Vice President 2005-2007 - (New York, United States)

Richard Grefé's experience is in the development of institutions that serve social purposes. His passion is design. He holds degrees from Dartmouth College in Economics, (where he also studied book design) and Stanford, where he received an MBA. While he began his career setting type by hand, he has since been a political analyst in Asia, a writer for Time magazine on business and the economy, a public policy and urban design consulting firm director, and a manager of strategic planning and legislative strategy for public broadcasting in Washington. He joined the AIGA in 1995. A humanist and internationalist, he has lived in Munich, Bristol (England), Lausanne, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, New York, San Francisco and Washington.

His interest in sitting on the Icograda Executive Board is twofold:
1) to provide personal experience and capabilities, where needed, in continuing to develop the growing capacity and programs of Icograda, with full respect for the progress of recent years; and
2) to find possible ways to begin to integrate the US design community more fully into the global community of designers. In his words: 'The US design community is large and has disproportionate influence in the use of words and images worldwide. While there are deep pools of energy, inspiration and knowledge in the US design profession which can be shared with colleagues around the world, there is an even more critical need for US designers to learn from designers elsewhere, particularly by gaining the personal understandings of seeing communication from different cultural perspectives.'