Carin Goldberg was born in New York City and studied at the Cooper Union School of Art. She began her career as a staff designer at CBS Television, CBS Records and Atlantic Records before establishing her own firm, Carin Goldberg Design, in 1982.
Over the following two decades Goldberg designed hundreds of book jackets for the major American publishing houses, including Simon & Schuster, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Hyperion. She also designed dozens of album covers for record labels such as Warner Bros., Motown, Nonesuch, EMI and Sony (formerly CBS) Records. Her work encompasses artists as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Steve Reich and Madonna.
In recent years Goldberg’s image making has expanded to publication design and brand consulting for clients including the Gap (AR Media), Time Inc., Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, the School of Visual Arts and Sterling Brands. From 2002 to 2004 she was creative director at Time Inc. Custom Publishing, where she designed and consulted on over 25 publications for clients that included Gallup, the New York Stock Exchange, Microsoft and Citigroup. Her work has appeared in and on the covers of The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, The Atlantic and Wired magazine.
Her work has also appeared in landmark surveys such as Graphic Design in America at the Walker Art Center (1989); Mixing Messages at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (1996); By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005); AGI: Graphic Design Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2007); and How to Be a Great Graphic Designer (Debbie Millman, Allworth Press, 2007). She has been featured in Time, The New Yorker, the New York Times, Adweek, and every major design publication. She has lectured and exhibited internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; the Cooper-Hewitt, New York; and the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, China.
Goldberg has won hundreds of awards, including a silver medal from the Art Directors Club and the Golden Pencil from The One Club, and has twice received the publishing industry’s prestigious Literary Marketplace Award. She is one of the first recipients of the Art Directors Club Grandmasters Award for Excellence in Education (2008). In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal, an honor considered to be the highest in America recognizing an exemplary career in graphic design. In 2009, she received the Cooper Union President’s Citation for “exceptional contributions to the field of graphic design,” awarded annually at commencement “to distinguished individuals who have made important contributions to art, architecture, and engineering, or interdisciplinary studies.”
In 2008 she completed a two-year term as president of the New York chapter of the AIGA. She also served on the chapter’s board from 2002 to 2004. She has been a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale since 1999 and served on its board of directors from 2006 to 2009.
From November 2010 to January 2011, a retrospective of Goldberg’s work and career was exhibited at Musée Géo-Charles, Échirolles, France. The exhibition was a part of the Festival le Mois du Graphisme in Échirolles, where she taught a weeklong master class before the opening of the exhibition.
Goldberg has taught Third Year Typography and Senior Portfolio Thesis at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for 28 years. She is the designer and author of Catalog (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2001).
She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn, New York.
