April Greiman - 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 oposite 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 oportunity 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 oposed 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 aplied to Rhode Island School of Design. Though she failed miserably on the part of the aplication 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 aply 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 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 aplications. 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.
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