Louis Danziger

In 2013, in honor of Danziger's 90th birthday, an exhibition of Danziger's key works was mounted at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

In 1998, Danziger was awarded the AIGA Gold Medal for “standards of excellence over a lifetime of work.”

In a 1998 interview coinciding with the awarding of the AIGA Gold Medal, Danziger summed up his advice to students in this way: “Work. Think. Feel.” Work: “No matter how brilliant, talented, exceptional and wonderful the student may be, without work there is nothing but potential and talk.” Think: “Design is a problem-solving activity. Thinking is the application of intelligence to arrive at the appropriate solution to the problem.” Feel: “Work without feeling, intuition, and spontaneity is devoid of humanity.”

In 1995, Danziger donated his collection of visual work and related documents to the Design Archives of Rochester Institute of Technology, where it can be accessed by students, design scholars, and historians.

Despite his own lack of formal education, Danziger became a noted design educator, a “charismatic pedagogue.” Danziger is associated most closely with three schools: Harvard University, where he was a visiting professor in graphic design from 1978 to 1988; Art Center College of Design (formerly known as Art Center School), where he taught courses in advertising and graphic design starting in 1958; and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts, formerly known as Chouinard Art Institute), where he taught from 1963 to 1979, and served as the Director of the Graphic Design Department from 1972 to 1979. At CalArts, Danziger was credited with helping to create the first academic course ever offered in the history of graphic design; and, averse to the promotion of a single point of view in design education, he was noted for recruiting faculty who represented a diverse range of styles.

Danziger largely retired from studio work in 1972, although for several years after he served as a corporate design consultant for Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO); he also consulted for Microsoft, LACMA, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and others.

Danziger collaborated with architect Frank Gehry on the Danziger House and Studio (1965), a studio/residence which Danziger and his wife occupied until 1995. This project was one of the first of Gehry's projects to receive widespread attention.

In addition, Danziger's influence extended outside the United States. In 1957, when travelling to Italy to study the work of Italian designers, Danziger discovered that many Italian designers knew and admired his work already: graphic designer Massimo Vignelli said that it was the work of Danziger and Saul Bass that inspired him to come to the United States.

Danziger had an early interest in the potential application of computers in graphic design, taking a course at UCLA Extension in the fundamentals of computer science in 1955. Later Danziger worked with programmers at the California Institute of Technology to create perhaps the first logo to be designed with the aid of a computer (for Xybion Corporation, in 1975).

Nevertheless, Danziger was closely connected with a group of designers from various disciplines who were active in Southern California from the 1950s to the 1970s, including Charles and Ray Eames, and the ‘Design Group’ (a group that consisted primarily of Alvin Lustig's students, which was active from 1948 to the early 1970s). These designers were not Danziger's direct collaborators; however, they met frequently, had common interests and preoccupations, and were cooperative and mutually influential. Danziger was something of an intellectual leader of this group: he was later described by his contemporary, graphic designer Deborah Sussman, as “a guru to everyone (in this confederation of designers).” Designer Saul Bass said that Danziger “shaped Los Angeles design activity into an intellectual dialogue and was a major inspiration.”

In 1949, Danziger joined a loosely affiliated, short-lived group called the Society of Contemporary Designers, which also included Saul Bass, Alvin Lustig, Jerome Gould, and John Follis, and which included graphic, product, and exhibition designers. Danziger was described by Bass as “a critical link in the communal support system.”

Danziger returned to Los Angeles in late 1948, where he studied architecture briefly at the California School of Art, under Raphael S. Soriano. He began an independent practice, offering graphic design, advertising, and consulting services, in Los Angeles in 1949.

After high school, Danziger served in the Army in the South Pacific (New Guinea, the Admiralties, the Philippines, and Japan), where he was a Staff Sergeant and worked as a radio operator and communication chief, from 1943 through 1945.

Louis Danziger (born November 17, 1923) is an American graphic designer and design educator. He is most strongly associated with the late modern movement in graphic design, and with a community of designers from various disciplines working in Southern California in the mid-twentieth century. He is noted for his iconoclastic approach to design, and for introducing the principles of European constructivism to the American advertising vernacular.

Louis Danziger was born in November 1923, and raised in The Bronx, New York.