Professor Emeritus Steven McCarthy (MFA, Stanford University) joined the UMN graphic design faculty in 1998 and retired in 2020. His long-standing interest in theories of design authorship as both scholar and practitioner led to lectures, exhibits, publications and grant-funded research on six continents. His book on the topic of design authorship, The Designer As... Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating was published in 2013. McCarthy’s creative work has been in over 130 juried and invitational exhibitions, and has been awarded inclusion in the AIGA annual, the STA 100 show and in Graphis Poster. Institutional ‘special collections’ that have acquired McCarthy’s work include these universities: Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Virginia Commonwealth, Cincinnati, Ohio State, Art Institute of Chicago, UC–Berkeley, and Washington. He has published in the journals Design Issues, Message, Visible Language, Design and Culture, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, and Visual Communication, and frequently writes for Eye magazine. In 2017 he was awarded the Minnesota Book Artist Award.