• Celebrating 100 years of design that

    About This Exhibit
    Swipe To Begin
    Join the Conversation
    List of conversations

    AIGA advances design as a professional craft, strategic advantage and vital cultural force—and in 2014, the profession’s largest community turns 100. To celebrate American design and its profound impact, AIGA (with Second Story Interactive Studios) presents “100 Years of Design”—a living resource for this landmark year and into the future.

    Selected works (primarily from AIGA’s Design Archives), new interviews with leading designers, and significant moments from AIGA history are woven together in narratives that represent how design informs, connects, delights, influences and assists us. Whether you are a design practitioner, student, or simply curious about how design is relevant to your own life, contribute your own favorite examples to the project. Celebrate AIGA by celebrating design!

    Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts
    Close

  • Connects

    By giving form to abstract relationships, design links people in groups large and small, inherent and voluntary. Designed objects, environments and experiences are powerful reminders of our diverse human ties, building solidarity within and between communities.

  • Informs

    Designers not only process and disseminate information of all kinds, they shape its reception and viability. Whether the goal is to explain a new idea or to clarify the complex, design performs a critical role between knowledge and understanding.

  • Assists

    Designers involve empathy in problem solving, putting them in a unique position to meet human needs. From minuscule print to extensive wayfinding systems to immeasurable altruism, design improves everyday life in precise and profound ways.

  • Delights

    Joy, humor, and beauty are fundamental needs; no less than other goals of design, they require serious skill. Playful books, elegant type, tone-setting titles—these sources of graphic pleasure satisfy and inspire in sometimes surprising ways.

  • Influences

    Design mediates between people and decisions. Whether subtle or overt, consumer or political, design embodies a point of view and can affect how many feel about a product, issue or institution—potentially changing opinion and compelling action.