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Joe Duffy
A Motion Graphic Designer, Animator and Graphic Designer.
It’s All About the Work
Joe Duffy is a 2004 AIGA Medalist; he was born 66 years ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A fine art and painting graduate of University of Minnesota and Minnesota School of Art. He is a creative director and an expert in branding and design. He broke new ground in 1984 when he associated with creative advertising agency Fallon Worldwide to start Duffy design for the collaborative integration of branding and design with advertising. His clients includes McDonalds, BMW and Starbucks etc He was born in Minneapolis and lives there to grow his company and expand, when he started he opened offices in New York and then London and then Singapore, literally to be in those various locations, but now he has office in Minneapolis and where he work for people in Europe, Asia and South America as well as all over the United States, made possible by the availability of the internet.
It’s all about the work. In looking back on creating a name for himself and his business throughout the years, this theme sits at the backbone of everything Duffy does—whether he’s looking to hire fresh talent or simply setting forth a guiding philosophy for Duffy & Partners. “It is all about the work and the work gives you [the base]
to attract other clients who want great work. To attract the best designers who want to build their design careers,” he says. “There’s nothing else that really matters.” “Don’t be distracted by anything, the work is what counts … it’s everything,” -Joe Duffy
Summit Pale Packaging 2014
Joe Duffy’s work is regularly profiled in leading business, marketing and design publications and has been exhibited around the world. Duffy has served as founding chair of the Environmental Committee of the AIGA, and on the boards of the AIGA, the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, and the Minnesota State Arts Council. He has been awarded the Legacy Medal from the AIGA for a lifetime of achievement. His first book, Brand Apart, was released in 2005. In 2006, Duffy was featured in Fast Company as one of the “fast 50” most influential people in the future of business and he is now a Fast Company guest blogger.
Diet Coke Cans 1991
a graphic designer has to draw out his design before going to the computer Joe Duffy offers wonderful advice for graphic design students, two that really standout follow. When asked, how important drawing is in today’s design world, he answered “It’s really, really critical that the people we hire are able to render their ideas, to literally draw them before they jump onto a computer. I think artistic skill is absolutely essential to do the best possible design, and to do it in a collaborative way where you can share your ideas initially with a little sketch, and then refine it, and then go on to the computer and work through it. I think there are too many designers out there who don’t have the real artistic skills that I think are necessary in order to do the best possible design’’. When he was asked how the creative processes work at Duffy & Partners, he answered “After we’ve done our deep dive into understanding the marketing
aspects of the brand–where it’s been, who it competes with and who the audience is–we take the verbal brief that the client gives us and, together with the client, we create a visual brief. It’s not just a mood board: it’s literally a collage of images that we think create, in effect, both a filter and almost a world in which our design directions can live. So there’s colour, there are graphic elements like illustrations and photographs, and there are examples of
typography. The designers working on the project and the clients are always involved in this part of the process. If the client is involved in creating the filter through which we’ll make the final design decisions, then they’re not surprised when they see the new design. They were participating at the outset in helping us to create a path for these new design directions’’
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Duffy Design has withstood the winds of fashion, the elitism of the design industry, the economic recession, the creative recession and the consolidation of what was an industry of individuality. Today, Duffy remains a premiere problem-solver for brands with a future.” —John C Jay, Co-Executive Creative Director, Wieden + Kennedy, Tokyo.
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