RIT Professor Among Inductees Into Prestigious Art Directors Club Hall of Fame

The impressive list of inductees into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame throughout the past 35 years includes such luminaries as Walt Disney, Andy Warhol, Saul Bass and Paul Rand.

R. Roger Remington, Massimo and Lella Vignelli Distinguished Professor of Design at Rochester Institute of Technology, is among the inductees of the 2008 Art Directors Club Hall of Fame.

Representing the fields of advertising, design, architecture, filmmaking, illustration, academia and photography, recipients will be honored at a gala event on Nov. 6 at the ADC Gallery in New York City. ADC, the premier organization for integrated media and the longest-running global creative collective of its kind, established the ADC Hall of Fame in 1971 as a unique cross-disciplinary acknowledgement of the most renowned professionals in visual arts and communications. To view a complete list, visit www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/.

The Art Directors Club Hall of Fame Laureates for 2008 are:

• Alex Bogusky, co-chairman, Crispin Porter + Bogusky
  
• Ray Eames (posthumous), designer, architect and filmmaker
  
• Sir John Hegarty, chairman, worldwide creative director, Bartle Bogle Hegarty
  
• Maira Kalman, illustrator, artist, designer
  
• John Maeda, president, Rhode Island School of Design
  
• R. Roger Remington, Massimo and Lella Vignelli Distinguished Professor of Design, Rochester Institute of Technology
  
• Bruce Weber, fashion photographer

“It is humbling yet difficult to be objective about this honor because suddenly one is grouped with one’s heroes,” says Remington. “In the design profession this honor is comparable with the Nobel Prize.”

Remington has critical interests in design studies, research, writing and graphic design practice. Since 1982 he has been engaged in the research, interpretation and preservation of the history of graphic design. He was the lead developer in establishing the Graphic Design Archive and the Vignelli Center for Design at RIT. The Graphic Design Archive features over 30 existing graphic design collections of Modernist American graphic design pioneers such as Lester Beall, Will Burtin, Cipe Pineles, William Golden and Alvin Lustig.

The Vignelli Center for Design will house the archive of renowned designers Massimo and Lella Vignelli, whose graphic and product designs are icons of international design. Their unique design achievements have been exhibited around the world and are included in many major collections. The center will serve as a resource for students and scholars from around the world and provide space for the teaching of design including classrooms, archival storage, offices, and critique and exhibition space.

Remington adds: “With more than 45 years of teaching and graphic design practice, it has been my major goal to help students achieve the highest possible level of visual aesthetics in their work. Developing the Graphic Design Archive and now the Vignelli Center for Design Studies has been a major contribution to students, to RIT and to the profession. Nothing in the world equals these archives. Based on this resource, my work in developing courses in the history of graphic design has strengthened the curriculum in RIT’s School of Design. These archives have also been the basis for four published books on graphic design history.”

Remington authored Nine Pioneers in American Graphic Design (MIT Press), Lester Beall: Trailblazer of American Graphic Design (W.W. Norton) and American Modernism: Graphic Design, 1920-1960 (Laurence King Publishers, London/Yale University Press). He recently co-authored Design and Science—The Life and Career of Will Burtin (Lund Humphries) with Robert S. P. Fripp. In The New York Times, reviewer Steven Heller writes, “After a recent spate of graphic designer biographies, this detailed monograph is definitely overdue. Burtin’s virtually forgotten work, like the exhibition ‘Metabolism—the Cycle of Life,’ prefigures the interaction design practiced today on the Web and reveals just how entertaining well-articulated graphic and exhibition design about science can be.”