Graham Clifford is a second-generation type director and graphic designer. He was trained by his father before working for some of London’s best creative advertising agencies including CDP and GGT. He moved to New York 20 years ago and plied his craft at Chiat/Day and Ogilvy.

In the mid-nineties the germ of independence took root and he opened his own design consultancy collaborating with agencies on global brands and directly with smaller clients on projects including advertising, logo design and brand identity.

Clients along the way have included: Absolut, American Express, Dell, ESPN, Ford, Gateway Computers, Glenlivet, HP, History Channel, Kmart, L.A. Times, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Moet & Chandon, Molson, New York Times, Reebok, Rolex, Tanqueray, and Virgin Atlantic.

Awards include: One Show pencils, Communication Arts, Type Directors Club and Art Directors Club and a silver at D&AD. As well as serving as a judge on all of the above.

This year he will be the Chair of the TDC Typeface Design competition.

Matteo Bologna is the founder and President of New York-based Mucca Design Corporation, where he also serves as Creative Director. Born and raised in Milan, Italy, Matteo’s grounding in architecture, graphic esign, illustration and typography facilitated his early business successes and inspired his decision to create a New York agency.

Under Matteo Bologna’s direction the Mucca Design team has solved numerous design challenges and created uniquely successful identities for widely varied brands, among them Adobe, Balthazar, Country, Harper Collins, André Balazs’ Hotels AB, Random House, Rizzoli, Sant Ambroeus, Schiller’s, the Standard Hotel Restaurants in Los Angeles, and Target. Mucca Design is also responsible for the highly successful re-branding of Rizzoli in Italy and its paperback division, BUR.

The designs and typography produced by the Mucca Design team have been widely recognized by industry publications, competitions and exhibitions, including: AIGA, Communication Arts, Eye, Graphis, HOW, PRINT, STEP, The Art Directors Club, The James Beard Foundation, and The Type Directors Club.

Brian Miller is an award-winning designer and lecturer who specializes in branding for the Web and print. Brian’s experience spans from being the in-house creative director of Gartner Inc. — a global technology consulting firm — to principal design director of the Brian Miller Design Group. His client experience includes GE, NBC Universal, Delta Airlines, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, BMW, A&E Television, and Unilever.

Brian’s work has been featured in the pages of Print Magazine and numerous awards annuals including the New York Festivals. His design work has also been honored by the Effi Awards, MIXX Awards (Gold), Stevies (Best Rich Media Online Ad Campaign), Connecticut Art DIrectors Club, Connecticut Advertisers Club, London International Awards and the ACE Awards.

In addition to teaching design at the University of Bridgeport, Brian and business partner Alex W. White founded the MillerWhite School of Design. This school is aimed at helping high chool students interested in pursuing a career in graphic design. The school also offers professional development workshops for creative staffs.

With more than 25 years of design experience, Argentinian born Diego Vainesman started his own desing firm, 40N47 Design, Inc. to provide clients with all sorts of design ranging from promotional cards to large environmental graphics identities. Working for himself and the different companies his list of clients ranges from global corporations such as Canon, Luxury Collection Hotels, IBM, Pfizer, to nonprofit organizations such as Congregation B’nai Jeshurun and PS 158.

His work has included logos, corporate identities, environmental graphics, promotional/collateral materials, videos, books, CDs, and interactive media. Diego is also the co-founder of tipoGráfica, the leading typographic magazine in South America, taught at Pratt and Parsons School of Design. Diego was the designer of Typography 25 and chair of TDC52.

Carol Wahler is celebrating her twenty-eighth year with the Type Directors Club.

Ms. Wahler has a type background from working in her families’ businesses that spans starting with the period of ludlow typesetting in the 50′s through today – the digital world.

Through her tenure with TDC the membership has more than tripled; Carol has been editor of the TDC newsletter, Letterspace, and integrally involved in other committees, especially the annual competition, annual book, Typography, and the traveling exhibits.

