Tanner Woodford has been at the epicenter of Chicago’s design community for over a decade. In 2012, he founded the Design Museum of Chicago, or as it was formerly known, the Chicago Design Museum. And although the museum’s mission is in a constant state of flux, responding to the city’s needs, its vision remains constant: to inspire, educate, and foster innovation through design.
Growing up, Woodford began a lifelong relationship to design and the visual arts thanks to his mother’s collection of camera lenses. Through analog photography, he developed a foundation of visual literacy and fundamentals that led to him starting a photography business alongside his friends. In those early days, Woodford would travel to Chicago from Southern Illinois to photograph and document live music and artists. This served as a gateway to graphic design as a communication tool of expression and meaning. Soon he began designing album covers and websites for bands — among them, Chicago band Tub Ring’s 2004 album Zoo Hypothesis.
The same year, Woodford left his midwest hometown to study design at Arizona State University. During these years, Woodford’s aperture of design widened, and he was now exposed to multidisciplinary practices such as architecture and industrial design. Around this time, with peers, Woodford began to brainstorm what a design museum could look like in Chicago, his main observation being that, at the time, there was no way for design disciplines to be connected. Soon after, in Chicago, Woodford began facilitating spaces where designers could connect with each other, obtain a sense of belonging, and collaborate.
We make our best effort to keep all programming free or low-cost. Each exhibition is uniquely designed in concert with the exhibition themes, and the gallery space undergoes a complete transformation for each show.
Today, as Founder and Executive Director of The Design Museum of Chicago, Woodford continues to find new ways to enrich Chicago’s relationship to design. A significant focus of his is to make design accessible not just for designers but to everybody from tourists, high school students, educators, non-profit organizations, and more. He considers himself as happy to be scrappy and irrepressibly optimistic and believes design has the capacity to improve the human condition fundamentally.
In addition, Woodford is an artist that paints what he calls optimistic, typographic, and larger-than-life murals. His work has appeared in places such as the WNDR Museum and Soho House Chicago. He also leads workshops on design issues, social change, and design history in classroom and conference settings.
In the latest episode of our podcast, Underscore, Woodford speaks with host Christian Solorzano and shares stories about his early introduction to graphic design, the beginning of the Design Museum of Chicago, his influences, and ways to strengthen design’s role throughout the city.
Acrylic on Yellow Brick, 2018
Printed Canvas, 2019
Album cover designed by Tanner Woodford
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