Mel Byars (born in Columbia, South Carolina), is an American design historian.

Byars studied journalism in the 1950s at the University of South Carolina.^[1][2] He subsequently settled in New York City^[3] and eventually became active as an art director or creative director for a number of publishers, such as Prentice-Hall and McGraw-Hill, and for advertising agencies, including Leber Katz Partners (subsumed into Foote, Cone & Belding, the world's second oldest advertising agency, founded 1873). In the early 1980s, he studied anthropology under Stanley Diamond (1921–1991) in the master's-degree program of The New School for Social Research. And, previously there, he was enrolled in the School of Media Studies.

A decade later, he turned to the history of applied art/industrial design and served as the archivist of the Thérèse Bonney Photography Collection (images of 1925-35 French decorative arts and other subjects) in New York's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and has been a major donor of 20th-century objects to the museum's permanent collection.^[4] He has made other donations to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague (Uměleckoprůmyslová museum v Praze),^[2] Israel Museum,^[5] Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and Columbia Museum of Art.^[2]

Byars has taught at Pratt Institute and Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City and Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and Holon Institute of Technology in Israel^[6] and at others as well as lectured widely^[7] while remaining active in the advertising sector. From 2017 to 2019, he wrote a column for Elephant art and culture magazine.^[8][9]

Awards/works

Byars's most significant work is the second edition (2004) of The Design Encyclopedia, which won the Besterman/McColvin Gold Medal for the best reference book of 2004 from the British Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.^[10][11] When active in graphic design earlier in his career, he won a number of awards, including from the Art Directors Club of New York and had works published in various books such as 100 Years of Dance Posters^[12] and Dance Posters.^[13]

In addition to The Design Encyclopedia, other literary works include more than a dozen books, essays for various design-exhibition catalogs, book introductions and articles for I.D., Beaux Arts, Clear, Echoes, Graphis,^[14] form, and other periodicals. A number of the books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Hebrew.^[15]