Advisory Board

John Bielenberg

Project M and C2

What John does best is help companies, and their people, find the courage, and the sense of humor to consider whole new, wrong ways of bringing their stories, ideas, and innovations out into the world.

John feels so strongly about the value of thinking wrong that he created a program called Project M that is designed to inspire and educate young designers, writers, photographers and filmmakers by proving that their work—especially their wrongest thinking—can have a positive and significant impact on the world. Project M has developed projects to help a conservation area in Costa Rica, Micro-financing in Ghana, New Orleans after Katrina, the community of East Baltimore and connecting households to fresh water in Hale County Alabama.

In his career, John has won over 250 design awards, was nominated for 2 National Design Awards from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, served on the AIGA National Board of Directors, and teaches at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has acquired six of his projects and staged a solo exhibition in 2000. In addition, John is a founding partner of C2 and a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique International).