Mr. Lois and his son Luke then founded Good Karma Creative, an advertising and marketing company. He has been inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame, the One Club Creative Hall of Fame, and the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame, and has won Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Society of Publication Designers.
In 2016, Mr. Lois gave the City College of New York a wealth of career material, including recordings of radio and television commercials; copies of print advertisements, scripts, sketches, correspondence and photographs from its campaigns; and perhaps the last Tommy Hilfiger poster from the pre-cellphone 1980s, when they appeared in Manhattan phone booths and jump-started that designer’s career.
“George Lois is extremely important to us because we have a new program, a master’s program in advertising, branding and integrated communications,” Jeffrey F. Machi, City College’s vice president for development and institutional advancement, told The New York Times.
Mr. Lois is the author of several books, including “Damn Good Advice (for People with Talent!)” (2012), “George Lois on His Creation of the Big Idea” (2008), “$ellebrity: My Angling and Tangling With Famous People” (2003) and “The Art of Advertising: George Lois on Mass Communication” (1977, with Bill Pitts).
Since its heyday, the advertising world that once fueled individual creativity has disappeared, Mr. Lois in 2012 to Creative Review magazine. started buying up agencies, and you have five or six or seven agencies running the world, and if you’re part of it, you’re never going to be a creative agency. It just doesn’t work.”