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1998 AIGA MEDAL
April Greiman was a designer in New York City in the mid-1970s
when she decided to leave the comfort of a design community deeply
entrenched in European tradition for an uncertain future on the
opposite coast. Seeking a new spirit, she moved to Los Angeles and
entered a culture that, for better or for worse, had a limited
aesthetic of its own at that time. Museums and galleries were few
and it was impossible to get a decent cup of coffee. But the lack
of an established design practice created a unique opportunity to
explore new paradigms in communications design.
Soon after she settled in Los Angeles, a friend offered to take
her to the desert. “Death Valley?” she said. “Sounds pretty bleak.”
He dragged her along anyway, and within hours she found herself
seduced by the landscape. “The desert is its own educational
vehicle,” she says. “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.”
Ten years later, in 1984, the Macintosh was making an unsteady
entry into the design market. Most designers were skeptical of—if
not completely opposed to—the idea of integrating the computer
into design practice, perhaps fearing an uncertain future wherein
the tactility of the hand was usurped by the mechanics of bits and
bytes. A visionary few, including April Greiman, recognized the
vast potential of this new medium. An avid fan of tools and
technologies since childhood, Greiman quickly established herself
as a pioneer of digital communications design. “The digital
landscape fascinates me in the same way as the desert,” she says.
This fascination comes from the core of her being, a core of
perpetual curiosity and questioning that fuels her desire to
explore and inspires the cutting-edge design work that places her
at the helm of integrated design at the close of the twentieth
century.
Born during the baby boom and raised in New York, Greiman was
endowed with a curious spirit from the beginning, and grew up in a
house where questioning was encouraged and adventure was a part of
life. Greiman had excellent role models in her father, mother, and
her great aunt Kitty, a strong and independent woman who had danced
with the Ziegfeld Follies and made excellence in her career a top
priority. Greiman recalls her mother as a calm, grounding influence
and her father as a curious, wandering explorer who was easily
distracted by whatever interesting thing crossed his path;
affectionately, they called him “the original astronaut” because he
was perpetually lost in the space of his own imagination. Neighbors
called her family “The Flying Greimans” because they were always
looking up, searching for interesting phenomena, and traveling by
air.
A professional dancer with the Fred Astaire Dance School in New
York City, Renee Greiman performed on television and taught
classes, often enlisting the young April as a dance partner. As a
result, April relates, she still knows how to do the cha-cha,
mambo, waltz, tango, merengue, fox trot, rumba, and limbo. But
perhaps her most important lesson from her mother came from her
often-repeated saying, “April, you can't fake the cha-cha.” From an
early age, Greiman learned that integrity and immersion were
critical elements in one's art.
Her formal design education began shortly after she settled on
the idea of going to art school and applied to Rhode Island School
of Design. Though she failed miserably on the part of the
application that required her to draw a pair of old boots, the dean
of admissions pointed out that her portfolio was very strong in
graphics and suggested that she apply to the graphic design program
at Kansas City Art Institute. Having no idea how one might define
graphic design or what it meant, she nonetheless took his
suggestion and was accepted into the program.
At KCAI, Greiman was introduced to the principles of Modernism
by Inge Druckrey, Hans Allemann, and Chris Zelinsky, all of whom
had been educated at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland.
Inspired by this experience, she went to Basel for graduate school.
As a student of Armin Hoffman and Wolfgang Weingart in the early
1970s, Greiman explored the Intermational Style in depth, as well
as Weingart's personal experiments in developing an aesthetic that
was less reflective of the Modernist heritage and more
representative of a changing, post-industrial society. Weingart
introduced his students to what is now called the New Wave, a more
intuitive, eclectic departure from the stark organization and
neutral objectivity of the grid that sent shock waves through the
design community. Wide letterspacing, changing type weights or
styles within a single word, and the use of type set on an angle
were explored, not as mere stylistic indulgences but in an effort
to expand typographic communication more meaningfully. Within a
decade, the impact of Weingart and the students who studied with
him was evident everywhere: the aesthetic had been widely co-opted
and imitated, with the original intent long forgotten or known to
only a few.