Prior to her position, Carol raised two children, Adam and Samantha, while graduating magna cum laud from William Paterson College where she received her B.A. degree in Art History. She has four grandchildren. Carol lives in Westport, Connecticut with her husband Allan.

Gail Anderson is a New York-based designer, writer, and educator.

From 2002 through 2010, she served as Creative Director of Design at SpotCo, a New York City advertising agency that creates artwork for Broadway and institutional theater. From 1987 to early 2002, she worked at Rolling Stone magazine, serving as designer, deputy art director, and finally, as the magazine’s senior art director. And early in her career, Gail was a designer at The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and Vintage Books (Random House).

Anderson’s work has received awards from major design organizations, including the Society of Publication Designers, the Type Directors Club, The American Institute of Graphic Arts, The Art Directors Club, Graphis, Communication Arts, and Print. In addition, it has also been included in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the Library of Congress, and the Milton Glaser Design Archives at the School of Visual Arts. Anderson has been featured in magazines that include Computer Arts (UK),designNET (Korea), kAk (Russia), STEP Inside Design, and Graphic Design USA. She is the recipient of the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Medal from the AIGA, the 2009 Richard Gangel art direction award from the Society of Illustrators, and has lectured about design (and her bottle cap collection) at organizations and conferences around the world.

Doug Clouse’s career began as a graphic designer at The North Carolina Museum of Art and The New York Public Library. He has run his own business and has worked full and part-time for four design studios in New York. In 2007 he completed a graduate degree at the Bard Graduate Center, where he focused on the history of graphic design. Doug’s research resulted in the publication of two books on design history. Since 2007 he has taught graphic design studio and history classes at Purchase College, School of Visual Arts, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. From 2010 to early 2011 he was curator, printer, and designer at Bowne & Co., Stationers at the Seaport Museum New York in lower Manhattan. Now he owns a graphic design business with Angela Voulangas, The Graphics Office.

Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich is currently principal at his own design firm in NYC specializing in publications, restaurant design and branding. He speaks frequently on typography and type design. He is also the author of several books featuring his own work. His most recent book To All Men of Letters and People of Substance, was selected as one of the AIGA’s 50 best books of 2008. He has received numerous awards from the Art Directors Club, AIGA, D&AD, Communication Arts, Eye, Graphis, How, Print, Type Directors Club and two Webby Awards. He is on the board at the Type Directors Club and was the chairman for the TDC competition of 2011.

Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, and eater of cake working in San Francisco. After graduating from Tyler School of Art with a degree in Graphic Design, she worked for Headcase Design in Philadelphia before taking a position as Senior Designer at Louise Fili Ltd. While working for Louise she learned a lot about letters while simultaneously developing her freelance career. In September of 2009, after two and a half years of little sleep and a lot of hand-lettering, she left Louise Fili to pursue her freelance career further. Jessica has been featured in most major design and illustration publications including Communication Arts, Print Magazine, How Magazine, The Graphis Design Annual, American Illustration and the Society of Illustrators. She was featured as one of Step Magazine’s 25 Emerging Artists, Communication Arts “Fresh”, Print Magazine’s New Visual Artists 2009 (commonly referred to as Print’s 20 under 30), and has been named an ADC Young Gun and one of Forbes 30 under 30 in Art and Design.

Sean King is a independent graphic designer who specializes in typeface design, lettering, editorial layout, information graphics, and interactive design. He also teaches typography and design to college students. In addition to independent projects, he is working with Gourmet Gaming on iOS games. His first game, Lines of Gold, is available now.

Prior to August 2011, Sean was Design Director, Corporate Communications at Landor Associates. In that role, he oversaw design standards and external communications globally for Landor. He managed a team that designed marketing materials and publications with web, multimedia, and print components. This role has given him valuable experience with cross-cultural and multi-lingual design.

