Ruffins attended the
High School of Music & Art in
New York City and
Cooper Union. While a student at Cooper Union he co-founded Design Plus with Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser, and Edward Sorel. It was a short-lived venture. After graduation the collaborative partnership evolved and in 1954, he co-founded
Push Pin Studios with fellow Cooper graduates Glaser, Sorel, and Chwast. In 1963, after leaving Push Pin, Ruffins co-founded another design studio with
Simms Taback, a partnership which lasted for more than thirty years. Commercial clients included IBM, AT&T, Coca-Cola, CBS, Pfizer, the
New York Times,
Time Life,
Fortune,
Gourmet Magazine, and the U.S. Post Office. Ruffins entered the field of children's book illustration in 1969, and throughout the 1970s and early 1980s he frequently collaborated with writer Jane Sarnoff. He lived in
Sag Harbor, New York; his wife Joan died in 2013.
Teaching A professor emeritus at
CUNY's
Queens College, Ruffins has also taught at the
School of Visual Arts,
Parsons The New School for Design, and was a visiting
adjunct professor at
Syracuse University. == Awards ==