This month’s edition of Fast Company hails President John Maeda as a “master of design.” In particular the president is cited for his leadership, as a person with the rare ability to “help reconcile the design world’s competing impulses: creativity and pragmatism, uniqueness and mass-marketability.” The in-depth article also features examples of President Maeda’s own work and a great shot of him amid plants and skeletons in the Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab.

“Because design will be the technology of the 21st century,” Esquire this month named President Maeda one of the “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century.” (In 1999 the magazine included him among the 21 most important people for the 21st century.) Says the president in a first-person mini-manifesto, “technology is outpacing our ability to use it. And it’s the job of designers to restore balance to this equation.”