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Welcome to - D E Q U AL - a paper devoted to give you some insights on the unequal world of design.

This, the first number, concentrates on maybe the biggest inequality; women in design. We hope offer you some insight in Why? as well as interviews and galleries of works by women active in the field of design.

All content is stolen and curated by Anders Wallner, who means no disrespect.

Art Direction and curation

by Anders Wallner www.anderswallner.com Made as a study project at HDK, Gothenburg School of Design and Crafts, no copyright infrignment intended.

Tech: Printed on recycled paper at HDK, with enormous help from Arild the genious.

Fonts used: Gotham by Sara Soskolne Century by Linn Boyd Benton

Contact: For any inqueries or issues please contact your local farmacy. It’s never to late to quit.

This is our logo.

It pictures Madonnas famous bra from the Blond Ambition Tour in 1990.

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What role are women designers playing in today’s world? Are they taking a more leading role in the design field? Do women and their male counterparts differ in anyway?

We talk to 12 women in design to get their view. w o m e n g r a p hi c d e si g n e rs A survey of woman designers of books, magazines, activist campaigns, identities etc. across the 20th century.

Wh e r e Ar e th e W o m e n in T y p e D e s i g n ?

Being one of the rare type designers who happen to be female, Verena Gerlach occasionally gets the question from other (mostly male) designers. In this article she will try to sort it out.

I N S P I R A T I O N AL Inspirational with Kelli Andersson. g o o d d e si g n is f e m inist d e si g n We talk to Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Dean of Graphic Design and Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art, is one of today’s most prominent feminist graphic designers. In 1971, she founded the California Institute of the Arts, the first women’s graphic design program.

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wasn’t the only one perplexed by this phenomenon.

er aspire to be Run DMC, than Mariah Carey.

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S ECO N D , T H E PE R CEP T I O N S

Conditioning is perhaps the most obvious and potentially controversial (but definitely the most changing) of all the reasons why there aren’t more women designers. Video games and scrapbooks are cliché, but a telling, cultural phenomena. Traditionally, young boys have been fascinated with video games.

The constant newness of the technological capacities; the integration with other male stigmas, such as television and computers; and certainly the intense competitive nature of the games, whether against a friend or the software itself, have all catered to masculine characteristics.

Scrapbooking, on the other hand — often a self-involved, self-rewarding, aesthetic, process-oriented affair — has appealed to feminine sensibilities. Great; but what do video games and scrapbooking have to do with gender gaps in creative fields?

Everything. And, it’s changing. In the Newsweek article “’Where’s My Crazy Hot Guy?’ A Female Designer On Women and Videogames,” award-winning female game designer Brenda Brathwaite confessed, “There was a time literally, within this decade, when I knew every single female game designer out there. Personally….” Video games, or more specifically, the video game format, have found their way into almost every media component of our lives.

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Walk into any design classroom, at any college in America, and you’ll see a comfortable mix of male and female students. Turn your attention to the front of the classroom, or down the hall to the faculty and staff offices, and that wonderful gender balance starts to skew.

Travel outside the campus, and there’s really no balance at all.

But why? If there are design classrooms across the country with a 50/50 blend of men and women — and in many classrooms, there are more females than males — then why doesn’t the design field represent the same ratio? Why does creative employment still showcase a male-dominated presence? What happens to these passionate and educated females? Certainly, there must be more to it than child-bearing — or is there? Is a more gender-balanced field really all that important? Why, or why not?  These questions and many others accompanied me to a design and technology conference this past fall. Minnebar, an annual Twin Cities conference that celebrates vision, niche technology and collective wisdom, provided the perfect platform for such inquiries. I hosted a session aptly named “The Equal Sign” to pitch the dilemma of the field not representing the classroom. I played the role of discussion facilitator, and was eager to see where the conversation would go. What I hadn’t realized, was that I

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According to Findings From A List Apart Survey 2009, a poll created by and for Web designers, 82.6% of Web designers are male. Ironically, 66.5% of the same respondents stated there is “definitely not” a gender bias in the design field.

