College Bible in 1979. 

Thompson served on the faculty of Yale University from 1956 to 1995. Thompson developed in 1950 a font called Alphabet 26 or a monoalphabetic, an alphabet whose uppercase and lowercase forms of each letter were identical, and the case was expressed through letter size only. 

23. Aries Moross

Aries Moross is an English graphic designer, artist, illustrator and art director based in London. They mostly focus on lettering and typography in their works of art. In 2007, Moross launched vinyl-only record label, Isomorph Records, set up in order to explore further the relationship between design and music.

Moross is also known for typographic illustration. Their achievements include a nationwide billboard campaign for Cadburys, a signature clothing range for Topshop and illustrations for Vogue Magazine.

24. Mirko Ilić

Mirko Ilić is a Bosnian-born comics artist and graphic designer based in New York City. Ilić is a co-author of several notable books about graphic design. His work is also in collections and many other institutions and museums.

His work is also in collections of Smithsonian Institution, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many other institutions and museums. Since 2017, Ilić is the creator and organizer of the Tolerance Traveling Poster Show, an international exhibition that brings together leading designers from around the world to create posters on the topic of Tolerance.

25. Seymour Chwast

Seymour Chwast is an American graphic designer, illustrator, and type designer. Chwast is famous for his commercial artwork, which includes posters, food packaging, magazine covers, and publicity art.

Often referred to as the left-handed designer, Chwast’s unique graphic design melded social commentary and a distinctive style of illustration. In 1985, he received the AIGA Medal.

26. Louis Dorfsman 

Rochester Institute of Technology, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Louis Dorfsman was an American graphic designer who oversaw almost every aspect of the advertising and corporate identity for the Columbia Broadcasting System in his 40 years with the network.

His design jobs included making displays for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Dorfsman served in the United States Army during World War II, using his design skills. Dorfsman’s designs were described by The New York Times as featuring clear typography, simple slogans and smart illustration.

27. Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. She is an Emerita Distinguished Professor of New Genres at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. 

In 2021, Kruger was included in Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 Most Influential People. Kruger’s words and pictures have been displayed in both galleries and public spaces, as well as offered as framed and unframed photographs, posters, postcards, T-shirts, electronic signboards, façade banners, and billboards.

28. Ellen Lupton

Kristian Bjornard, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, curator, writer, critic, and educator. Known for her love of typography, She is the founding director of the Graphic Design M.F.A. degree program at Maryland Institute College of Art, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking.

Lupton has written numerous books on graphic design for a variety of audiences. She has contributed to several publications, including Print, Eye, I.D., Metropolis, and The New York Times.

29. Louise Fili

Louise Fili is an American graphic designer recognized for the use of typography and quality design. Her work often draws inspiration from her love of Italy, Modernism, and European Art Deco styles. 

Considered a leader in the postmodern return to historical styles in book jacket design, Fili explores historic typography combined with modern colours and compositions. Since opening her own design studio, her work specializes in restaurant identity, food-related logos, and packaging. 

30. Debbie Millman

Chase Jarvis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Debbie Millman is a designer who is best known as the host of the podcast Design Matters. She has authored six books and is the President Emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and chair, one of only five women to hold the position over 100 years.

She co-founded the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City with Steven Heller. Her illustrations have appeared in many major publications, including New York Magazine, Design Observer, and Fast Company and her artwork has been included in many museums and institutes including the Design Museum of Chicago and the Boston Biennale.

31. Peter Saville

Peter Saville is an English art director and graphic designer. He designed many record sleeves for Factory Records, which he co-founded in 1978 alongside Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus.

In 1979, Saville moved from Manchester to London and became the art director of the Virgin offshoot Dindisc. He subsequently created a body of work that furthered his refined take on modernism. Saville was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to design.

32. Rebecca Méndez

Rebecca Méndez is a Mexican-American artist and graphic designer. Rebeca has won the three most significant awards in the field of design: The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Communication Design, in 2012, the AIGA Medal in 2017, and induction to the One Club Hall of Fame in 2017.

On December 20, 2019, she was bestowed with the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts by her alma mater, ArtCenter College of Design, which honours her as an artist and designer who is able to include great skill and innovation, think in new ways, and move the social and cultural needle. Her artwork has been credited as making Méndez a strong asset to the fight against prejudice against women and intolerance due to her focus on women in society. 

33. David Airey

David Airey is an entrepreneurial graphic designer from Northern Ireland. Designer of enduring logos and visual identities, David Airey runs an independent graphic design studio in Bangor, Northern Ireland. 

Airey writes three of the most popular graphic design blogs on the Internet: DavidAirey.com, LogoDesignLove.com, and IdentityDesigned.com.

34. Ivan Chermayeff

Ivan Chermayeff is one of the best American graphic designers, the son of the Russian-born, British architect Serge Chermayeff. Graduated from the Phillips Academy of Andover, Massachusetts in 1950. He studied at Harvard until 1952, and the Institute of Design until 1954.

Chermayeff came to be known as a prolific graphic designer of the 20th century. In his design career of six decades, Chermayeff made various illustrations, posters, collages, sculptures and of course logo designs for notable brands. Among Chermayeff’s countless, immediately recognisable designs are the Smithsonian’s yellow sun and the Museum of Modern Art’s MoMA logotype.

35. Tom Geismar

Tom Geismar is an American graphic designer. Geismar has designed more than a hundred corporate identity programs and established abstract corporate symbols. The unifying element in his work is the repetition of symbols which gives new life to the form.

Geismar was awarded the AIGA medal in 1979. In 1998, he was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. In 2014, he was awarded the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement along with Chermayeff and the School of Visual Arts’ 26th Masters Series Award recipient.

All of these famous designers have made a significant contribution to the field of graphic design, and their work continues to inspire and influence designers around the world. Their visionary contributions have left an indelible mark in the industry of graphic design and will continue to speak volumes about them even to the generations to come.