New Zealand Listener

‘I do the big stuff’

Eddie Opara is a renowned designer whose award-winning work is held in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. A partner at New York’s prestigious Pentagram design agency, he has developed brand identity across multiple mediums for clients such as Samsung, lululemon athletica and Morgan Stanley. He is also a senior critic at Yale University School of Art. UK-born Opara was as a guest of the Alliance Graphique Internationale AGI Open design conference in Auckland.

When you go to parties and tell people you’re a graphic designer, how do they respond?

For a long time, I’d say I was a plumber, because when I did say I was a graphic designer, they usually had something in their head like, “Oh, you do logos.”

What do you say you do now?

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