Linda and Kit Hinrichs Endowed Scholarship in Honor of their Mothers

The Linda and Kit Hinrichs Endowed Scholarship in Honor of their Mothers was established in 2005 by Linda (ADVT 64) and Kit Hinrichs (ADVT 63) to support women from Los Angeles County with financial need and academic merit studying in the Graphic Design program, with a particular interest transfer students.

Kit and Linda are both well-known graphic designers and collectors who met at ArtCenter and worked in New York before moving to San Francisco in the 1970s and merging their firm with Pentagram, a global design corporation with offices in London, New York, Berlin, Austin, Texas, and San Francisco.

Linda Hinrichs reminisces on her experiences as a trailblazing woman in the field in a 2011 Interview by AIGA SF https://aigasf.org/fellow-awards-2011-interview-linda-hinrichs:

“I graduated from Burlingame High School, a pretty high-achieving school even in those days, with classes based not only on getting into college but into Cal or Stanford (as did my older brother). But I edited the class yearbook and quickly realized I preferred layout and text editing to term papers and chemistry lab, and some good counseling sent me off to visit Art Center. Both of my parents grew up in LA––my father had a career as a manufacturing executive with American Can and was a graduate of USC, so he would have preferred UCLA––but they both signed off on my choice and off I went. At the time there did seem to be a simplistic concept that you were either arts or science, and although I did not draw or paint well, Art Center presented a different concept from the usual arts program and saw the fit for me. It was not called graphic design, however, and no one put architecture on the list, as they might today.

My reunion reminded me, however, that it was a bit of a lonely choice, and more different than I probably had understood. Art Center was at the time about 70/30 ratio of men to women, and perhaps 90/10 ratio of what were transfer or graduate students. In classes it was not so noticeable but social life was hard and there were certainly no tennis courts and not very many books, either. But I loved it, I made life-long friendships, met my future husband, and dodged critical comments on my final Bachelor of Professional Arts degree (trade school), the cost of which my dad sometimes compared to my brother’s Stanford tuition.

It wasn’t made an issue to be female at Art Center and the 60s brought careers into focus for women, but Kit and I went off to New York to work and as we now watch episodes of Mad Men, many things come back into focus. If you were young, it was assumed you would not be taken seriously anyway, male or female, so it didn’t become a real issue until you wanted to attend a meeting or talk to the client directly. Like children, we were expected to be seen and not heard. And Mad Men aside, I was treated better at the ad agency than I was at my next job––in publishing, at American Home magazine. At the magazine there were odd imbalances: so many editorial writers and editors in New York were women that male art directors were preferred in order to strike a balance. I felt invisible there. My creative group at Kenyon & Eckhardt had the Lincoln Mercury account and my boss would close his door so I wouldn’t hear the crass language of the Detroit meetings on the speakerphone. Eventually I chose to leave advertising because I felt that I would never be theatrical enough for TV, clearly where all the action was going. (And I was still not 25, not old enough to rent a car for the photo shoots.)

By the time we became successful, many younger women were doing very well, so the issues were not frequent and occurred primarily within the business community. But I expect one learns to stay in the background so as not to be suspect, even with generous design partners, as I had at JPH&S and Pentagram.

The real problem, I think, for many women, is that at some point one realizes that one wants a home, children and extended family, and it is very distracting from a full-out career, no matter how good it is."