Cipe Pineles, (pronounced CEE-pee Pi-NEL-is), was a prolific designer and art director whose career stretched from 1932 to 1987. She gained recognition for innovative approaches to magazine design, including commissioning well-known fine artists to create commercial illustrations and creative layouts using multiple typefaces. Pineles raised the level of design quality in magazines directed at teenage girls and working women, paying these audiences respect by taking them seriously when women's interests and sensibilities were often treated as frivolous.

Pineles was born in Vienna, Austria in 1908 and spent most of her childhood in Poland. Her family moved to New York in 1923 to escape violence in Europe. In 1932 her fabric designs and displays were noticed by the publisher, Condé Montrose Nast, who invited Pineles to interview with M. F. Agha, the art director of Nast's Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines. Pineles worked as Agha's assistant for five years, during which time he became an important mentor and source of inspiration. In 1932, Pineles started working at Glamour magazine. She was appointed art director in 1942. She went on to serve as art director for Seventeen, Charm, and Mademoiselle magazines, as well as for Lincoln Center.

Pineles became an instructor at Parsons School of Design in 1962 and continued in that role until 1987. For one of her assignments, she led her class in the production of an unconventional yearbook, the Parsons Bread Book, that sold commercially and was recognized as one of AIGA's Fifty Books of the Year in 1975. Starting in 1970, Pineles also served as Parsons’s director of publications, mentoring a staff of students in the creation of promotional materials and shaping a new graphic identity for the school. She developed the iconic look that defined Parsons for many years, with images of fruit serving as geographic symbols for Parsons's campuses--apples for New York City, grapes for Paris, oranges for Los Angeles, used for nearly a decade on recruitment posters, mailers, and course catalog covers. As a teacher, Pineles had devoted students, but she also had detractors who were put off by her autocratic style. Enrollment in her classes begain to wane in the 1980s, and in 1987, when she was seventy-nine, her contract was not renewed.

As a pioneering woman in a male-dominated industry, Pineles did not receive the recognition that many felt she deserved. She did, however, earn many accolades late in her career, from the AIGA, the Art Directors Club, and the Society of Publication Designers. Charm magazine won Art Directors Club awards every year under Pineles’s direction. In 1975, Pineles became the first woman admitted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. She received the Award for Excellence in 1978 and the Herb Lubalin Award in 1984, both from the Society of Publications Designers. Pineles died in 1991. In 1996, she was posthumously awarded the AIGA Medal for exceptional achievements in the field of design.

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Sources

Audio interview with Alan Gussow, May 15, 1994. Parsons School of Design Centenary oral history project, PC.07.01.01, New School Archives and Special Collections, The New School, New York, New York. http://digitalarchives.library.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/PC070101_Gussow_19940515

Scotford, Martha. Cipe Pineles: A Life of Design. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Scotford, Martha. "Cipe Pineles." AIGA. 1998. http://www.aiga.org/medalist-cipepineles

Parsons School of Design has offered courses in graphic design since the early twentieth century under various program titles, including Poster Advertising and Commercial Art, Advertising Design, and Communication Design.

In the 1960s and 1970s Parsons’s Graphic Design program was a three or four year course of study (earning a certificate of graduation or a BFA bachelor of fine arts degree), which sought to create an artist “who is able to think creatively about communication problems and find appropriate solutions for them.” The program focused on teaching students design proficiency in a wide range of media including drawing, illustration, photography, lettering, painting, and even film. Students were expected to use these skills to clearly and forcefully communicate a message to a viewer. James Frangides was chairman of the department during the 1969-1970 academic year, with John Russo becoming the new department chair in 1971. In 1972, the department name changed from Graphic Design to Communication Design, which remains the name of the program in 2017. Of twenty-four Graphic Design faculty members in 1971, Cipe Pineles was the sole woman teaching in the department.