Greiman was one of those who remembered. In her work, she
continued to explore typographic meaning and began experimenting
with ways to alter the two-dimensional space of the page and
reimagine it as a more three- and four-dimensional continuum of
time and space. In her first job after moving to Los Angeles,
Greiman hired Jayme Odgers, who had previously worked as an
assistant to Paul Rand, to shoot a series of photographs. This
collaboration with Odgers would lead to two experiences that would
greatly influence the direction that her life would take—he
introduced her to the desert, a journey that would forever
influence her way of thinking and being; and shortly after, they
formed a creative partnership that was to last for four years and
produce some highly visible work. Notable projects include a 1979
poster for California Institute of the Arts that Odgers art
directed and photographed, the 1980 China Club Restaurant and
Lounge advertisements, and a poster, designed in 1982, for the 1984
Olympics.
When CalArts invited her to direct its graphic design program in
1982, she committed herself to exploring design education and also
gained access to state-of-the-art video and digitizing equipment.
She immersed herself in being an educator as well as in the new
media, spending her spare time traversing the digital terrain in a
quest for image-making potential. She began using video and
analogue computers to hybridize, combining different elements
through the new media. Greiman knew intuitively that the field of
graphic design was rapidly changing and that emerging technologies
would soon be integrated into everyday design practice. In 1984 she
lobbied successfully to change the department name to Visual
Communications, feeling that the term “graphic design” would prove
too limiting to future designers. Later that year, with her
business booming, she decided to switch gears and become a student
rather than an educator, to study the effect of technology on her
own work. She returned to full-time practice and acquired her first
Macintosh.
Also in 1984, Greiman also completed a poster for Ron Rezek
titled “Iris Light” that was significant for its innovative use of
video imagery and integration of New Wave typography with classical
design elements. This work incorporated a still video image at a
time when this meant shooting a traditional photograph off the
monitor using a 35mm camera. “Iris Light” represented a turning
point in Greiman's work: it is the first hybrid piece incorporating
digital technology that Greiman felt was conceptually and
aesthetically successful. Of the video image, she says, “Instead of
looking like a bad photograph, the image was gestural. It looked
like a painting; it captured the spirit of light.” In this case,
the video technology integrated with the concept of light: light
from the video screen combined with light from the lamp resulted in
an image wherein the form matched the content.
Greiman's California New Wave typography and mixed-media design
had been rocking the Modernist boat for a few years when she
undertook a major assault upon the design community's sensibilities
and preconceptions of what constitutes design in 1986, in an issue
of Design Quarterly. Published by the Walker Art Center,
edited by Mildred Friedman, and directed toward an intermational
design audience, each issue of Design Quarterly focused on
a specific theme. Greiman was not only the focus of issue #133, she
was invited to design it and show her own work.
Greiman saw Design Quarterly #133 as an opportunity not
only to present her digital work but to ask a larger question of
the work and the medium: Does it make sense? Reading Wittgenstein
on the topic, she identified with his conclusion: “It makes sense
if you give it sense.” She says, “I love this notion which exists
in physics as well—that the observer is the observed, and the
observed is the observer. The tools and technologies begin to
dictate what and how you see something, or how the outcome is
predictable. These ideas bring back the kid in me, that very pure
curiosity.” Greiman's piece challenged existing notions of what a
magazine should be. Rather than the standard thirty-two-page
sequence, she reformatted the piece as a poster that folded out to
almost three by six feet. On the front is an image of Greiman's
digitized, naked body amid layers of interacting images and text.
On the back, colorful atmospheric spatial video images are
interspersed with thoughtful comments and painstaking notations on
the digital process—a virtual landscape of text and image. Beyond
considering whether digital technologies made sense, the Design
Quarterly poster seemed to embody the disillusionment of a
nation deeply wounded by the Vietnam war and shaped by the growth
of feminism, spiritualism, Eastern religion, Jungian archetypes,
and dream symbolism. “Does It Make Sense?” was also an astounding
technical feat. The process of integrating digitized video images
and bitmapped type was not unlike pulling teeth in the early days
of Macintosh and MacDraw. The files were so large, and the
equipment so slow that she would send the file to print when she
left the studio in the evening and it would just be finished when
she returned in the morning. One morning, after she had arrived and
was assembling the tiled image, it was clear that something big was
missing. For some reason, her body had not printed, though
everything else was there. While the technical details of the
mystery of the missing body remained unsolved, its later
reappearance on the pages presented another problem—Greiman
didn't like the way her right breast looked. The reproduction
process had flattened her and the light was strange. So, in what
may well be the first MacDraw breast replacement; she cloned and
flopped her left breast and placed it on the right side of her
body.
