Design Lecture Poster Research: April Greiman

For this project each of us were assigned a designer that will be lecturing at a fictional event on campus, Kansas City Art Institute(KCAI). My designer is April Greiman. She is a 1970 KCAI Graphic Design Alumni among many other things. There was a vast selection of sources of information on Greiman. I started my research online through the top website that popped up with her name, and then I went to the library and further my research through books. I found quiet a bit of information on Greiman in the books, especially quotes of hers which I feel may prove beneficial in the final poster outcome.

April Greiman

She was born in 1948 and lived in New York until 1976 when she moved to Los Angeles. Her parents were very curious individuals and involved in the arts, which really affected Greiman. Fascination is at her core and fuels her desire as well as inspires her work. She is influenced by space, scale and color. Greiman is known as one of the first designers to make the connection between Macintosh and the digital world of design. After graduating from KCAI, she went to Universität Basel in Basel, Switzerland. She was introduced to Modernism by Inge Druckrey, Hans Allemann and Chris Zelinsky at KCAI. Her professors at Basel that continued to inspire her were Wolfgang Weingart and Armin Hofmann.

Greiman is considered one of the most influential female graphic designers. She has done work for MAK Center for Arts and Architecture in Los Angeles, AOL/Time Warner, Microsoft, the US Postal Service, and the architects Frank O. Gehry, RoTo Architects, held multiple leadership positions in American Institute of Graphic Artists(AIGA) & Alliance Graphique Internationale(AGI). She also has won multiple awards for her designs.

Some examples of her work:

Quotes:

• "You can't have chaos without order [and] I think that I've pushed everything else as far into chaos as I can."
• "A change in the mental is a change in the physical."
• "My personal research is about what, in my heart, I feel is important to explore and discover."
• "I'll always be designing. It's not what I do, it's who I am."
• "All form is content. So are emotion, texture, words, symbols, color and technology."
• "(The computer) is a real stroke of genius. It's the chance tool. You can lose yourself in it and while you can think about nothing, intuition takes over."
• "Am I making a more meaningful message by reducing and simplifying it, or am I making a more meaningful message by throwing it all in?"
• "The desert is its own educational vehicle. While most processes occur at an invisible or microscopic level, the desert reveals its evolution in its very existence. I felt as if, for the first time, my eyes were wide open to the process of evolution, to growth, to change. The digital landscape fascinates me in the same way as the desert."
• A quote that she used in one of her pieces, but was not her own. "Creativity, common sense, and love do come together in a fundamental sense. The three of them happen when you reach the point of awareness where you let go of something and let something else emerge." - Francisco Varela

Visually I really loved the Made in Space website. I will admit that I really enjoyed the color scheme. I was a bit confused initially on how to navigate back to the home page, but I eventually figured it out.

As I was researching Greiman I was constantly being reminded of why she was chosen for me to research on. We definitely have similarities; our thoughts about design in general are pretty similar. As I believe that design is the collection of all that we cross, she pulls colors, texture and other content from the locations that she visits. Basically for each place that she goes she takes a little box with her and collects samples of leaves, plants, or other materials to later use in her design.

Sources:

http://aprilgreiman.com/

http://www.aiga.org/medalist-aprilgreiman/

http://madeinspace.la/

http://www.art-directory.info/design/april-greiman-1948/

April Greiman, Floating Ideas Into Time and Space

By Liz Farrelly

Published by Watson-Guptill Publications, in New York, NY in 1998.

Women of Design

By Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit.

Published by How Books, in Cincinatti, Ohio in 2008.

It’s Now What You Think it Is, April Greiman

Published by Artemis and Arc En Rêve D’Architecture in 1994.