Rick Penn-Kraus is design director at the 79-year-old international public relations firm Hill & Knowlton in Los Angeles. His duties include designing logos, brochures, posters, and collateral material, as well as illustration, photography, in-house movie creation and video editing, songwriting/performing, and managing the graphics department.

At H&K he has created award-winning designs for clients that include Motorola, Stoli, Sony, Wal-Mart, Mazda, BFGoodrich, Hitachi, Hewlett Packard, the State of California, Proctor and Gamble, and PG&E, and he recently won a Graphic Design USA award for inhouse design for his work for Thailand. His illustrations appear regularly in WPP’s newspaper (based in London) reaching 100,000 WPP employees worldwide. Rick also enjoys teaching graphic design and illustration, and recently was a guest lecturer at the USC Annenberg School of Communication.

As creative director at book and audio publisher NewStar Media for more than five years he designed award-winning books for adults and children, as well as hundreds of audio book covers and movie posters; his designs have appeared on the covers of numerous local and national bestsellers.

Rick began his career in the art department of California Magazine as photo researcher and production artist before working as designer and art department supervisor at book publisher Price Stern Sloan (Mad Libs, Murphy’s Law, etc.), then as art director at advertising studio BKA. In addition to professional photography, he also exhibits and sells his fine art internationally -- in 2003 he had a solo photography show in Burbank ("New York Before You-Know-When”), and a solo cartoon retrospective in 2004 ("The Friday Cartoon".)

Rick is also a professional musician (guitar), performing at McCabes and private gatherings, and a published author. He has a 19-month-old son, and has known his wife since fourth grade.