Aaron Marcus

Mr. Marcus is the founder and President of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A). A graduate in physics from Princeton University and in graphic design from Yale University, in 1967 he became the world’s first graphic designer to be involved fulltime in computer graphics. In the 1970s he programmed a prototype desktop publishing page layout application for the Picturephone™ at AT&T Bell Labs, programmed virtual reality spaces while a faculty member at Princeton University, and directed an international team of visual communicators as a Research Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu. In the early 1980s he was a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, founded AM+A, and began research as a Co-Principal Investigator of a project funded by the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 1992, he received the National Computer Graphics Association’s annual award for contributions to industry. He was the keynote speaker for ACM/SIGGRAPH 1980, the organizer and chair of the opening plenary panel for ACM/SIGCHI 1999, and the closing keynote plenary speaker for UPA 2005, the Usability Professional’s Association’s annual conference. In 2007, he was named an AIGA Fellow by the AIGA Cross-Cultural Design Center. He is the Editor-in-Chief of User Experience (UX), Editor of Information Design Journal, and is a regular columnist of Interactions. He is also on the Editorial Boards of Visible Language, Universal Access Journal, and the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction.

Mr. Marcus has written over 250 articles; written/co-written five books, including (with Ron Baecker) Human Factors and Typography for More Readable Programs (1990), Graphic Design for Electronic Documents and User Interfaces (1992), and The Cross-GUI Handbook for Multiplatform User Interface Design (1994) all published by Addison-Wesley; and contributed chapters/case studies to five handbooks of user-interface design, information appliances, and culture. Mr. Marcus focuses his attention on the Web and wireless communication, mobile devices, helping the industry to learn about good user-interface and information-visualization design, providing guidelines for globalization/localization, the challenges of “baby faces” (small displays for consumer information appliances) of ubiquitous devices, and cross-cultural communication. Mr. Marcus has published, lectured, tutored, and consulted internationally for more than 35 years and has been an invited keynote/plenary speaker at conferences internationally. He is a visionary thinker, designer, and writer, well-respected in international professional communities, with connections throughout the Web, user interface, human factors, graphic design, and publishing industries.

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