Michael Mabry (born 1955) is an American graphic designer, illustrator, and educator, he is the Principal at Michael Mabry Design. He was one of the founders of the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

postmodern Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...

movement in

graphic design Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdiscipli ...

, that later became known as the "Pacific Wave".

Biography

Michael Mabry was born in 1955 in Niles,

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...

and raised in Park Forest,

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...

. Mabry attended

Iowa State University Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the n ...

for a year. He then moved in 1974 to the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...

to study architecture, but changed focus and instead graduated in 1978 with a BA degree in Graphic Design. In 1979, he was invited to join Nicolas Sidjakov and Jerry Berman at the design firm of Sidjakov & Berman Associates in San Francisco. In the early 1980s a few San Francisco–based designers were nicknamed “The Michaels” because they all had the same name (Mabry, alongside Cronan, Manwaring, Vanderbyl, Schwab), and later they were known as the "Pacific Wave" according to historian Steven Heller. In 1981, he opened his own design firm, Michael Mabry Design. Mabry is married to Sarah Mercer Keith, and she is a partner in his design firm. Clients have included The Land of Nod,

NetJets Europe NetJets Inc. is an American company that sells fractional ownership shares in private business jets. Founded as Executive Jet Airways in 1964, it was later renamed Executive Jet Aviation. NetJets became the first private business jet charte ...

, the

Andrew Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pitts ...

Chronicle Books Chronicle Books is a San Francisco-based American publisher of books for adults and children. The company was established in 1967 by Phelps Dewey, an executive with Chronicle Publishing Company, then-publisher of the ''San Francisco Chronicle''. ...

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

, and

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

. The design for the packaging of Mottura shower curtain rings won awards and was included in

I.D. magazine ''I.D.'' (''The International Design Magazine'') was a magazine covering the art, business, and culture of design. It was published eight times a year by F+W Media. History ''I.D.'' was founded in 1954 as ''Industrial Design''. The name was late ...

's annual design review in 1994. Mabry was a founding member of the American Institute of Graphic Art (AIGA) chapter in San Francisco, and served as the first Treasurer and second President. He was awarded the 2014 AIGA Medal. He has taught at

California College of the Arts California College of the Arts (CCA) is a private art school in San Francisco, California. It was founded in Berkeley, California in 1907 and moved to a historic estate in Oakland, California in 1922. In 1996 it opened a second campus in San ...

(CCA) in the graphic design department. Mabry's work is in various public museum collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA). He has been a member of the

Alliance Graphique Internationale Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) is a club of the world's leading graphic artists and designers. There are 527 members from 43 countries. Its members have been collectively responsible for the identity design of most of the world's top co ...

(AGI) since 2000.

References

1955 births American graphic designers AIGA medalists Iowa State University alumni University of Utah alumni People from San Francisco California College of the Arts faculty Living people {{Design-bio-stub