Biography
Douglass Scott was, until January 2010, Creative Director at
the WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston – a producer and broadcaster of
public television and radio programs, where he had worked since 1974. His major
projects at WGBH include: Masterpiece Theatre, This Old House, Nova, Evening at
Symphony, The Victory Garden, Evening at Pops, The Caption Center and WGBH Radio.
He currently runs a design practice doing book and identity design, and is
consulting Art Director of Davis Publications, an art education publisher in
Worcester, Massachusetts. Before coming to WGBH, Scott worked for Schmidtke
& Layer Architects in Elgin, Illinois; was a principal of two
architecture/graphic design firms in Lincoln, Nebraska – Art Coalition and
Rainbow Studio; and has maintained a freelance practice since 1968. From
1971–1977, Scott was a draftsman/cartographer and Operations & Intelligence
Sergeant in the United States Army Reserve.
He has designed books for many publishers including Little,
Brown; Houghton Mifflin; Addison-Wesley; Beacon Press; Alfred A. Knopf;
Prentice-Hall and Harper & Row. Other clients include Suffolk University,
Emmanuel College, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Society for the
Preservation of New England Antiquities, Boston Design Museum, Harvard
University’s School of Public Health and John F. Kennedy School of Government,
Abt Associates and Boston Musica Viva. He has designed exhibitions for the
Boston Public Library, Museum of African American History, Mid-America Arts
Alliance, Nebraska State Historical Society and the National Park Service.
Scott teaches graphic design, exhibition design, typography
and graphic design history at the Rhode Island School of Design (since 1980)
and teaches graphic design and design history at the Yale University School of
Art (since 1984). He has also taught at
University of Massachusetts/Dartmouth, Northeastern University, Rhode Island
College and Connecticut College, as well as the Boston
Architectural Center, Harvard University, Maine College of Art and at both
RISD and Maine Summer Institutes of Graphic Design Studies. He is a recipient of RISD's John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. Since 1989, Scott
has been actively constructing and exhibiting paper collages and assemblages.
Since 1978, Scott has given over 150 lectures on the history
of design and printing, as well as his own work, at various colleges,
universities and symposia. He was a curator of the history of American
typography section of the 1989 exhibition Graphic Design In America, which
opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and traveled to Phoenix, New York
City and London. Scott also curated The Roots of Modern American Graphic
Design, a 1987 exhibition at the Art Institute of Boston which included 400
works by 21 American designers from the 1930s–50s. He has been a visiting critic at
over 35 colleges and art schools.
Scott’s design work has won awards from the American
Institute of Graphic Arts, Society of Typographic Arts, Boston Hatch Awards,
New York Art Directors Club, Boston Art Directors Club, Broadcast Designers
Association and Bookbuilders of Boston. He has been a member of the American
Institute of Graphic Arts since 1974 and served on its national board of
directors from 1989–1992. He has been a member of the board of directors of
DesignInquiry.
Scott holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the
University of Nebraska, a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University and studied
the history of graphic design with Louis Danziger at Harvard University.