Prior to joining Landor in 2003, Sean worked at a variety of advertising agencies in New York City. He has designed items as varied as print advertising, direct mail, point-of-sale displays, convention and trade show displays, stage backdrops, web sites, multimedia presentations, corporate identity materials, design guidelines, articles, newsletters, book covers and books. His first job out of design school was at a screen printing shop, which fueled his hands-on approach to design.

Sean’s love of the written word has fueled his career-long passion for type. He is keenly interested in both the history and future of typography and lettering.

A 1988 graduate of the School of Printing at Rochester Institute of Technology, Steve found his passion for type and typography among the historic collections of books, metal type, type-casting equipment and printing presses. Under the guidance of Professor Archie Provan, Steve completed several dozen typographic and printing projects including a booklet for the Byron G. Culver award and numerous keepsakes. College calligraphy courses with Professor Al Horton and later, workshops with Kris Holmes and Robert Paladino, refined his attention to the details of letterform design.

In 1990 Steve was hired by Monotype Typography as a contractor to aid in the production of Microsoft’s first TrueType fonts. Having already spent over two years mastering the hinting algorithms of a similar technology for another company, TrueType was an easy transition. In 1991 Steve opened the California office of Monotype to specialize in the production of TrueType fonts for OEM customers such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.

Working on the technical aspects of type helped fuel Steve’s ambition to design new typefaces. He completed a handwriting design called Andy and a revival of Frederic Goudy’s Truesdell in 1993. These were quickly followed by a screen font design for main frame terminal emulation (Andalé) as well as Blueprint, Fineprint, Binner Gothic and Goudy Ornate.

By the time Steve left Monotype to form Ascender Corporation he designed over 20 font families including the user interface fonts for the original Xbox and Windows Vista.

Ina Saltz is an art director, author and professor (of Electronic Design and Multimedia at The City College of New York) whose areas of expertise are typography and magazine design. She is currently serving as the Chair of the Art Department at CCNY. For over 22 years, Ina was an editorial Design Director at Time Magazine’s International Editions, Worth, Golf Magazine and others.

Ina is on the design faculty of the Stanford Professional Publishing Course and has taught typography at Stanford via webcast. Ina frequently lectures on topics related to magazine design and typography, most recently in Moscow, Toronto, Atlanta, Denver, New York City, Calgary and Amsterdam. She has written over 50 articles for prominent design journals.

Ina has authored several books: “BODY TYPE: Intimate Messages Etched in Flesh,” (Abrams, 2006); “BODY TYPE 2: More Typographic Tattoos,” (Abrams, 2010); “TYPOGRAPHY ESSENTIALS: 100 Design Principles for Working With Type,” (Rockport, 2009); and she is co-author of “TYPOGRAPHY REFERENCED: A Comprehensive Visual Guide to the Language, History and Practice of Typography,” (Rockport, 2012).

Nick Sherman is a Brooklyn-based typographer working for Font Bureau and Webtype. Originally from Cape Cod and Boston, he is also a skateboarder, pizza enthusiast, musician, and classic horror film buff.

Nick previously worked at MyFonts, where he overhauled the design and helped organize, curate, and promote the world’s largest collection of fonts. His current projects include Fonts In Use, Woodtyper, Pizza Rules!, Specimenism, and a personal photo journal. He serves on the advisory board for the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum as well as the advisory committee for the Type Directors Club. He consults for the Type@Cooper typeface design program at Cooper Union, and is involved in revitalizing one of the world’s only remaining letterpress typecasting foundries, The Dale Guild Type Foundry.

Nick also participates in the Kaiju Big Battel live monster wrestling group, contributes to typography sites such as Typographica and We Love Typography, and has taught undergraduate typography at MassArt. He is an active member in the Society of Printers, ATypI, and American Printing History Association, and often travels in the interest of typography, skateboarding, and pizza.