Web design is just one segment of the design world, but the statistic is nonetheless chilling.

My audience for the session? Predominantly female. It seems the topic itself is more intriguing for women than men.

What these women had to say was sobering. One mentioned that it’s foolish to expect a male-dominated field to be able to design interfaces that appeal to how women want to interact with technology. In other words, young girls put off as consumers of technology aren’t likely to desire to create in that arena.

Another common theme during the discussion was that of heroes. So few female designers exist, and of them, few are known superstars in the industry.

Of these, even less are known by individuals outside of the industry. Lack of visible female heroes results in lack of female interest. But there are countless male role models in the field; why can’t they be heroes for young girls with computers? The same reason why I’d rath-

In the book Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that “research shows that both males and females believe that males are better than females at computing” (Clarke, 1992; Spertus, 1991). This finding is nearly 20 years old, but this mindset could easily have been held by the parents of today’s college students. Going to college can be hard, but pursuing a degree with little support from mom and dad makes it even harder.

There is also an unspoken expectation that women are very creative and make great print designers, but aren’t wired to splice the intricacies of new and constantly changing software and platforms — as noted in a Fadtastic. net articlewritten by designer Matt Davies. The field generally represents the occurrence of women holding positions in print, illustration and photography, with noticeable scarcity in more technology-dependent roles such as Web design, animation, game design and programming.

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Log in to Facebook, and in no time you’ll end up fielding requests from friends to play “Farmville.” Shop your favorite store online, and you may be prompted to click a link and dress a sophisticated cartoon character to help you with your purchasing decisions. Save some time at the grocery store by going through the self-checkout line, and you’re confronted with the all too familiar series of buttons, colors and graphics to ease your way through the credit card swipe and out the door.

Video gaming isn’t just something engaged in by teenage football players.

It’s a format that is relevant to men and women, boys and girls, and this inclusion of the female population is invariably causing more females to ask themselves how it all works, and how they can be a contributing factor.

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All things design — video games, Web design and graphic arts — can bring two genders together and create acceptance and encouragement, which fosters the potential to level the creative employment playing field. You must ask yourself, “Is this a good thing?” There are numerous reasons why more women are needed, and need representation; but is the “female designer dilemma” really all that bad? If a city of people stormed the

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doors of their school district demanding more male kindergarten teachers, they might be mercilessly scoffed at.

Similarly, few are tooting the horn for more female firefighters, or male nurses.

Our culture has built functioning gender-based roles, and has birthed young boys and girls excited to fill them. Why fix it if it ain’t broke? If gender balance is achieved in the creative industry, will it be adding new jobs for females, or replacing jobs that males had? If the latter is the case, what will happen to these men? My audience at Minnebar had blank faces, and empty responses, when I asked them.

All of this matters for one reason: I don’t want to face my female students every day with the thought that more than half of them won’t ever be designers, and of the few that do, what exactly do they have to look forward to? They will have to deal with their peers, employers, clients and families being both impressed and confused when their sisters, friends and coworkers create designs that aren’t “girly” and “cute.”

Lisa Firke, a woman embodying that rare combination of female and Web designer, commented on Zeldman.com: “I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that 90% of my clients are women. Perhaps taking women seriously as designers goes handin-hand with taking women seriously as Web consumers.”

S O U R CE S Fisher, A. and Margolis, J. (2002). Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.

Google used to return the correction “Did You Mean: He Invented” for the search “she invented”.

It generated a lot of buzz throughout the Web.

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What role are women designers playing in today’s world? Are they taking a more leading role in the design field? Do women and their male counterparts differ in anyway? From a feminist aspect, women and men do not differ in any kind. However, the numbers speak the truth, as we do not find enough women designers in conferences, publications, or as jurors.

