With only $100 in his pocket when he arrived in New York, Koons worked his way through school by teaching art in settlement houses, selling his class projects, and washing dishes.

Although he realized early on that his career was in commercial art and design, Koons was an accomplished and prolific painter and sculptor, and he continued to work in a variety of mediums, but chiefly in oil painting, for the rest of his life.

[6] In 1946, after his discharge from the army, Irv Koons returned to New York where he enrolled in The New School and received his first major assignment, a series of forty illustrations for Simon & Schuster for a humorous "travel diary" by American novelist David Dodge.

The book, titled How Green Was My Father, chronicles the Dodge family's misadventures as they travel from San Francisco to Guatemala, via the Pan American Highway through Mexico, by car.

Koons went on to illustrate four more of Dodge's books, How Lost Was My Weekend (1948), The Crazy Glasspecker (1949), 20,000 Leagues Behind the 8 Ball (1951), and The Poor Man's Guide to Europe (1953), and provided dust jacket art for Time Out For Turkey (1955).

He also designed special equipment and furniture for the venture and taught a group of locals with virtually no art training how to do print mechanicals and produce the newspaper daily.

In 1949, he founded his own consulting design firm, Irv Koons Associates, Inc. (IKA), in New York, for which he served as CEO and Creative Head.

In November 1988, Koons resigned from the Saatchi organization to join the United Nations Development Programme as Senior Advisor to the Administrator, a volunteer appointment.

[10][11] In addition to Consolidated Cigar, Seagram, and Mueller, Koons worked on projects for many other companies and organizations designing packaging, advertisements and logos, leaflets, brochures, and booklets.

Koons also created Jewish art pieces, including a complete set of eight Torah ornaments for the Temple Emanu-El in Englewood (now Closter, New Jersey).

The designs were based on the burning bush, each depicting a different interpretation of the eight most important events in the history of the Jewish people; the crowns symbolized the flames.

The award presentation and dinner was originally scheduled to take place at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in a room designed to hold about fifty attendees.

However, the PDC received such an overwhelming response from designers, friends, and students from around the world who wanted to attend that the event had to be moved at the last minute to a larger venue at the St. Regis New York.