Tom Geismar is a founding partner of Chermayeff & Geismar and widely considered a pioneer of American graphic design. During the past four decades he has designed more than a hundred corporate identity programs. His designs for Xerox, Chase Manhattan Bank, Best Products, Gemini Consulting, PBS, Univision, Rockefeller Center and, most notably, Mobil Oil have received worldwide acclaim. Tom has also had major responsibility for many of the firm's exhibition designs and world's fair pavilions. His projects include such major tourist attractions as the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, the Statue of Liberty Museum, the Truman Presidential Library, and the redesigned Star-Spangled Banner exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. He has received all the major awards in the field, including one of the first Presidential Design Awards for helping to establish a national system of standardized transportation symbols. Tom Geismar concurrently attended the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown, he received a master's degree in graphic design from Yale University, School of Art and Architecture.

Sagi Haviv is a partner and designer at Chermayeff & Geismar. Among his numerous projects for the firm are the logo designs and identity systems for the Library of Congress, National Parks of New York Harbor, Radio Free Europe, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the fashion brand Armani Exchange. Sagi designed the award-winning animation "Logomotion," a ten-minute tribute to the firm's famous trademarks that was not only the first animated trademark sequence of such scope, but also introduced a new approach to showcasing a firm's portfolio. Sagi's other motion graphics work includes the opening sequence for the Emmy Award winning PBS documentary series Carrier. Sagi joined Chermayeff & Geismar in 2003 after graduating from The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City.

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is a graphic designer, author, and professor. She received a B.A. in art history from Barnard College an M.F.A. from Yale in 1964, and honorary doctorate degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts and Moore College of Art. Sheila was designated "Design Legend" by the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 2006 and a "Grandmaster' by the Art Directors Club in 2009.

Sheila's work in books, posters, magazines, and newspapers and fine press editions are in the special collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris and in a number of university and public libraries. Her numerous publications on art and culture include special issues of Arts in Society, the Aspen Times, Everywoman, The Photographs of Dorothy Norman and The Motown Album, as well as permanent public installations.

Sheila worked as designer for Chanticleer Press in New York, Yale University Press in New Haven and Olivetti Publicita in Milan before opening "The Sheila Studio" in 1970. In 1971, at the California Institute of the Arts, she created the first women's design program and, in 1973, founded the Woman's Building and its Women's Graphic Center in Los Angeles. In 1981, she initiated and chaired the Department of Communication Design at Otis/Parsons. Ms. de Bretteville joined the Yale faculty in 1990 as the first tenured woman in the Yale University School of Art where she currently teaches as Caroline M. Street Professor of Graphic Design.

Clement Mok is a designer, digital pioneer, software publisher/developer, author, and design patent holder. Mok, a former creative director at Apple, founded multiple successful design-related businesses - Studio Archetype, CMCD and NetObjects. In the late 90's, he was the Chief Creative Officer of Sapient, an e-service consulting company. In the early 2000's he was the president of AIGA, the country's largest professional design organization. Currently, he consults for Fortune 500 companies on a variety of design planning and user experience related projects. He also heads up a subscription-based royalty-free stock image business -- Visual Symbols -- and consults for Sapient on developing new design service offerings.

He has consulted for clients like Adobe, American Express, Apple, Hallmark, IBM, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Nintendo, QVC, Sony, United Airlines, UPS and Wells Fargo Bank. An advocate of design and technology practices, Mok's been recognized by numerous professional organizations and publications with hundreds of awards and citations. His designs have been exhibited in museums and galleries in Europe and Asia.

He has been published internationally and has received hundreds of awards from professional organizations and publications including I.D. which named him among 1994's 40 most influential designers and Chief Executive Magazine which named him 1998's Tech 100 CEOs. He also serves on the advisory boards of numerous technology companies, colleges and non-profit organizations.

Lance Wyman is the principal of Lance Wyman, Ltd., the New York graphic design office established in 1979. He is a specialist in branding/wayfinding systems for public environments and is credited with helping to define of environmental graphics. His graphic system for the Mexico '68 Olympic games is cited as "...one of the most successful in the evolution of visual identification."* His early landmarks also include branding/wayfinding systems for the Mexico City Metro, the Washington Mall, the National Zoo, and the Minnesota Zoo which was selected by Time Magazine as one of the best ten designs of 1981. He is currently working on a branding/wayfinding system for the State of New Jersey and his autobiography.

Lance has received awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Society for Environmental Graphic Design, Art Directors Club of N York, and the Milan Triennial. His work has been published in numerous publications including the New York Times, Life, and Time.

His work has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, the Center of Industrial Design at the Louvre in Paris, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and the Poster Museum of Warsaw.

He is a Fellow of the Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD), and was founding President of the SEGD Education Foundation. He co-conducted the first Interdisciplinary Environmental Design Seminar at the University of Cincinnati in 1990 and is teaching at Parsons School of Design in New York since 1973. He lectures and conducts design workshops internationally.

Scott Stowell is the proprietor of Open, an independent, New York-based design studio that works across a range of media, including identity systems, print design, motion graphics, and web design. Many of Open's projects integrate design solutions that encompass more than one of these categories. Stowell has garnered acclaim for translating the ideas of a diverse set of clients into engaging campaigns that speak to a wide audience. Recent Open projects include identity systems for Bravo, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Planet Green, and WNYC Radio; the editorial design of Good magazine; short films for Jazz at Lincoln Center; and architectural signage for the Yale University Art Gallery.

Open's work has received awards from and/or been published by the American Institute of Architects, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), the Art Directors Club, the Broadcast Designers Association, Communication Arts, Eye, Grafik, I.D., +81, Print, ReBrand, the Society of Environmental Graphic Designers, the Society of Publication Designers, Step Inside Design, and the Tokyo Typedirectors Club, among others.

Before starting Open, Scott was the art director of Colors Magazine in Rome and a senior designer at M&Co. New York. Before that, he received a BFA in graphic design from Rhode Island School of Design. A former vice president of AIGA/NY, Scott teaches at Yale and the School of Visual Arts. In 2008, the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum named Scott the winner of the National Design Award for Communication Design.

Hjalti Karlsson was born and raised in Reykjavik, Iceland. Hjalti graduated from Parsons School of Design, New York. He freelanced for various Manhattan design studios before working at Sagmeister, Inc., New York, from 1996 to 2000.

Jan Wilker grew up in Ulm, Germany. Prior to graduating from the State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart, where he studied from 1996 to 2001 communication design under Prof. Manfred Kroeplien, he ran his own little studio in Ulm. He moved to New York in 2000.

Karlsson and Wilker started their Manhattan studio, karlssonwilker, in 2000. The two of them (plus one intern) work on all sorts of projects for an eclectic mix of cultural and commercial clients, from local non-profits to global corporations. Tellmewhy, a book about their first two years in business, was published by Princeton Architectural Press (NY) in 2003. Their work appeared in major national and international design publications, and they have won multiple awards. The two of them frequently lecture and give workshops on design on all continents (except Antarctica). Hjalti taught at the School of Visual Arts, NY. Jan teaches at Parsons School of Design, and he co-founded SahreVictoreWilker, the annual international summer design workshop, held at the ADC in New York.

Hjalti and Jan continue to work with a wide-ranging list of clients, including Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, Creative Time, MOCA, Puma, MTV, Art Directors Club (global), TIME Magazine, Capitol Records, The New York Times, The Rockefeller Foundation, Museum of the Moving Image, and Good Magazine.