Gail Anderson (born 1962) is an American graphic designer based in New York.
She worked for Rolling Stone from 1987 to 2002, achieving the position of senior art director. She also designed a number of book covers, Broadway music show posters and a postage stamp commemorating the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Anderson is the chair of Design and Advertising faculties at the School of Visual Arts in NY.
Gail Anderson. Photo by Declan Van Welie. Courtesy of Gail Anderson.
Rolling Stone magazine spread, 1997: Marilyn Manson. Art director: Fred Woodward. Designers: Fred Woodward, Gail Anderson. Photographer: Matt Mahurin.
“Most of what I do is typography-driven, whether it’s through type-play or working with hierarchies in editorial content. More and more, I’m interested in creating editorial content as much as designing it—I’m all about communication through design,” Anderson said in an interview with Inside Design. For much of her career at Rolling Stone, working with art director Fred Woodward, Anderson fine-tuned her typographic expressionism, devising quirky letterforms out of traditional and non-traditional materials. In 2015, Princeton Architectural Press published Outside the Box, Anderson’s book dedicated to hand-drawn packaging. The book explores one of the biggest trends in the packaging design world today: visual authenticity.
Some of Gail’s work for Rolling Stone. Illustration by Alex Ostroy.
A page spread of Outside the Box book.
Rebeca Méndez (born 1962) is a scholar, artist,and designer of Mexican origin, known for her works at the boundaries between academia, art, and design.
Rebeca Méndez. Photo by Michael D. Powers.
Méndez’s art practice is in photography, film, video, and installation, exploring the nature of perception and representation. She once said “boundaries are like open invitations to me.” Today she is a professor at UCLA Design Media Arts Department and an internationally-renowned multimedia artist.
Grass, 2006. Public art at the University of Cincinnati Rec Center by Rebeca Méndez.
In 2006, Méndez was commissioned to create a public art installation on four cone-like structures at the campus of the University of Cincinnati. For several months, she photographed grass from various points of view and under different weather conditions. This allowed light and wind to create visual differences, revealing the patterns that a blade of grass produces through complex organization. Méndez considers the experience of a journey an artistic process and many of her works are based on travels to unfamiliar or extreme places like Iceland, Patagonia and the Sahara Desert. She uses video and photography to examine the cycles and systems, the forces and cross-rhythmic tensions that make natural phenomena emerge. Committed to a sustainable future, Méndez founded the UCLA CounterForce Lab, a research and fieldwork studio for art, design and environment.
CircumSolar, Migration 2, 2013. Public art at the Pico Rivera Public Library in Los Angeles by Rebeca Méndez.
Poster for UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Lecture Series printed in a plastic trash bag, 1997. Design by Rebeca Méndez.