California Institute of the Arts by Paula Scher in 1979
Guest Post by John Clifford
Today, women brand upwardly around one-half of the graphic design profession. This wasn't ever the instance. I wrote Graphic Icons: Visionaries who Shaped Modern Graphic Blueprint to highlight the pioneers of the field, from El Lissitzky to Stefan Sagmeister. Information technology surprised me that so many of the historic designers I considered influential were male person. Fortunately, at that place were several women who challenged the status quo and paved the way for today's female designers. Hither are a few:
Cipe Pineles (1908–1991)
Above, Amuse cover, 1954;Charmmanner spread, 1957
When Cipe Pineles was looking for her offset blueprint chore in the 1940s, prospective employers were interested in her portfolio—until they learned that the unusual first name belonged to a woman. She kept at it, though, and eventually became fine art director at Glamour in 1942, the beginning female person to hold that position at a major American magazine.
Pineles moved on to exist art director at Seventeen, a magazine for teenage girls. While competing titles saw young women as frivolous husband hunters, Seventeen considered its readers smart and serious. By commissioning fine artists like Advertising Reinhardt and Andy Warhol to illustrate articles, Pineles rejected the arcadian way typical of magazine illustrations at the time, and exposed her audience to modernistic art.
In 1950, Pineles became art director at Charm, a magazine targeting a new demographic: working women. She designed style spreads showing the clothes in use—at work, commuting, and running errands. "We tried to brand the prosaic attractive without using the tired clichés of fake glamour," she observed in a later interview. "You might say we tried to convey the attractiveness of reality, every bit opposed to the glitter of a never-never land." Her piece of work helped to redefine the expect of women'due south magazines, while also furthering women'due south changing roles in society.
During a career of many firsts (she was also the showtime female person member of the Art Directors Club, and the first female elected to its Hall of Fame), Cipe Pineles led with her work and she led by example.
April Greiman (born 1948)
"Does information technology Brand Sense?"Blueprint Quarterly,1986
April Greiman uses dissimilar words to describe what she does: "hybrid imagery," "transmedia," "visual advice." But not "graphic pattern." She feels the term refers exclusively to print, and her work combines elements from different types of media. Greiman thinks in terms of space when she designs, not in terms of a page. This is probably why designing digitally has been such a good fit for her.
New Moving ridge typographer Wolfgang Weingart encouraged Greiman, while in graduate school at Basel, to break free from a grid-based approach to design—to layer type, and to float it in space. She brought this knowledge to New York and, after growing frustrated past the rigid limitations imposed by East Declension clients, she moved in 1976 to Los Angeles and opened a studio. She began instruction at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1982 and gained access to the school's computers and video equipment.
The new technology opened and then many possibilities for Greiman, enabling her to combine impress, video, and type into multiple layers that were previously impossible to create. She felt strongly that these new tools weren't just a means to arrive at the same sometime solutions, but that they should pb the states to explore ideas and create something new.
When Greiman designed an issue of Design Quarterly for the Walker Art Center in 1986, she blew upwardly the traditional magazine format, creating a 2-human foot-by-6-pes folding collage that combined a nude portrait of the designer overlaid with multiple layers of images and text. While the fact that Greiman used a computer to create the work hardly seems noteworthy today, consider that the estimator had one megabyte of RAM and a monochrome 9-inch brandish. Like much of Greiman's work, the projection wasn't simply well-nigh technology, it was personal.
As the world continues to change, then does Greiman. More recently, she'due south been creating web design, branding, signage, and public art, and consulting on color, finishes, and textures for architectural projects. She continues to teach, and believes in ever existence open to new ways of doing things.
Muriel Cooper (1925–1994)
"Information Mural," MIT Media Lab'due south Visual Language Workshop, 1994
Muriel Cooper had ii design careers: first equally a impress designer and second as a groundbreaking digital designer. She was the art director for MIT Press, where she designed archetype books such every bit Hans Wingler's Bauhaus. She designed the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas; authors Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour hated what she did, only many graphic designers loved it.