Is this a reversing trend? Barbara Szaniecki from Brazil, Belen Mena from Ecuador, Benito Cabanas from Mexico, Chris Lozos from United States, Gitte Kath from Denmark, Jamila Varawala from India, Lygia Santiago from Brazil, Maria Mercedes Salgado from Ecuador, Marina Córdova Alvéstegui and Susana Machicao both from Bolivia, respectable designers , well known to our community and Veerle Poupeye from Jamaica, Executive Director of the National Gallery of Jamaica, were called to give the role of women in design as they experiences it in their respective countries or just global observations. They came with very interesting points and links for your references. I thank all of them for their valuable contribution to this article!

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B A R B A R A S Z A N I EC K I (Brazil) Women are occupying spaces in all types of work. it is therefore normal that also in the design field they are acting more and more. In the labor world, women can enter “making equal” to men or, on the contrary, “making a difference”. Or playing between the two positions. So certainly, some assume positions of leadership and choose to work in large companies of communication and design. Or for large companies. But there is also a large number of women designers that are seeking ways of working beyond a labor market that does not always allow them to produce under adequate conditions – i mean specially to harmonize production and motherhood and care of the family – or to have their work recognized in the same way as their male colleagues. And so they try to work on gender issues of course but also, more broadly, on the issues of society. They try, through their work, to provoke a reflection on the current crisis in its multifaceted social, economic and ecological aspects. Facets that point, all of them, for the decline of a certain kind of rationality that has dominated the world for centuries. Women have always generated new lives and today, many women designers seek through their work to generate a new world. And it may be necessary to start by discussing the very idea of leadership – at work or in life – and by learning how to generate both a more collaborative design and a more egalitarian society.

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don’t know if we gain yet a leading role, but certainly I think we are creating the bases to it, strongly contributing to the development and expansion of design.)

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(Mexico) What role are women designers playing in today’s world?

Women have struggled to gain a place, a recognition, a reputation that they have succeeded with their work day by day!

There are women leaders in the field of design and their work is of excellent quality.

Do women and their male counterparts differ in anyway?

Maybe in some countries women do not even have chance! I think that level of thinking, thinking, creativity, work is the way to equal capabilities!

Are women designers taking a more leading role in the design field?

Of course they do! Besides that it becomes an equity contribution of women given a diversity of thought to the design field.

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(United States) The role of women designers is completely in their own hands unless they create a self fulfilling prophesy. Women (and men) will find what they are looking for in the design field. If you are looking for sexism and bigotry, you will find it. If you are looking for a place to B ELE N ME N A exert your own creativity and succeed as a designer, you will find it. My ad(Ecuador) vice is that you search for exactly what What role are women designers you want to find. Be the person you playing in today’s world? want to be instead of wishing someone I believe, in the interest of equality, women designers should be consider the would grant you that wish. The women same as men designers. But I think gen- designers who are getting a leading role are the women who have seized the der differences exist, atomically, physiologically and biologically, therefore her day and taken it. If you feel you are not worthy, then you will be found not role is different. worthy by others so simply BE worthy Being a women designer in actualiand believe in yourself. ty it’s a privilege. I think the way that There is only one creature on this women react to some social experiences and themes, are assumed different from earth that you totally control. That person is yourself. There are some people men, so the way we communicate this whom you may influence to some dethru our design, increase the possible gree and there are some people whom ways to change a society positively. you invite to influence you. The vast majority of others in the world will be Do women and their male countermostly disinterested in you but not beparts differ in any way? cause they are uncaring, instead beEven though natural given characteriscause they have their own lives to focus tics been quite different amongst males and females, whether they be cultural or on most of the time.

There are also another set of people physical, competing it’s not the essence.

