Ruth Ansel

• Design
  Industry
• About
  In the 1970s, she was art director for The New York Times Magazine. In the 1980s, she was art director for House & Garden, Vanity Fair and Vogue. And those prestigious titles were only part of her creative output during those years. She also created film titles for Louis Malle’s cult film, My Dinner with Andre, and designed celebrated editions of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Beard’s The End of the Game.
  
In the early 1990s, she formed her own design studio. She designed such notable books as Dark Odyssey by Phillip Jones Griffiths, The Sixties by Richard Avedon, Women and The White Oak Dance Project by Annie Leibovitz, and a master monograph for Taschen by Peter Beard. She continued to work closely with Richard Avedon and designed significant portfolios of his work for The New Yorker. Her studio has also designed ad campaigns for Versace, Club Monaco, and Karl Lagerfeld. Current projects include a book for photographer Jerry Schatzberg and an extensive monograph on the life and work of jewelry designer Elsa Peretti.

  Ruth has received the Gold Medal for Design — the Art Directors Club’s most prestigious award — and the Society of Publication Design Award for Continuing Excellence in Publication Design. She has been a guest lecturer at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan and panelist on fashion and design at The School of Visual Arts in New York. In October 2009, she was invited to present her work and give a talk at the prestigious Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden.
  Hall of Femmes: Ruth Ansel, a book designed by Swedish studio Hjarta Smarta, chronicles her forty-year career, is now available through this site. The book is both intimate and authoritative. It includes personal pictures of Ruth with her colleagues, many of them never before published in book form, examples of her work in both editorial and advertising design, and an extensive interview in which she shares her views on everything from photography to the business of image-making.

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  Added: April 2014 • Updated: April 2014