Ryan Medeiros is a designer with eyes on the future and respect for the past.
Ryan Medeiros is a designer with eyes on the future and respect for the past.
Designer, educator, and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ryan Medeiros is a designer, educator, and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spends most days designing, teaching, and managing his online Etsy store Posterdelic.
From his nascent experience designing for one of the first music websites (IUMA) in the mid 1990s, to developing and teaching classes in UI for Augmented Reality (A.R.), Medeiros has practiced at the cutting-edge of the digital design industry for nearly 25 years.
Ryan’s Art and Design Background
Ryan grew up in Berkeley California and showed an interest in drawing from a very early age. Both parents were highly interested in the arts and encouraged him. In high school Ryan was active as a cartoonist for the school newspaper and created his own comic book with a group of friends. He was voted “Most Artistic” in the Berkeley high yearbook.
He went to collage at UC Santa Cruz and studied Art History and Fine Art. At UCSC he completed courses in a wide range of mediums including life drawing, painting, print making, sculpture and photography. He also produced flyers for local music events including a performance by Green Day in the Porter Collage Quad in 1992, and multiple events for Super Sauce which was the first band of Gretchen Lieberum and Maya Rudolph, who are now the front duo for the band Princess.
Right out of college, Medeiros got a job at a game company in Santa Cruz called Cinematronics where he designed the artwork for “Space Cadet Pinball”—a game that shipped with Microsoft Windows 95 and was part of the OS for over 10 years.
Next, he moved to San Francisco and became the Interaction Specialist for legendary package designer Primo Angeli. There he became friends with and was mentored by Mr. Angeli. As a junior designer, Mr Angeli would employ Ryan for pet side-projects, as well as working closely with him on the award winning design of the Primo Angeli Inc website. This received an International Merit Award from How Magazine in 1997.
This preliminary success in web design led Ryan to strike out on his own. Medeiros founded a successful web design company in San Francisco in the late 90s and led a team of designers through the creation of the first online store for worldwide skateboard retailer Deluxe Distribution.
He and his team also created graphics and logos for skate companies such as Real and Stereo, and designed promotional sites featuring top skateboarding professionals such as Tommy Guerrero.
In 2009, Medeiros was recognized at the Moscow Biennale of Graphic Design as a short-list winner in the Best in Show category (alongside luminary designer Stefan Sagmeister) for his poster “100 years of Futurism”.
Medeiros has been teaching at the Academy of Art University for over twenty years. In 2014, he became the Executive Director of the School of Interaction & UI/UX Design, and helped to guide the Department to become a leader in UX/UI design for Virtual Reality (V.R.) and Augmented Reality (A.R.).
Ryan’s Current Interests
Ryan’s current art and design activities include teaching UX and Motion Graphics classes for the Academy, designing freelance web and graphics projects, and creating his own mixed media fine art.
Since 2018, Ryan has also been promoting and managing his online Etsy store Posterdelic which sells authentic vintage 1960s psychedelic posters, handbills and memorabilia. He has written a number of articles about User Experience on Substack.
Teaching/Writing
Ryan has been teaching digital graphics and user experience for over twenty-five years, both in the classroom and online. He’s been associated with the Academy of Art University since 2003 as an adjunct professor, full-time professor, and eventually the director of the School of Interaction Design & UI/UX (formerly Web Design & New Media). Currently, Ryan teaching online classes in both user experience and motion graphics (specifically After Effects), and writes articles on the topic of User Experience on the publishing platform Substack.
Over the decades of his teaching experience, Ryan has written and developed many courses on the topics of typographic design, user experience, and interactive thesis project development.
As Director of the Interaction and UX/UI department at the Academy of Art University Ryan was responsible for the department’s curriculum. He worked hands on to create many department classes including Typography for Digital Masters (a foundational UI and typographic design course), Directed Study in UX/UI (focused on the UX design process for masters students), and Interactive Infographics (a survey and design course for developing data driven design).
Creating instructional content requires many different media types including written content and video tutorials. In addition to the actual class content, further development includes assignments, discussions, exams, and rubrics.
Collecting / Selling Vintage Art / Posters
Ryan’s father Walter Medeiros was a very prominent art collector, writer and archivist who focused on the psychedelic rock posters of the 1960s. He was friends with many of the poster artists from that period, especially his close friend and visionary artist Wilfried Sätty.
When Walter passed in 2016 he left his vast collection of posters and the artwork of Wilfried Sätty to Ryan and his sister Molly DeCoudreaux, who are both following their father’s legacy by promoting his collection and the art of Wilfried Sätty.
Screen printing/Graphic Art
Ryan has a strong background in traditional art and studied drawing, painting and photography at UCSC. His mixed-media art works were shown in San Francisco galleries in 2007 and 2008. He is currently working on new mixed-media work, building up a series of graphic prints and stretched canvas pieces. The theme of this current work is retro-1960s-70s cold war era spy craft.
Ryan is dedicated to his work in design and teaching, both as a passion and a career. With over 25 years of experience in design, he possesses a diverse set of skills including digital software, design thinking, teaching, curriculum development, fine art, and printmaking. He is also developing talks on 1960s psychedelic rock posters to honor the legacy of his father, Walter Medeiros. The future offers many opportunities for this artist with eclectic interests and a Renaissance man's spirit.