Introduction; Willoughby Design Lookbook, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Awards
Date
Credits
- Willoughby Design 7 Agency
- Ann Willoughby 8 Design Director
- Nicole Satterwhite 7 Art Director
- Olivia Feathers 2 Designer
- Ann Willoughby 8 Copywriter
- Ann Willoughby 8 Illustrator
- Tim Pott 2 Photographer
- Tom Styrkowicz Photographer
- Meg Cundiff Illustrator
- Gordon Mackenzie Author
- Megan Stephens Visual Consultant
Format
- Book 1100
Clients
Techniques
Dimensions
Locations Made
- United States 1049
- Kansas City 6
- Kansas
- Missouri 10
- Kansas City
Links
Introduction, Willoughby Design Lookbook
In 2019, Ann Willoughby was nominated for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award. This lookbook introduction gathers Ann’s design statement, biography, honors, and accomplishments, along with images that evoke the culture, team, and office life of Willoughby Design.
In her statement, Ann looks back to a childhood in Mississippi in the late 1940s and early 1950s—a landscape of family, memory, and contradiction that helped kindle her creative entrepreneurship and her lifelong desire to build a life shaped by creativity, talent, and a different kind of workplace, one where women and children could flourish.
Ann’s early years began at the Smith family homestead, tucked into ten acres of hilly woods in Raymond, Mississippi. The 1840s antebellum home was surrounded by outbuildings, a large workshop, chickens, a cow, rabbits, flowers, and gardens…the ordinary abundance of a place that, in a child’s mind, became anything but ordinary. A feeling for place, family, endurance, beauty, and making became a touchstone of Ann’s memory. Less than a quarter mile away stood the magnificent Hinds County Courthouse, once the capital of Mississippi, built by enslaved people in 1849. Jim Crow would not officially end in the South until 1975. These early encounters…with the land, with the rituals and tensions of a small Southern town, and with the steady wisdom of an 85-year-old great-grandmother, helped shape the life and career that followed.
Ann was an only child in a household of three generations of adults, and she spent long hours, whole days, and slow summer months outdoors drawing and building. There, out of found objects, rocks, wood, wire, nails, buttons, Civil War shells, and small treasures gathered in the trash heap and around her great-grandparents’ home, she crafted a handmade world of wonder. It was a time when a child’s imagination and time were still unstructured, largely free of rules, adult oversight, formal lessons, and, in Ann’s case, the company of other children. Reflecting on her childhood, Ann believes that this uninterrupted focus on drawing instilled in her a deep love for the design process.
With a child’s innocence and curiosity, Ann absorbed Southern culture—its food, hospitality, sense of belonging, and sense of purpose. She was encouraged to draw and design an alternative world with the fearless confidence of a young child. And yet the racial hypocrisy and the cruel treatment of innocent people could not be ignored. Even then, she began to develop an instinct for questioning social and institutional rules and traditions. Those early experiences left a lasting mark on a girl’s future dreams. Was it possible to design a life?
In 1978, Ann opened a small studio at 423 Westport Road in Kansas City, Missouri. There, in a small room and with a large idea, she began the experiment that would become Willoughby Design.
The introduction closes with ten stories of client partnerships, tracing a path from 1978 through 2018.