Was at the PSFK Trends & Ideas conference yesterday morning and had the pleasure of hearing Laurie Rosenwald speak and show some of her portfolio. Laurie, who admitted to me later, spent three years as a stand-up comic, is not surprisingly a wonderfully entertaining speaker. She showed over 40 different pieces of her work ranging from ads (both those that ran and a few slightly obscene ones that didn’t) to book illustrations to posters to magazine covers. It’s worth a trip to her website www.rosenworld.com to see some of her work. Here’s a portion of her bio which will give you a taste of her sense of humor:
Laurie Rosenwald is the World’s Most Commercial Artist and principal of rosenworld. rosenworld’s motto is “No job too big, No job too small, No job too medium.â€
The studio’s areas of expertise include drawing, graphic design and typography. They make books, magazines, packaging, logos, and posters. And animation. And portraits.
Actually there is no studio, Miss Rosenwald usually works alone, and rosenworld doesn’t exist. In spite of this, rosenworld.com was launched in 1995.
Laurie Rosenwald’s “New York Notebook†is published by Chronicle Books. It’s a hyperillustrated, overdesigned guidebook, sketchbook, and blank book all mushed up together.
Rosenwald does graphic design for IKEA, animation for Sundance Channel and lots of drawings for The New Yorker magazine. She has some other good clients too, such as Ogilvy, J. Walter Thompson, Sony Music, The New York Times, Fortune, Vintage Books, Coca Cola, Bravo, Nickelodeon, Krow, BHV Paris, Little Brown, Houghton Mifflin, and Knopf. She has worked in Japan, France, Italy, Holland, Sweden, Austria, Germany and the UK. She can speak Swedish like a native New Yorker.
What I really like about Laurie’s work is that it feels real and is filled with child-like wonder. She avoids computer art (with rare exceptions) decrying its perfection. She has spent her career learning “how to make mistakes on purpose” while noting “there is no personality in perfect.” I love that thought—there is no personality in perfect. Laurie’s work is full of her personality; funny, self-deprecating, personal yet easy to grasp and relate to.
I found Laurie’s work and her approach to her work quite inspiring. While I’m certain there is a Marketing for Good opportunity here, I can’t yet put my finger on it. Perhaps a non-profit and a big brand could work with Laurie to create something magical that could help both organizations. Laurie is quite approachable unless she happens to be in Sweden (for which occasions she provides her Swedish phone number–go figure!). Give her a shout. Ya sure ya betcha.
–postscript–
I wasn’t the only one who found Laurie inspiring. Noah Brier pointed me to Grant McCracken who wrote about her extensively on his blog