Matt Willey Wins National Design Award
The graphic designer is honored with the prestigious award in Communication Design.
Pentagram is thrilled to announce that our partner Matt Willey has been selected to receive the 2025 National Design Award for Communication Design. Presented by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the National Design Awards honor innovation and impact in design.
Matt joined Pentagram as a partner in 2020 after five years as the Art Director of The New York Times Magazine, where he collaborated on a major redesign in 2014. Matt’s multidisciplinary practice includes brand identity, motion graphics and editorial design. His work is often characterized by his use of bespoke typography as the foundation of a design system.
Design and art direction of The New York Times Magazine, 2015-2020.
Identity and title sequence for the BBC television series Killing Eve, 2018-2022.
Redesign of the The Paris Review, 2022.
Matt studied graphic design at Central St. Martins in London before joining Vince Frost at Frost Design London in 2002, ultimately rising to the position of Creative Director. In 2005 he co-founded the London-based firm Studio 8 Design with Zoë Bather in 2005. The pair closed the firm in 2012 to focus on independent projects, and Matt relocated to New York.
Over the course of his career Matt has collaborated with several of the leading titles in contemporary independent publishing. He was previously the Creative Director and Senior Editor of the quarterly style magazine Port, the first Art Director of the arts magazine Elephant, and Art Director of the travel and culture magazine Avaunt. He completed a redesign of the UK newspaper The Independent in 2013.
At Pentagram his clients have included The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Smith Quarterly and The Big Issue, the largest street magazine in the world. He is currently the Creative Director of INQUE, the annual literary publication he co-founded with editor Dan Crowe in 2021. Most recently he developed the design for The Metrograph, a new print publication from the independent movie theater in New York.
Series of postage stamps to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, 2020.
Design and art direction of INQUE, a new annual literary magazine, 2021-ongoing.
Website design and multiple typeface designs for Buy Fonts Save Lives, an initiative that raises money for Cancer Research and Macmillan Cancer Support, 2014-ongoing.
Matt has developed branding systems and title sequences for a range of clients, including the design of the titles for “Killing Eve,” the award-winning BBC series created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. His identities and motion graphics can be seen in other series including “Landscapers,” “One Day,” “A Spy Among Friends,” “Rain Dogs,” “The Responder” and “Kaos.”
He often creates custom typefaces for the specific contexts of the brands, publications and stories in which they appear. Matt has made several of these fonts commercially available through the Buy Fonts Save Lives initiative, with proceeds donated to charity. His typefaces AType, BWord, Gracey Slab, NSW01, MFred and TIMMONS have helped raise more than $150,000 for Cancer Research UK and Macmillan Cancer Support to date.
His work has been recognized with numerous awards from D&AD, the Society of Publication Designers (SPD), the Type Directors Club (TDC) and Creative Review, which named him Designer of the Year in 2014. His titles for “Killing Eve” were nominated for a BAFTA Award and received a Royal Television Society Craft Award. Matt was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) in 2015.
Congratulations, Matt!
Design and art direction of the London-based style and culture magazine Port, 2011-2021.
Redesign of The Independent, one of the UK’s national newspapers, 2013.
Furniture and tiles made in collaboration with Huguet, the Mallorcan artisan hydraulic tile, cement and terrazzo producer, 2022.
Redesign of The New York Review of Books, 2022.
