Michael Patrick Cronan

Michael Patrick Cronan (June 9, 1951 – January 1, 2013) was an American graphic designer, brand strategist, adjunct professor, and fine art painter. He was one of the founders of the San Francisco Bay Area postmodern movement in graphic design, that later became known as the "Pacific Wave".

He was a 2014 American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Medalist and received the AIGA lifetime achievement award in 2009. He met his future wife and business partner, Karin Hibma at California State University, Sacramento.

In 1971, he went abroad to study archeology, and work as an archaeological dig manager for Hebrew University in the Negev Desert and then at the Dead Sea.

Career

Pacific Wave movement In the early 1980s a few San Francisco–based designers were nicknamed “The Michaels” because they all had the same name (Cronan, alongside Mabry, Manwaring, Vanderbyl, Schwab), and later they were known as the "Pacific Wave" according to historian Steven Heller.

Cronan Design Cronan and Karin Hibma established Michael Patrick Cronan Design (also known as Cronan Design, but later known simply as Cronan) in 1980. Cronan Design clients including TiVo, Kindle, Levi Strauss & Co.,

Walking Man Together Cronan and Hibma formed a sub-brand of clothing design, Walking Man, in 1989. In 1992 and 1993, Walking Man clothing won the I.D. Magazine Consumer Product of the Year/Gold Award presented at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York.

Other design experiences He was an adjunct professor of graphic design at California College of the Arts from 1981–2001.

Cronan designed the stamp commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of NATO and later the Prostate Awareness stamp for the United States Postal Service.

His graphic design work is included in many public museum collections including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, among others.

Membership Cronan was a founding member of the American Institute of Graphic Art (AIGA) chapter in San Francisco

Publications Cronan has been subject of profile articles in Communication Arts Magazine, I.D. Magazine, Linea Graphica (Italy), Graphis Inc., HOW, and many others.

Death On January 1, 2013, Cronan died at his Berkeley home after a long time with colon cancer. He had been diagnosed for the same for five years previously.