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2007 AIGA MEDAL
Ellen Lupton makes this industry smarter. If graphic design has
a sense of its own history, an understanding of the theory that
drives it and a voice for its continuing discourse, it's largely
because Lupton wrote it, thought it or spoke it.
Like so many other design legends that came of age in the era of
“commercial art,” Lupton was not aware of design as a viable field
of study before college. It wasn't until she began as a fine art
student at Cooper Union in 1981 that she discovered the expressive
potential of typography. The visual art of writing was an
inspiration to a self-professed “art girl” who came from a family
of English teachers. Realizing the potential for an expanded
critical discourse in graphic design provoked a shift in her
ambitions. “Graphic design was a revelation to me,” says Lupton.
“Design really wasn't in the mainstream back then. It was esoteric.
It was the thing you did if you were very 'neat,' which I
wasn't.”
Upon graduating in 1985, Lupton accepted an offer to run the
newly founded Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at
the Cooper Union. The future advocate of “do-it-yourself” started
out as a D.I.Y. curator herself, fusing her talents as a writer and
designer with an abiding interest in post-structuralism to visually
construct the principles of graphic design history and theory on a
shoestring budget. Curatorial work came naturally as an extension
of writing and design. Exhibitions provided another arena in which
objects, images and text functioned as both the method of
communication and the subject of inquiry. Lupton's early work in
this area brought the visual and the verbal together so playfully
that she surprised her academic peers with her ability to make
rigorous theory digestible and engaging. During this time Lupton
also began publishing as a critic, establishing herself as a
leading voice in the field in publications such as
Blueprint, Eye, Design Review,
I.D., Print, Emigre and
Assemblage.
In the mid-1980s Lupton founded the Design Writing Research lab
with partner J. Abbott Miller as a so-called “after school”
supplement to their early working lives. “We were young and had
theories,” she says, “so we created DWR as a thing where we could
take on work with clients and do artsy-fartsy stuff for the real
world.” The fledgling studio provided the ideal climate for the
kind of seamless integration between theory and practice that would
characterize the scope of Lupton's career. Ideas from the Design
Writing Research studio and early curatorial explorations at the
Lubalin Center formed the basis for Design/Writing/Research:
Writing on Graphic Design, co-authored and designed by Lupton
and Miller in 1996. The Lupton/Miller partnership has yielded many
accomplishments, both professionally and personally, from the
Chrysler Design Award in 1993 to the ultimate collaboration: their
two children, Ruby and Jay.
Lupton earned access to broader audiences and larger-scale
projects in 1992, when she became the contemporary design curator
at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, one of the few
existing design curatorships in the country. During her continued
tenure at the museum, Lupton has organized numerous exhibitions and
major publications that showcase design for a general public
without sacrificing conceptual depth. Shows such as 1996's “Mixing
Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture” set a precedent
for sophisticated, mainstream legibility that came to fruition in
2000, when Lupton co-organized the first National Design Triennial,
thus establishing a benchmark of innovation in American
contemporary design.
“I first experienced Ellen Lupton's curation when I visited her
'Mechanical Brides' and 'Mixing Messages' exhibitions in the late
1990s,” recalls Paul Warwick Thompson, director of the
Cooper-Hewitt since 2001. “I was truly excited by the prospect of
working with Ellen, and I remain captivated by the 'Skin'
exhibition, which she curated in my first year in New York. She is
a beautifully expressive writer, an eloquent and engaging speaker,
a remarkable designer and design thinker: a true polymath.”
For the latest Triennial, 2006's “Design Life Now,” Lupton
raised a few eyebrows by including populist forms of new social
media such as blogs, open-source software and D.I.Y. magazines, all
of which work towards making design literacy part of mainstream
culture and reflect her own desire to make design a less exclusive
club. Lupton herself is an avid blogger on design-your-life.org and DIYKids.org, two
sites that apply design to everyday life co-edited with her
identical twin sister Julia. Inviting audiences to participate in
the creation of a new design discourse shows a level of confidence
rarely found among the design elite and a lack of fear in what she
calls the age of “unstoppable self-education.”
“Ellen Lupton is an institution,” says Paula Scher. “In a time
when design writing has moved to the blogosphere—and is more
democratic, but more idiotic—Ellen's clear voice is even more
valuable.”
In her role as director of the graphic design MFA program at the
Maryland Institute College of Art since 2003, Lupton has continued
to practice an inclusive ethos of design and communication. (She
joined the school as chair of the undergraduate design program in
1997.) In 2006, she and her grad students produced D.I.Y.:
Design It Yourself, a manual for empowering non-designers with
how-to skills. Lupton advocates exposing all methods of production:
to this end, she has taught a course on code writing with a
graduate student at MICA, and recently hosted seminars on
independent publishing and blogging for designers and writers.
When she needed the right textbook for her students, Lupton
wrote one herself. Although she has worked with various publishing
houses over the years, she has produced over a dozen books with
Princeton Architectural Press, including 2004's Thinking with
Type, one of the press's best-selling titles. That seminal
book features a series of concise essays, deftly illustrated
examples and direct rules of engagement, and is most notable for
the humor that hums dryly behind its Scala typeface. Her writing is
smart, but more importantly, it entertains, too. “I wanted to
produce a book that addressed both the how and why of typography,
with serious history and theory,” she recalls, “and I wanted it to
be fun, but not dumbed down. This is typography for people who
think, but the book is not pompous or overly detailed.”
Lupton's writing about design is itself an art. “She's
exceptionally adept at both the verbal and the visual, which is not
to be taken for granted in this new era of 'designer as author,' an
era that she so skillfully pioneered and has inspired many of us to
follow suit,” says Chip Kidd. Lucid, sophisticated and free from
jargon, her words continue to define the territory of graphic
design after deconstruction—using theory not just as a collection
of footnotes or an intellectual endgame, but also as a way to bring
critical reflection into everyday practice. Abbott Miller concurs,
“Ellen has always been interested in writing that is clear and
stripped down. She wants to make theory and history relevant to
what designers do, making her work a resource for practicing
designers as well as a contribution to the discourse of design
history.”
In addition to inspiring others to become contributors to the
design world, Lupton challenges them to be intellectuals, too. Her
conclusion to Thinking with Type offers this typically
droll bit of advice: “Think more, design less.” She is this
profession's constant reminder to strive for conceptual depth,
avoid style over substance and be smarter than we think we can
be.
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