Natalia Ilyin’s Design Life
Professor of Design, Design History and Criticism at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Natalia teaches courses in history, criticism, theory, design for social activism, transition design, complex systems, and semiotics of brand. She and her former co-teacher Elisabeth Patterson created the Parallel Narratives publishing program at Cornish. This on-going program is dedicated to reimagining a construct for design history from the student up, rather than from the historian down.
Natalia received a Fulbright Specialist grant from the United States Department of State in 2024, to collaborate on an intensive critical writing program with Dr. Nina Bartosova at the Brno University of Technology Architecture Program in Czech Republic. She has received Cornish's Award for Teaching Excellence twice, and is Founding Faculty of the MFA in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts, a CalArts affiliate. There, she advises students on writing, design history, and criticism.
Natalia has also taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, The Cooper Union, and the University of Washington, and has acted as Critic for the MFA in Graphic Design at Yale University and Rhode Island School of Design.
A former National Director of Programs for the American Institute of Graphic Arts in New York, she has given talks and workshops at Microsoft, Boeing, RISD, Maine College of Art, California College of Art, Art Center College of Design's Toyota lecture series, the Wolfsonian Museum, The Henry Art Gallery, and other nice places.
And Her Writing Life
Natalia’s articles have been published in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Portland Oregonian, the Miami Herald, Metropolis, Adbusters, Eye, Print, Communication Arts, 2+3D, Grey Magazine, and in several anthologies of design criticism, including the Looking Closer series, and the recent Total Armageddon, edited by Ian Lynam.
Her first memoir, Blonde Like Me, was published by Simon and Schuster. Just starting out as a writer, Natalia was so worried about future criticism that she became a frozen ball of anxiety while finishing the last chapter. Her agent finally walked down to her apartment and pulled the manuscript from her cramped hand.
When she moved to a cottage near Seattle, Natalia looked back at her time in New York, and wrote Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time. Published by Metropolis Books, it's a personal look at the legacy of Modernism and its effects.
Natalia and Elizabeth Patterson co-edited the first volume of Parallel Narratives: Annotated Student Bibliographies Toward a Broader History of Design, with significant editorial contributions by Robert Baxter, in 2019. This book will be republished this year, along with the publication of a second volume.
Natalia’s third book, Writing for the Design Mind, is a textbook written specifically for designers who want to write. It emphasizes many kinds of visual methods for creating and structuring writing. Recently published by Bloomsbury Academic, it benefits from her years of experience as a writer and teacher.
She is currently at work on a concise review of major themes in graphic design’s past, which she is writing in collaboration with twelve designers, and which is built from their wide-ranging views and experiences.