Carin Goldberg was born in New York City and studied at the Cooper Union School of Art.  Carin began her career as a staff designer at CBS Television, CBS Records and Atlantic Records. She later went on to establish her own
 firm, Carin Goldberg Design, in 1982.
Over the following two decades Carin designed hundreds of book jackets for all the major American publishing houses, including Simon & Schuster, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Harper Collins, Doubleday and Hyperion, and dozens of album covers for record labels such as Warner Bros., Motown, Nonesuch, Interscope and EMI. The breadth of her work covers artists as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Susan Sontag, Dvorák and Madonna. Her book jacket for the 1986 reissue of James Joyce’s "Ulysses" has become an icon of postmodern design.