Before the appearance of “Does It Make Sense?” designers widely
considered bit-mapped type and imagery not only unorthodox but
unacceptable, straying too far from the clean, crisp precision of
the Intermational Style. The computer itself was viewed as cold and
unfriendly, wildly expensive, and a harbinger of the demise of fine
design. After the publication of Design Quarterly #133,
many designers felt compelled to reconsider the role of the
computer in design practice. Greiman's willingness to ask the
question, and to place it at the center of the design community,
triggered countless debates about computers, context, and
creativity.
Greiman warmly recalls receiving a phone call from Massimo
Vignelli soon after he saw the poster. “I have just one question,”
he said. “When do I get the other side?” A Modernist's query?
Perhaps, but more clearly an indicator of the departure Greiman had
made from the coolly classical to the intensely personal, poetic,
and digital, and in particular of the giant step that she had
boldly taken into what had been very much a man's world.
Greiman sees herself as a natural bridge between the Modernist
tradition and future generations of designers. Given her classical
education at KCAI and graduate studies with Hoffman and Weingart at
Basel, she possesses the knowledge and skills of the Modernist
tradition. And yet she is a vocal advocate of the new aesthetic,
defending both the visual and conceptual aesthetics, as well as new
technologies, to skeptics. “In the tradition of graphic design in
the twentieth century, you had to be either a great typographer, a
great designer/illustrator, or a great poster designer. Now we are
confronted with motion graphics, the World Wide Web, and
interactive applications. The world has changed and the field is
changing to meet it.” Greiman is adamant that we must be open to
new paradigms, to new metaphors, to a whole new spirit of design:
“It's not just graphic design anymore. We just don't have a new
name for it yet.”
New paradigms emerge in Greiman's own studio including what may
be a new model of the contemporary design studio, reflective of
cultural shifts. Greiman acts as both a generalist and a
specialist. “I don't hire graphic designers anymore. The idea of
many designers working in virtual isolation is no longer relevant.
I hire collaborators who are specialists in their own fields—a
web master, a researcher, a production artist—depending on the
project.” As a generalist, she is involved in all phases of the
projects. As a specialist, the concept and design are ultimately
her own. In this new studio structure, each collaborator is an
expert in his or her field, with Greiman as the tie that binds. In
order to expand her research into new technologies and image
generation, Greiman created Greimanski Labs as a conceptual
offshoot of her studio. She describes the laboratory as a place for
research and exploration in the development of non-commercial
images and projects. Regardless of client, the lab works in a
variety of media ranging from traditional photography to new tools
and technologies.
One of the original Flying Greimans speaks with great enthusiasm
of her newest large-scale project, “Inventing Flight,” originally
titled “A Century of Flight.” Greiman worked with a team of experts
to develop an active approach to the concept instead of fixing the
notion of flight in the past. For the event—a celebration of 100
years of flying to take place in Dayton, Ohio, in 2003—Greiman
and her team are developing a total identity—motion graphics,
website, collateral materials, exhibitions, and an interactive
installation. Greiman has taken her passion for science and
technology and immersed herself in every detail of the history of
flight. The celebratory event is particularly significant to her
because it addresses the early stages of bringing information into
space and the information revolution. “I love it when things come
full circle like this,” she says. “Everything is related, and makes
this wonderful loop of interconnection.”
Further expanding the very broad scope of her work, Greiman
often collaborates with architects on spaces and environments, with
most of her contribution in the areas of color, finishes, and
materials. She sees these three- and four-dimensional
collaborations as yet another aspect of hybridizing, in which she
considers ideas of integration of building and landscape, interior
and exterior, inner and outer selves. Miracle Manor, a business and
creative collaboration with architect Michael Rotondi, is an ideal
forum for such explorations.
Greiman sees the site as an opportunity to explore her own
personal interests in color, myth, symbolism, and space in real
time. “The entire place is sort of a laboratory,” she notes, and
one begins to realize that for Greiman, everything is a laboratory.
From her investigations at the leading edge of the California New
Wave to her pioneering work in digital media and hybrid processes,
Greiman sets an example for future generations of designers to be
willing to ask the questions that need to be asked.
Copyright 1998 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
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