About

Since opening Morla Design in 1984, Jennifer Morla has paired wit and elegance on everything from motion graphics and branding to retail environments and textiles. She is the recipient of graphic design’s most honored awards: The AIGA Medal and The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award.

Morla’s work is included in numerous museum collections including the MOMA in New York, LACMA in Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian Museum. She has had solo exhibitions at DDD Gallery in Japan and at the SFMOMA in San Francisco, which has acquired over 50 pieces of her work for their permanent collection. Her work has been published extensively, most notably in Meggs’ History of Graphic Design.

Morla’s clients include Levi Strauss, MTV, Apple, Stanford University, the Mexican Museum and Design Within Reach. For her accomplishments with DWR, the company was awarded the prestigious AIGA Corporate Leadership Medal for the successful interaction between aesthetics and business pragmatics.

Originally from Manhattan, she studied conceptual art at the Hartford Art School/ University of Hartford and received her BFA in Graphic Design from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Morla moved to San Francisco in 1978. She was the Senior Designer for broadcast and print at PBS/SF and Art Director at Levi Strauss & Co. prior to opening her studio at 28 years old.

Morla lectures and judges internationally and was a professor of senior level design at California College of the Arts for over 20 years. She is an elected member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), an international design organization based in Zurich. She has served on the boards of national art and design organizations, is past Chair of SFMOMA’s Architecture and Design Forum, received the 2021 Distinguished Alumni Award from Massachusetts College of Art.

Morla has been on the Accessions Committee at SFMOMA since 1991, is a Board Director at Letterform Archive and is a Creative Advisor for Arion Press. She serves as an Executive Juror for the Academy of Digital Arts, the Webby Awards.