The School of Visual Arts will honor designer and educator Louise Fili with the 28th annual Masters Series Award and Exhibition. “The Masters Series: Louise Fili” will be the first comprehensive retrospective of the designer’s influential career and include her book jacket, branding, food packaging and restaurant identity work. An opening reception takes place October 13, 6-8 pm at the SVA Gramercy Gallery.

Louise Fili is probably best known for the food and hospitality branding and packaging work she has done through her eponymous design studio, founded in 1989. But her design career, begun in the 1970s, encompasses much more. For 11 years, Fili was art director at Pantheon Books, where she designed more than 2,000 book covers. Logos that she has created include redesigned marks for the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and Paperless Post. Her past and present clients include Hyperion Books, Rizzoli, Sarabeth’s, Tate’s Bake Shop, Tiffany & Co., Williams-Sonoma and the U.S. Postal Service. She has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on design and typography is a longtime faculty member of SVA’s BFA and MFA Design departments.

Much of Fili’s work reflects her deep respect for Italian culture, a passion ignited at the age of 16 during a trip to the country, her family’s ancestral home. This connection with the arts and culture of her family’s past is now being seen by millions of New Yorkers through the Fall 2016 SVA poster currently installed in subway stations city-wide. Described by Fili as a “half-undressed chocolate bar,” the poster creates a sense of excitement about the best of things yet to come. Photo above: SVA poster designer Louise Fili and Nicholas Misani, senior designer at Louise Fili Ltd.; both photos courtesy SVA.

Louise Fili Ltd. is a graphic design studio that offers unique and elegant solutions to all things related to food, books, and culture, including brand development for restaurants and specialty food packaging.

Masters Series laureates are Marshall Arisfoman, Saul Bass, Michael Bierut, R. O. Blechman, Ivan Chermayeff, Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, Lou Dorfsman, Heinz Edelmann, Jules Feiffer, Shigeo Fukuda, Tom Geismar, Milton Glaser, April Greiman, Steven Heller, George Lois, Mary Ellen Mark, Ed McCabe, James McMullan, Duane Michals, Tony Palladino, Paula Scher, Edward Sorel, Deborah Sussman, George Tscherny, Paul Rand and Massimo Vignelli.