Carin Goldberg

(1953–2023). Carin Goldberg was born in New York City and studied at the Cooper Union School of Art. She began her career as a staff designer at CBS Television, CBS Records, and Atlantic Records before establishing her own firm, Carin Goldberg Design, in 1982.

Over the following two decades Goldberg designed hundreds of book jackets for every major American publishing house, including Simon & Schuster, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, HarperCollins, Doubleday, and Hyperion, in addition to dozens of album covers for record labels such as Warner Bros., Motown, Nonesuch, EMI, and Sony (formerly CBS) Records. The breadth of her work covers artists as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Susan Sontag, Steve Reich and Madonna.

In recent years her image-making has expanded to publication design and brand consulting for clients including The Gap (AR Media), Time Inc., Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, The School of Visual Arts, and Sterling Brands. From 2002 to 2004 she was Creative Director at Time Inc. Custom Publishing, where she designed and consulted on more than 25 publications for clients that included Gallup, New York Stock Exchange, Microsoft, and Citigroup. Her work has appeared in and on the covers of the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Wired.

Goldberg’s work has appeared in landmark surveys such as the exhibitions “Graphic Design in America” at the Walker Art Center (1989) and “Mixing Messages” at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (1996), and in the publications By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), AGI: Graphic Design Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2007), and How to Be a Great Graphic Designer (Debbie Millman, Allworth Press, 2007). She has been featured in Time, The New Yorker, the New York Times, Adweek, and every major design publication. She has lectured and exhibited internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; the Cooper-Hewitt, New York; and the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, China. She has won hundreds of awards, including a silver medal from the Art Directors Club and the Golden Pencil from The One Club, and has twice received the publishing industry’s prestigious Literary Marketplace Award. Goldberg is one of the first recipients of the Art Directors Club Grandmasters Award for Excellence in Education (2008). In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious AIGA Gold Medal, an honor considered to be the highest in America recognizing an exemplary career in graphic design. She was honored, at the 2009 commencement, with The Cooper Union President’s Citation for “exceptional contributions to the field of graphic design . . . awarded annually at commencement to distinguished individuals who have made important contributions to art, architecture, and engineering, or interdisciplinary studies. This citation recognizes outstanding citizenship, ethics and social responsibility.”

In 2008, Goldberg completed a two-year term as president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. She also served on the chapter’s board from 2002 to 2004. She has been a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale since 1999 and served on its board of directors from 2006 to 2009. In November 2010, a retrospective of her work and career will be exhibited at Musée Géo-Charles, Échirolles, France.

Goldberg has taught Third Year Typography and Senior Portfolio at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for 27 years. She is the designer and author of Catalog (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2001).