Oxford Languages, Google’s online English dictionary, defines graphic design as “the art or skill of combining text and pictures in advertisements, magazines, or books,”—but it is so much more than that.

Graphic design enhances how we communicate with one another, provides space for individuality and expression, and simply gives our brains a break from looking at plain text all day. Studies suggest that ninety percent of information transmitted in the human brain is visual, making graphic designers an important player in processing and transmitting society’s abundance of information. But how well represented are African Americans, and how well represented is our history in the field of graphic design, when only 3.5% of African Americans make up the industry?

Gail Anderson is one of that 3.5%. Anderson is a New York-based designer, writer, educator, co-author, partner at Anderson Newton Design, and one of the most influential Black designers in the game.

Courtesy of Gail Anderson

Anderson is well-known for her passion for typography—the art and technique of arranging letters and text to make words legible and appealing. As she expanded and refined her skills in type, Anderson has utilized traditional as well as non-traditional types, which can range from wood to found objects. She includes these intricate compositions into commercialized fonts/lettering, old/vintage advertising posters and lettering, and even pages from antique lettering books. Her vast body of work offers great insight into the kinds of projects that graphic designers work on.

Achievements 

With over three decades of experience in the design field, Gail Anderson has received awards from major organizations such as the Type Directors Club, The Art Directors Club, Graphis, Communication Arts, Print, The Society of Publication Designers, and The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), where she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Medal in 2008. She has been featured in various graphic design magazines including Computer Arts (UK), designNET (Korea), kAk (Russia), STEP Inside Design, and Graphic Design (USA). She has also made contributions to Imprint and Uppercase magazines.

In addition to the NMAAHC, her work is included in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the Library of Congress, and the Milton Glaser Design Archives at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Anderson, along with Steven Heller, has co-authored over sixteen books including The Typographic Universe, New Modernist Type, New Ornamental Type, New Vintage Type, Astounding Photoshop Effects, American Typeplay, The Savage Mirror, and Graphic Wit.

Academic Beginnings and Career History

Gail Anderson began her impactful career at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, where she produced student designs for the school’s campaign related to arts, design, and education. When discussing her experiences at the SVA on the Revision Path Podcast, Anderson reflects on a quote she remembers from a Paul Davis poster, “We had a poster in the corner, it was the Paul Davis poster: ‘to be good is not enough when you dream of being great,’ and I was like, I want to go to that school.” After graduating from the SVA with a BFA, Anderson worked as an Assistant Designer at Vintage Books (Random House) in 1984, then went on to work at The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine from 1985–1987. In 1987, Anderson began a fifteen-year career at Rolling Stone, moving from designer to department director and eventually becoming senior art director.

From 2002 through 2010, Anderson served as creative director of design at SpotCo, a New York City advertising agency that creates artwork for Broadway and institutional theater. At SpotCo, Anderson moved from editorial design to advertising, and created playbills, posters, and book covers with some of the more well-known images in American pop culture. She has also been called upon to design for productions created by African American playwrights, and is responsible for the poster design for George C. Wolfe’s Harlem Song Broadway musical and for August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean.

Current Work and Stamp Design

Today, Anderson is the chair of the BFA Advertising and Design departments at the School of Visual Arts and serves as creative director at the School of Visual Arts Press. Anderson is also on the Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee for the US Post Office. In 2013, the US Postal Service commissioned Anderson to design the commemorative postage stamp for the Emancipation Proclamation’s 150th anniversary.

Anderson was the second African American designer requested to create a commemorative stamp, with the first being Georg Olden, who designed the Proclamation’s 100th anniversary stamp in 1963. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the states the proclamation included "are, and henceforward shall be free." Although the proclamation did not immediately end slavery across the United States, it set the stage for freedom. In an interview with The Atlantic, Anderson discusses the impact her stamp has had on spreading the importance of the Emancipation Proclamation. She says, "As one speaker mentioned during the First Day of Issue ceremony, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation is one of our nation's most important and transformative documents. If the stamp can remind people of what the Emancipation Proclamation helped accomplish, then it is very important."

The rectangular stamp’s design is colorful and celebratory, with text in black and red ink that quotes the lines “Henceforward Shall Be Free” of the Emancipation Proclamation. The stamps went on sale on January 1, 2013. When the initial run of 40,000,000 stamps sold out, USPS issued an additional 10,000,000 as well as 5,000 letterpress posters of the stamp.

NMAAHC’s collection of Anderson’s work includes several objects related to her stamp design. In addition to the official red and black stamps printed against a tan background, Anderson created promotional posters with similar designs. In these works, Anderson’s use of vibrant hues and saturated colors convey the urgency of the freedom message. Bright yellow lines radiate outward in one design; in another, an orange sun-like image frame the words “shall be free.”

Personal History

Anderson’s family, originally from Jamaica, migrated to the Bronx, New York when she was a child. She is a first-generation American and first-generation college student, being the very first to graduate in her family.

Some of Anderson’s earliest design creations were Jackson 5 and Partridge Family pretend magazines, which she created by drawing and cutting out images from magazines. As Anderson got older, she discovered her love for “commercial art,” now referred to as advertising, and decided she was interested in pursuing this career field. Today, her Jackson 5 fan magazine is one of her favorite creations.

In her spare time, Anderson has taken up collecting as a hobby, accumulating over 300 pairs of salt and pepper shakers, bottle caps, cast-iron toys, and an “exhibit” on Mexican crosses on the walls of her home. She is currently working on collecting botanica candles and products in relation to Santeria, a polytheistic African diasporic religion that combines Catholicism and West African Vodou (or Voodoo).

Anderson’s work surpasses searchable definitions of graphic design. Although first inspired by magazines, and later by advertising, the impact of Anderson’s engaging and dynamic work is vast. With topics that range from the Emancipation Proclamation to art in the wake of COVID to designs for theatrical performances, she has used her creativity to make meaning for important historical and cultural moments. One such moment was when Anderson created a poster with the words “Reclaiming My Time,” in homage to the phrase Congresswoman Maxine Waters used during a congressional hearing in 2017. Waters’ phrase became a powerful refrain that echoed online, and Anderson’s poster smartly replicates that echoing effect in its multilayered typographical design.

Anderson has published some of her creations in her book, Hand-Drawn Packaging from Around the World, where she also documents her skillful talent in graphic design. She is currently working on a book project on Black graphic designers. As Gail Anderson continues to breathe life into words through her work, we cannot wait to see what she does next.

BROWSE OBJECTS DESIGNED BY GAIL ANDERSON IN THE NMAAHC COLLECTION

Written by Marissa Anne Coleman, Architecture and Design Curatorial Intern, Spring 2022
Published on June 7, 2023