2014 AIGA Medalist: Charles S. Anderson

Recognized for creating a design language that elevates the vernacular into a playful, modern design style and pioneering the role of designer as entrepreneur.

Charles S. Anderson is a designer with the heart of a linguist. He has collected and transformed thousands of anonymous commercial-arts artifacts from the Depression era and beyond into a bona fide graphic-design language that is easy to comprehend and fun to apply. He elevated authentic vernacular into a playful design style, which ultimately grew into a successful business. That business, CSA Archive (now CSA Images), made him a pioneer design entrepreneur who, in the tradition of Push Pin Studios and M&Co, split his practice into a client-service studio and an entrepreneurial resource that both licenses quirky illustrative design to the world and produces products from the same collection.

Anderson graduated from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1981. By 1985 he had joined the edgy Duffy Design Group, where he ultimately became a partner. Influenced by a curious mixture of mid-century New Bauhaus Modernism, which he was exposed to through his teacher and first employer, Peter Seitz, and carnivalesque pop culture, which he learned through studying design history, Anderson exemplified a Minneapolis style. He further placed the Midwest on the design map, blending nostalgic pastiche with contemporary aesthetics of color and form.

The mid-1980s was a period of artistic, technological and demographic transitions, and Anderson was in its vortex. On the crest of the postmodern wave, his work confronted Modernist institutional conformity that had dominated corporate identity since the ’60s. He was the alternative.