Rebeca Méndez is a designer and artist living in Los Angeles. She is professor at UCLA, Design | Media Arts. Her research focuses on critical reflections on visual communication practices and in particular on brand identity and consumer culture.
Through her studio, Rebeca Méndez Design, she has collaborated with video artist Bill Viola, architect Thom Mayne, and film director Mike Figgis. RMD’s clients include MIT Press, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Berlin, The Getty Museum, MOCA, and Caltech.
As creative director of Brand Integration Group (BIG), Ogilvy & Mather, (1999–2003) Rebeca led global brand identity projects for clients such as IBM, Motorola, BP (British Petroleum), AT&T Wireless, and Mattel.
Parallel to her design practice, Méndez is an exhibiting artist who works with various media to explore the forces of nature modulated through technology. Méndez’s art and design work has been exhibited and collected by institutions such as the SFMOMA, Stedelijk Museum, Centre Pompidou, and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Méndez has won numerous awards, including a Graphis Platinum Award this year.
Méndez lectures internationally from Tijuana to Taipei, and has been reviewed extensively by: Metropolis, I.D. Magazine, 34 Magazine, Creative Magazine, RES, Communication Arts, Graphis, Eye, Business 2.0, and Poliester. Her work has been subject of numerous exhibitions including ‘Masters of Graphic Design: UCLA Extension Catalog Covers 1990 – 2007’ 2007, ‘The National Design Triennial: Design Culture Now, 2000’, a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998, and ‘Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture’, 1996.
Méndez has received numerous awards including in 2007: Graphis Platinum Award in Design, 365: AIGA Year in Design 28, and Art Directors Club of New York Merit Award, 2007. She has been twice nominated for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Communication Design (2005 – 2006).
Méndez recently served as Chair of the Design Jury for the Art Directors Club 86th Design Awards, 2007.
Adam Eeuwens is partner in Rebeca Méndez Design, responsible for design strategy, account handling, research and development, copywriting and creating concepts that lead to artistic solutions and pragmatic results. Adam possesses almost 20 years of media industry experience, half in the United States, half of them in Europe, with experience as journalist, editor, publisher, event developer, planner, copy writer and author. Adam is co-author of False Flat, Why Dutch Design is So Good, published by Phaidon Press in 2004, and until recently, he was editorial director of ‘34’ Magazine, a design quarterly published from Istanbul. The red thread of his career is his propensity to create strategy and turn it into story.
His motto in work and life is to ‘Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.’