Cooper took her first estimator form at MIT in 1967, and it bewildered her. Still, she could see the computer's potential in the artistic process, and before long began the second phase of her career: applying her pattern skills to computer screens. With Ron MacNeil, Cooper cofounded the inquiry group Visible Language Workshop in 1975, which later became part of MIT'south Media Lab. Cooper didn't write code; she was the designer and the thinker. She encouraged her students to use technology to nowadays well-designed information.
Cooper presented the group's research at the influential TED5 (Applied science, Entertainment, Design) conference in 1994. For the first time, computer graphics were shown in three transparent dimensions, which moved, changed sizes, and shifted focus, instead of the standard Windows interface of opaque panels stacked similar cards. She made a big impact: Even Microsoft founder Bill Gates was interested in her work. Unfortunately, she died suddenly soon after, but her legacy in interactive design continues.
Zuzana Licko (born 1961)
Oakland type specimen, now role of the Lo-Res blazon family; Mrs. Eaves type specimen
Apple tree broke new ground in 1984 when it introduced the Macintosh computer. Designers Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko did the same (albeit on a smaller scale) with Emigre magazine. While many designers initially resisted the calculator, VanderLans and Licko embraced it, though in dissimilar and complementary means: VanderLans liked the freedom information technology gave him in designing layouts, while it gave Licko a disciplined method for designing blazon.
Emigre magazine quickly became a forum for designers, especially those interested in experimentation and technology. It featured in-depth articles and visual essays, in layouts that bankrupt all the rules—with varying type sizes, overlapping layers, text columns crashing into each other, and distorted letterforms, all techniques that the Mac made easier. Concern partners and spouses VanderLans and Licko sold their type designs to fund the magazine (which meant they didn't have to cater to advertisers).
The typefaces were an important role of the magazine'south design as well. After the beginning two issues, the mag was set exclusively in Emigre fonts. Licko began with rough, pixilated typefaces, similar Oakland, and progressed to more than versatile fonts, like the pop Mrs. Eaves.
The magazine ceased publication in 2005, but Licko continues designing fonts, and VanderLans designs the type specimens.
Paula Scher (born1948)
Public Theater affiche, 1995; New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) environmental graphics, 2001
As a design pupil, Paula Scher couldn't get the hang of formally positioning type in a layout. Then her teacher, Stanislas Zagorski, suggested that she think of type in a more conceptual mode, using it as the primary image in her work. That unproblematic direction helped Scher plant herself as a master of persuasive, expressive, even aggressive type.
Equally fine art director at CBS Records and Atlantic Records during the 1970s, Scher worked on large-budget album covers, but she found the small-budget projects more interesting, because they required her to create her own artwork Considering she hated the sterility of the typeface Helvetica, she experimented with older type styles—art deco, mid-century modern, constructivism—and combined them. Non considering she was a postmodernist, but because she wanted to create something more expressive than Helvetica.
Scher joined the influential studio Pentagram as the first female partner in 1991. Iii years afterward, she took on a defining projection: a new identity for New York City's Public Theater (formerly known as Shakespeare in the Park). Director George Wolfe wanted a visual identity that looked zippo like Shakespeare, and Scher designed exactly that: a big, assuming typographic language that was loud and urban and distinctive. Scher's street posters for the testify Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk pushed this in-your-face manner even farther, with brash blazon that actually looked noisy. Scher's design became so pop that information technology changed theater advertising, as more groups tried to capture the youthful vigor of her work for the Public.
Scher is a very intuitive designer—her first or second idea is unremarkably her best. That doesn't mean it's easy: For her, the best way to grow as a designer is to take on projects for which she's not qualified. After making a big splash with the Public, she was approached to blueprint architectural signage for other performance venues. She had no feel in that field, merely the work forced her to think in new ways; her fresh arroyo resulted in innovative and successful signage for projects such every bit Symphony Space and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
For more information on women in graphic design, meet the blogs Birdwatching and Women of Graphic Blueprint .
John Clifford is the author of Graphic Icons: Visionaries Who Shaped Modern Graphic Blueprint , and the artistic director of NYC design firm Think Studio , focusing on identity, digital, publishing, and print design. Keep up with him on twitter.
This post was excerpted from Graphic Icons: Visionaries Who Shaped Modern Graphic Pattern by John Clifford. Copyright © 2014. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and Peachpit Press.
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