Erik Spiekermann, born 1947, studied History of Art and English in Berlin. He is author, information architect, type designer (FF Meta, ITC Officina, FF Info, FF Unit, LoType, Berliner Grotesk and many corporate typefaces) and author of books and articles on type and typography. He was founder (1979) of MetaDesign, Germany’s largest design firm with offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco. He is responsible for corporate design programs for Audi, Skoda, Volkswagen, Lexus, Heidelberg Printing, Bosch and way-finding projects like Berlin Transit, Düsseldorf Airport and many others. In 1988 he started FontShop, a company for production and distribution of electronic fonts.

He is board member of the German Design Council and Past President of the ISTD International Society of Typographic Designers, as well as the iiid International Institute for Informationdesign. In 2001 he left MetaDesign and now runs Edenspiekermann with offices in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Stuttgart & San Francisco. In 2001 he redesigned The Economist magazine in London. His book for Adobe Press,“Stop Stealing Sheep” has been reprinted several times and translated into German, Russian and Italian. His corporate font family for Nokia was released in 2002. In 2003 he received the Gerrit Noordzij Award from the Royal Academy in Den Haag. His type system DB Type for Deutsche Bahn was awarded the Federal German Design Prize in gold for 2006. In May 2007 he was the first designer to be elected into the Hall of Fame by the European Design Awards for Communication Design.

Erik is Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts in Bremen and in 2006 received an honorary doctorship from Pasadena Art Center. In 2007, he was made an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA in Britain. In 2009, he became European Ambassador for Innovation and Creativity by the European Union. The German Design Council gave him their 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest award in Germany. In May 2011 he was the 25th recipient of the TDC Medal, awarded by the Type Directors Club New York. Spiekermann lives and works in Berlin, London and San Francisco.

Originally from the midwest, Scott Valins threw himself headfirst into a design career as an architect at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. His studio time there led to an erratic multidisciplinary design career. It began with large scale architecture projects at the New York and London offices of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Tiring of the limitations of AutoCad, Valins found himself designing theme park rides full of Heffalumps and Woozles with Walt Disney Imagineering in Los Angeles. Then, transitioning away from the restrictions of the built world, Valins decided to plant roots in New York and embarked on a career (finally) as a graphic designer. Seduced by the persuasive strength and visual immediacy of design, and intrigued by the choreography of a timeline, Valins serendipitously discovered the field of motion graphic design.

He now spends his days with the wonderful staff at Valins&Co., helping a wide variety of clients with their design dilemmas and brand strategies. V&Co has tackled projects as large as designing Walmart’s national in-store network of 27,000 screens; as small as advising interns on pronunciation of ‘Houston’; and as comical as branding a fake show, ‘TGS with Tracy Jordan’ on 30 Rock. Since opening the studio in early 2007, Valins has been fortunate to work alongside fantastic clients with brands such as Walmart, Comedy Central, Tiffany&Co, CBS News, Unicef, HBO, BBC America, Best Buy, Food Network, VH1, Sundance, G4, Versus and many more.

Valins&Co. is honored to have been recognized by the TDC, AIGA, promaxBDA, CINE, New York Festivals, Stash and How Magazine.

When not working, he’s working on not working.

Sharon Werner founded the Minneapolis based design firm: Werner Design Werks, Inc in 1991. The company specializes in combining strong visual language with sound design solutions to create work that not only impacts commerce but also culture.This creative and business strategy has attracted and gained praise from clients including: Target Corporation, Mohawk Paper, Chronicle Books, Mrs. Meyer’s-Clean Day, Blu Dot Design and Manufacturing, Nick at Nite, VH-1 Networks, Levi’s, Minnesota Public Radio, Ogilvy, Comedy Central and Urban Outfitters.

Werner Design Werks has been recognized with national and international awards and honors. They were named Target’s Vendor of the Year in 2002 Their work is included in 100 World’s Best Posters and is part of the permanent collection of The Library of Congress, The Rumpus Room of Ernest and Viola Werner, Musée De La Poste, Victoria and Albert Museum, Musée des Arts Decoratifs and the Cooper Hewitt Museum.