Fast Company’s senior editor Tischler dies from cancer

Linda Tischler, a senior editor at Fast Company, where she wrote about the intersection of business and design, died Monday from cancer.

Executive editor Noah Robischon wrote, “Goodbye Linda. Thank you for opening my eyes and heart to everything possible in design.”

She helped launch the magazine’s annual “Master’s of Design” issue, which celebrates the people in the forefront of design thinking. That franchise has grown into an annual Innovation by Design issue and conference.

Tischler also  blogged on Fastcompany.com and helped launched the dedicated design site, FastCoDesign.com where she curated the site’s first team of expert design bloggers. For several years she wrote a magazine column, “Big Bang Design,” which explored how design, when used strategically, can have a big impact on everything from health to education to urban planning and beyond.

Robischon, in a remembrance posted on the Fast Company website, wrote, “For anyone unfamiliar with her work over the last decade, Linda catalyzed and chronicled a fundamental evolution in the way design and business interact. The fact that designers occupy the c-suite more often now than in the past, and that the design process is built into the earliest stages of a business plan, instead of being an afterthought, is in large part thanks to her writing.”

Prior to joining Fast Company, Tischler was an editor at Boston Magazine, where she initiated the New England Design Awards, and launched the magazine’s special “Boston Home” section.  She has also written on art and design for Metropolitan Home, the Boston Globe, Better Homes and Gardens, and Maybourne Style, and held editing and writing jobs at the Boston Herald and Microsoft’s sidewalk.com

In 2006, Tischler won the Society of Professional Journalists top award for feature writing, and was a finalist for the 2007 “Mirror Awards” for best single story.

She held a bachelor’s degree, and two masters’ degrees from Boston University.