2011 Fellow, Past President, Founder

Linda Hinrichs was the first President of the AIGA San Francisco Chapter in 1983.

She has been a design practitioner, art director, and educator for over four decades. Her work has been recognized by major competitions, and has been featured in design publications and books. She has taught in Bay Area design programs, primarily at the Academy of Art.

A graduate of the Art Center School in Los Angeles, (now the Art Center College of Design), she began her career in New York. Following several years of working as a junior designer/art director at a design office (Sandgren & Murtha), an ad agency (Kenyon & Eckhart), and a Curtis magazine (American Home) in the mid-sixties, she joined husband Kit Hinrichs in forming Hinrichs Design Associates. They succeeded in building their office around publication work, advertising promotion and corporate work.

Based on a growing success, they moved in late 1976 to San Francisco and formed a bi-coastal partnership with Vance Jonson and Martin Pedersen in New York (Marty later became the publisher and creative director of Graphis). Partner Neil Shakery joined a few years later to create Jonson, Pedersen, Hinrichs & Shakery. In 1986, Kit, Linda and Neil became partners in the London/New York based Pentagram partnership and created the San Francisco Pentagram office. Favorite clients and projects for her during those years were for Smith Kline & French, Crocker Bank, Transamerica, Smith and Hawken, Logo Paris, UC Santa Cruz and the Aspen Sking Company. (She was the first, and for those years, the only female Pentagram partner; a fact sometimes noted, but at the time not seeming so important.)

Linda left the fast lane in the early 1990s to freelance out of a new live/work space in North Beach and opened a small independent Powell Street Studio. As a member of the fledgling SFMOMA Architecture & Design Forum, she helped launch a tabloid newsletter and designed publications for the San Diego Museum of Art. She also designed and edited a book with photographer Nick Zurek for Harper Collins. Continuing major art direction clients were Petaluma children’s clothing catalog Biobottoms, and the CSAA magazine, VIA. She admittedly got sidetracked with a major home/studio renovation in 2001 and joining husband Kit Hinrichs with his growing collection of all things American flag, starting to have a serious exhibition schedule. She now considers herself to be as retired as a designer manages to be.

Linda Hinrichs has been a member of AIGA for 35 years, starting with early visits to design exhibits in New York. She remains active within the Bay Area design community, and continues to be an ongoing supporter of AIGA San Francisco.

» Read an interview of Linda Hinrichs by Ward Schumaker