With over 300 awards of excellence, she has

been recognized by virtually every organization

in the field of visual communication. She is the

recipient of design’s most honored awards:

the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

National Design Award and the AIGA Medal.

Her work has been published extensively, most

notably in Meggs’ History of Graphic Design.

Clients include Levi Strauss, Herman Miller,

Stanford University, SculptureCenter, and Design

Within Reach. Her work is part of many permanent

museum collections including the Museum of

Modern Art in New York (MoMA), the San Francisco

Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) and the

Smithsonian Museum. She has been honored with

solo design exhibitions at the SFMoMA and the

DDD Gallery in Japan.

She served on the National Board of Directors of

AIGA, is on the Accessions Board for Architecture

and Design at SFMoMA, and has been judging the

Webby Awards for over a decade.

After giving marine biology a try in college, Susan decided to fall back on a more stable and lucrative profession: illustration. With her artist/writer husband Allen Crawford, they formed Plankton Art Company in 1999 

Susan's stylized, graceful forms are largely inspired by nature and mid-century modernism. She clients include Target, Warner Bros., Hershey, Chronicle Books, Knopf, Ride Snowboards, Hasbro, National Geographic Kids Magazine, Discovery Channel and The Smithsonian National Zoo. One of her most ambitious project was a series of 400 hand-rendered identification key illustrations of fish, plants and other undersea creatures for The American Museum of Natural History's Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, where these drawings are on permanent display. 

Susan's paintings, drawings and prints have been exhibited at numerous galleries, most notably Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea. She lives in a historic Quaker town in Central New Jersey, where she often goes on kayak trips in the Pine Barrens to look for tree frogs and orchids.