Paul Prejza

Paul Prejza died on 21 September 2026 at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, aged 87. The cause was complications from pneumonia, according to his obituary in Graphic Design USA. Funeral, memorial and burial details have not been made public.

Paul Prejza was born in 1939 in Herminie, Pennsylvania, a small community in Westmoreland County east of Pittsburgh. His father, Paul Prejza Sr., owned and operated an automobile dealership in Herminie. His mother, Dorothy A. Prejza, was a homemaker and an accomplished knitter. He grew up with a brother, Harold, and sisters Mary and Gloria. His exact birth date has not been published in the sources used for this page.

Prejza studied at Pennsylvania State University and graduated in 1962 from the College of Arts and Architecture. The Sussman/Prejza firm biography describes his degree as a Bachelor of Arts in architecture and architectural history; his obituary in Graphic Design USA describes it as architecture and art history. The Los Angeles Times later described him as trained as an architectural historian. Penn State honored him decades later with an alumni award (the obituary dates it to 2002 through the School of Visual Arts; the firm biography calls it a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2003).

After graduating, Prejza moved to Los Angeles. He worked first for North American Aviation, then joined the Los Angeles City Planning Department, and later the architecture office of William L. Pereira & Associates, where in the late 1960s he worked on the Transamerica Building in San Francisco alongside Carl Magnussen, later design director of Knoll.

In 1980 he and his wife, Deborah Sussman, formally merged their work into Sussman/Prejza & Co. Inc., based first in Santa Monica and from 1986 in Culver City. As executive vice president he supplied strategic planning, technical knowledge and architectural and urban planning expertise to a studio known for graphics and color.

In 1982 the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee engaged The Jerde Partnership and Sussman/Prejza to create the visual language and temporary architecture of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Jon Jerde, David Meckel, Sussman and Prejza led more than 600 designers and architects from about 60 firms, based in a warehouse near downtown Los Angeles with a prototyping shop and large venue models. Time magazine called the result the decade's most glittering and effective demonstration of the power of creative design.

Later work included the Walt Disney World wayfinding system (from 1989), where Prejza divided the vast property into five destination zones; road signs for Euro Disney; the citywide identity and wayfinding for Santa Monica and the Big Blue Bus; identity and wayfinding for Philadelphia's historic districts and parks; programs for the Southern California Gas Company, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the Museum of the African Diaspora, SC Johnson, Amgen, LA Metro, UCLA and Grand Park; and urban and waterfront renewal programs in Culver City, Long Beach and Santa Monica. He also guided new signage ordinances for the Hollywood Entertainment District. He taught at the USC School of Architecture and lectured widely.

Prejza met Deborah Sussman (1931 to 2014), a former member of the Eames Office, at a Los Angeles County Museum of Art event in the late 1960s (1967 per his obituary, 1968 per the firm's history). They married in 1972 in Guanajuato, Mexico. The couple were partners in life and business for more than four decades, until Sussman died of breast cancer in August 2014.

Prejza was an accomplished photographer. His pictures of Guanajuato and of markets, street scenes and landmarks from the couple's travels formed a visual archive that the studio drew on for inspiration. His published obituary does not mention any children. He was survived by his brother, Harold Prejza, and his sister, Mary Trice; another sister, Gloria (Prejza) Keller, died in 2025.

Prejza saw environmental design as a way of making a place coherent at every scale. In 1989 he told the Los Angeles Times that architects and developers increasingly asked the firm to harmonize everything from the color of a wall to the spaces linking buildings with their neighbors, and that the studio had expanded its skill in creating coherent images from a small scale to a larger one. He believed clients understood that "design counts, at every level." His approach to wayfinding started with how people move through a place and interpret information, rather than with the signs themselves, an idea most clearly seen in his zone system for Walt Disney World.

With Deborah Sussman, Prejza helped establish environmental graphic design as a profession that sits between graphic design, architecture, landscape and urban planning. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics look remains a landmark in design history and a reference for later Olympic and civic celebrations. Architect Barton Myers, a frequent collaborator, said in 1989 that "Paul and Deborah have taken the lead in breaking out of the usual restricted role of graphic designers." Colleagues remembered Prejza's steady, pragmatic temperament as the counterweight to Sussman's exuberance, and his planning approach to large wayfinding systems influenced how theme parks, cities and campuses guide visitors.

AIA Institute Honors, 1985, as part of the design team for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Awards from the California Council of the American Institute of Architects. Recognition from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Awards from the AIGA. Penn State College of Arts and Architecture alumni award (2002 per his obituary; listed as a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2003 by his firm).

Prejza appeared with April Greiman, Jeri Heiden, Jayme Odgers and Peter Shire on a panel led by Louise Sandhaus about Los Angeles design in the 1980s, filmed by Eric Minh Swenson as LA Design in the Age of Glow: The Eighties (2017). The firm's work for the 1984 Olympics is featured in the Olympic Channel's Design Focus series, and its Walt Disney World road signs are the subject of popular fan videos. A 1989 Los Angeles Times feature, Environment by Design, profiled the couple's practice.