April Greiman

A pioneer in the digitization of graphic design, April Greiman is a notable postmodern designer whose innovative work helped assimilate digital practices into the design community.

Insights: April Greiman, Los Angeles
A cover for Wet Magazine.

Greiman grew up in a intrepid family who fueled her desire to explore and innovate. She studied graphic design at Kansas City Art Institute, getting her graduate degree at Basel School of Design and studying under Wolfgang Weingart and Armin Hoffman. Weingart introduced his students to the New Wave style, with a focus on pushing boundaries and exploring different ways to convey typographic meaning.

After a brief stint teaching at CalArts for Visual Communication (she had lobbied a change from the more constrained title of “graphic design”), Greiman began to truly immerse herself in the new technological advancements that offered huge potential in spicing up the design industry.

“Does It Make Sense?” Greiman's Design Quarterly #133, 1986
With Does it Make Sense? Greiman actually cloned and mirrored one of her breasts to be identical to the other.

She became known for the New Wave typography and video imagery used in much of her work. When she was invited to design an issue of Design Quarterly, she came up with “Does it make sense?” which was not only conceptually, but also technically astounding. The issue folded out into a huge poster, rather than being the usual book format, and the integration of digitized images with bitmapped type was a huge feat at the time.

Sources:

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

https://walkerart.org/calendar/2015/insights-april-greiman

http://idsgn.org/posts/design-discussions-april-greiman-on-technology/

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