The multi-task intelligence of women ap- in any field. They are the selfish, the proaches a highly constructive thinking, greedy, and even the evil. You cangiving more importance to social respon- not change them or defeat them but you can minimize how they affect you. sibilities. We are generally more emoDon’t waste your time or your soul with tionally; sensible and intuitive driven them. while men are usually goal oriented, so Woman, Man, or Android, you have still going to have differences even in the the power if you create the power from absence of gender socialization. within. Those who have no power are Are women designers taking a more waiting for someone else to grant it to them. This will not happen. You were leading role in the design field? born with everything you need. Believe Since the beginning of time Women have always been treated as the inferior it and get to work making yourself be that person. Screw all the assholes in sex, but certainly actual women gained the world, they don’t matter. You matinfluence in every field, when we compare them to women of last decades and ter, your friends matter, your family matters. Work for them and yourself. centuries.

This is a very hard job. Don’t shy Actual female designers are taking away from it. Don’t blame others for risks, are voicing their opinions thru viyour woes. Be in charge of your life. If sual art and approaching new ways to you don’t do it, who will? create a healthy and better society. I

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(Denmark) In Denmark the general possibilities for both men and women are more or less identical. Everyone have access to free education in Denmark. At the design schools 80% are female students nowadays. It is somehow characteristic that the female students work together in groups and male students work alone. Maybe the experience of working alone explains why 80% of the poster designers today are male?

The female students are in my experience more eloquent and they work harder. It might still today be important for women to work that much harder to make the world aware of them? On the other hand the male students often have more courage to go against the main stream and thereby stand out from the rest.

In general the female students have higher grades from high school tests when they get accepted into the design schools – but grades are not necessarily important to make it as an artist or designer. It’s the originality, courage and the basic talent to express ideas that makes an interesting designer. To generalize, maybe 20% of all the design school students have what it takes to be a good designer? The talent to express your ideas might be the most important thing and gives you the possibility to get to a leading role. I believe that women in the world of design, and in the world in general, will get even stronger in the future.

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(India) What role are women designers playing in today’s world? Clearly there is a shift in a women’s role in society that would affect her role in every field. I am aware that a lot of women designers are making their mark in the design world today. They are visible with strong statements. Zaha Hadid is a strong voice.

Are women designers taking a more leading role in the design field?

Yes. Women designers are playing pivotal roles today. I have primarily been a teacher of graphic design for the last 30 years. I have taught in Sophia College Polytechnic Mumbai, a girls college, for the first 13 years. In the earlier years most Indian girl students would study and get married placing their career on the back burner. Now the trend is that the girls take up design as a strong career option to create an identity for themselves resulting in financial freedom. They start their own entrepreneurial design studios creating a niche for themselves in branding, publishing pharmaceutical designs, hospitality and retail. A few have made it big in the advertising field.

Do women and their male counterparts differ in anyway?

In my experience as a teacher in a girls college and then teaching co-ed colleges I find that girls definitely think differently from boys. Girls are gentle and maneuver design elements differently, the boys bring a different perspective, they are direct willing to take huge risks and bold. Without sounding feminist most graffiti artists are boys.

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(Brazil) What role are women designers playing in today’s world?

I think we women have to make a difference and show our potential and creativity. Wedo this normally, with no marks caused by a sexist society.

Are women designers taking a more leading role in the design field?

No … I think not … We do our best ever, without worry of being the best … but to make the best ever …

Do women and their male counterparts differ in anyway?

I do not think there is a design done by women … I believe that is not identified … What can be identified is a style …

A designer woman who really like and think it has a well-defined style is the canadian Marian Bantjes … In the visual arts, I think in some periods of art history that can be identified because of the feminist movement … Around 60’s.

MA R I A ME R CE D E S S ALGA D O (Ecuador) Very few women designers around the world have important responsibilities in direction posts, for instance: direction of design organisations, juries in international contests and biennials or lecturers in design events. Our presence is still limited but will change.

I’ll tell you a local story that represents already an evolution of women in design. They are 29 artisans organized in an association, A.M.A.D.O.M. (Asociación de Mujeres Artesanas Autónomas de Dos Mangas) in a very small town called Dos Mangas, located 8 km from the Pacific Ocean in Ecuador, South America, bordering the protected forest.

