Journalist, Design critic
Anne Quito
Anne Quito is a journalist and a design critic based in Barcelona. Her beat tracks the surprising ways designers shape culture—from making legible fonts, ergonomic chairs, mood-altering scents, cooler cities, to designing a brand new nation from scratch. She is the first recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary.
A former staff reporter at Quartz, her writing also appears in The Atlantic, CNN,Fast Company, Architectural Digest, Town and Country, Metropolis, Design Observer, Works That Work, A24, Eye on Design, and other publications.
Anne wrote the book Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines (Columbia University Press, 2019), a chronicle of the glory days of magazine design as told by Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard. She is among the hosts of Print is Dead. Long Live Print!, a podcast devoted to the legends of magazine publishing.
An experienced speaker and lecturer, Anne gave the commencement address at the Parsons School of Design, School of Art, Media, and Technology in 2022. She has presented at the Harvard School of Design, AIGA, the Type Directors Club, Adobe, the World Health Organization, the CDC, and TED Global; she been a guest commentator on the BBC, CBC Radio, and Monocle.
Anne has served as a moderator at several conferences and panels including SxSW, Amazon’s Conflux, Herman Miller, Collision, Pictoplasma, Copenhagen’s TechBBQ, IAM Weekend, the Van Alen Institute, the AIA New York-Center for Architecture, and Turncoats. In April 2024, she moderated the D7 Summit, the first ever gathering of America’s seven largest design organizations held in Kansas City.
Anne graduated from Georgetown University in 2009 and is an alumna of the School of Visual Arts Design Criticism MFA where she developed a thesis about the nation branding of South Sudan, the world’s newest country. She at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and at the ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering.
She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art, AICA) and the North American Vexillological Association.
Anne is currently working on the biography of Milton Glaser.
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