DJ Stout Wins National Art Director Award
Austin partner DJ Stout will receive the 2010 Richard Gangel Art Director Award from the Society of Illustrators tomorrow evening at the Museum of American Illustration in New York City. Established in 2005, the Richard Gangel Award singles out one art director a year and honors them for their outstanding contributions in promoting and advancing the art of illustration. The award was named in honor of Richard Gangel, the award-winning art director for Sports Illustrated, who for 21 years—from 1960-1981—built an extraordinary collaboration with illustrators. Past recipients of the award have included Fred Woodward, Steve Heller, Rita Marshall, Patrick JB Flynn and Gail Anderson. “I’m honored to be mentioned in the same paragraph with these great art directors, design innovators and illustration lovers,” says Stout.
Texas Monthly covers featuring illustrations by Matt Mahurin, left, and Steve Pietzsch, right.
Stout began his longstanding association with illustrators in 1981 in Dallas, where as an Art Director at Robert A. Wilson Associates, he worked with top illustrators like Brad Holland, Jack Unruh, Gerry Gersten and Geoffrey Moss to create annual reports and other corporate collateral. From 1987 to 2000 Stout was the award winning Art Director of Texas Monthly magazine where he significantly stepped-up his commissioning of original illustration to a long list of outstanding illustration talent including John Collier, Matt Mahurin, Brad Holland, Richard Hess, Alan E. Cober, Jack Unruh, David Levine, Owen Smith, Hanoch Piven, Marc Burckhardt, C.F. Payne, Braldt Bralds, Marvin Mattelson, James Marsh, Stephen Alcorn, Jose Cruz, Bill Nelson, Ian Pollack, Julian Allen, Kent Barton, Randall Enos, Aletha Repel, Terry Allen, Buddy Hickerson, Larry McEntire, Anthony Russo, Elwood H. Smith, Sandra Hendler, Bill Mayer, Steve Pietzsch, Anita Kunz, Marshall Arisman, Dugald Stermer, Seymour Chwast, Dagmar Frinta, Jeffrey Smith, Zohar Lazar, David Hughes, Milton Glaser, Jody Hewgill, Brian Cronin, Paul Davis, Tavis Coburn, Joe Ciardiello, Steve Brodner, Barry Blitt, Gerard Dubois, Douglas Fraser, Gary Baseman,Ward Sutton, Daniel Zakroczemski, Mark Ulriksen, Jean Tuttle, Regan Dunnick, James Noel Smith, Gary Kelley, John Kascht, Alison Seiffer, Ross MacDonald, Victor Juhasz, Chris Gall, Etienne Delessert, Cathie Bleck, Wendell Minor, John Howard, Christian Northeast, Robert Neubecker, Tom Curry, David Wilcox, Eddie Guy, Mike Benny, Mellissa Grimes, Noah Woods, Mark Fredrickson, Melinda Beck, Jason Holley, Jordin Isip and many more.
Since joining Pentagram as a partner in 2000 Stout has continued to utilize illustration in a wide variety of his design work. Recent collaborations with illustrators include David Plunkert, Barry Blitt, Mirco Ilic, Jack Unruh, Seymour Chwast, Mark Summers, Brian Stauffer, Dan Goldman, Josh Cochran, John Hersey, Serge Bloch and Marc Burckhardt.
HOW magazine covers featuring illustrations by Serge Bloch, left, and David Plunkert, right.
Many of the original illustrations commissioned by Stout over the years have won medals and have been included in the award annuals of the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, Graphis and Communication Arts. Stout served as the honorary chairman of the Society of Illustrators award show in 1997. The call for entries poster he designed for the show, featuring an illustration of a screaming “illustrated woman” by Anita Kunz, won a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators that year.
In 2005 Stout and his team at Pentagram redesigned the Society of Illustrators annual. The annual had been a large format hard-cover book for many years. “Even though it was supposed to be a ‘coffee-table’ book it wasn’t ending up on anybody’s coffee-tables, that’s for sure,” says Stout. “It had large pages but every spread was jam-packed with the winning illustrations which made them pretty small. Our concept was to make the book a smaller soft-back edition and more of a useful resource for art directors. We put one illustration per page and asked the illustrators to describe the original assignment and their approach to solving the visual problem. In that way you get a glimpse into how a particular illustrator thinks. Which is after all the most valuable thing that an illustrator brings to a project.”
For more than 100 years, the Society of Illustrators has been an integral part of New York City’s arts community. Home to the Museum of American Illustration, the Society promotes the art and appreciation of illustration, encourages high ideals through exhibitions, lectures, education and fosters a sense of community and open discussion. The Society of Illustrators and Museum of American Illustration is open to the public in a circa 1875 carriage house with state-of-the-art galleries located on East 63rd Street. To learn more, visit www.societyillustrators.org.