Congratulations to Warren Lehrer for winning the Design Incubation Award for his multimodal electronic book Riveted in the Word. Each year, one project receives the Educators Communication Design Award for Scholarship: Creative Work for “demonstrating originality, scope, rigor, impact on communication design’s theoretical, critical, historical and/or visionary foundations.”

Riveted in the Word is inspired by the true story of a writer/historian’s hard-fought battle to regain language after a devastating stroke. The multimodal book app uses writing, a custom interface, kinetic typography, and an original soundtrack to place the reader inside the mind of a retired American history professor as she recalls her journey with Broca’s aphasia. The interface toggles between columns of text that readers navigate at their own pace, and animated sections that evoke gaps between perceptions (thoughts, memories, desires) and the words needed to communicate.

Warren Lehrer is a designer and writer known internationally as a pioneer of visual literature and design authorship. His work is acclaimed for its marriage of writing and typography, capturing the shape of thought and speech, and reuniting oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling in books, animations, and performance. Honors include: Ladislav Sutnar Laureate, Center for Book Arts Honoree, Brendan Gill Prize, Innovative Use of Archives Award, International Book Award for Best New Fiction, three AIGA Book Awards, and fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Rockefeller, Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. His books are in many collections including MoMA, Getty Museum, Georges Pompidou Centre, Tate Gallery. Lehrer is a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author/Entrepreneur MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, Professor Emeritus at SUNY Purchase, and co-founder of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY. https://warrenlehrer.com/