They never studied design, but practice it. Around ten years ago men earned money to support their families by selling forest woods until the laws prohibited logging in that area. Thus, the women decided to work on making art crafts.

After some conflicts and divorces, the men went to the forest to grow and harvest the raw material as « paja toquilla » and « tagua » (vegetal ivory) for their women work. These women « design » objets for their families maintenance.

MA R I N A C Ó R D O V A AL V É S T EG U I (Bolivia) What role are women designers playing in today’s world?

The role that women designers are playing in today’s world is basically the same to our male counterparts. But as women we have an extra responsibility, more like an owe to our gender actually. We must expose sexism and firmly oppose it e.g. the common practice of displaying women’s body to attract costumers and possible buyers; if we have the same skills and preparation as our male colleagues, we must not accept to earn less than them for the same responsibilities; we must celebrate and share the work that has been done by women designers worldwide; we must demand more female jurors, more workshops by female designers, more female speakers, among other things always seeking for gender equality. In 2006, the London School Of Economics estimated it will take 150

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years to eliminate economic inequality based on gender worldwide. Imagine that! Gender equality is a really serious issue, we have to work harder in order to accelerate this change.

Do women and their male counterparts differ in any way?

Well, nature gave women maternity and it is something that men will never have the possibility to experience, unless a dramatic change occurs with the help of science. Women experience that miracle, we get pregnant, bear children and take care of them, which is a lifetime job. During women’s fertile years, men are building their careers and becoming visible in the professional arena.

Leaving work to care for children should always be our choice, not a pressure imposed upon us by society. If we want to have the chance to get back to work in the design field, we must have our partners’ support as well as sharing child care responsibilities with them, otherwise trying to balance our personal and professional lives becomes a titanic and overwhelming enterprise.

Are women designers taking a more leading role in the design field?

Let me quote the ever amazing and inspiring Canadian designer Carole Guevin: “Gender has got nothing to do with talent! Are women still under represented today? Yes! Needing more limelight?

Yes!”  S A N D R A MO N T E R R O S O (Guatemala) What role are women designers playing in todays world?

The work of women designers is very important because we are part of the productive system of society. With our work we can provide and make structural changes in the culture, if we consider it clear that the design is part of the visual culture of a place.

Do women and their male counterparts differ in any way?

Perhaps the difference lies in the sensitivity, the ability to organize and to give a different point of view, we have the same capabilities as men, but historically we have not had the same opportunities. That will create a disadvantage for us, but also an impetus to innovate.

Are women designers taking a more leading role in the design field?

We are exelentes managers to generate ideas and changes, at this time I think we are more women designers, but we are still not sufficient compared with men, for us are still less opportunities and also because in some societies there is still sexism in power.

So that led us to make new ways of leadership for ourselves and create another type of institution more inclusive.  S U S A N A

MAC H I CAO

(Bolivia) What role are women designers playing in today’s world?

There is no special role. To emphasize that we had a special role is to recognize that our design work is different from male designers. BUT we need to keep motivating the young generations to never forget the passion and dedication

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that they had while they where studying. We need more professional representation in workshops, international jury, Universities, because we are not that few, so let’s make a statement with our work Do women and their male counterparts differ in any way?

Not at all in the results I am seeing thus far. In my experience women are more dedicated in details while they’re designing, so sometimes the result is clearly unique. But this is not common and of course there are bad designers too.

Are women designers taking a more leading role in the design field?

In some countries yes. I read a debate of Polish Designers few months ago when they were discussing why they have so many women designers in Poland, and why men are so few. This is crazy for me, classrooms are full of young female students, but somehow they change priorities while they are growing, or simple stop looking for spaces of recognition or healthy competition.   V EE R LE PO U PEYE (Jamaica ) What role are women designers playing in today’s world?

I am best equipped to speak about the Jamaican situation. In terms of studies, at the Edna Manley College, the ratio of graphic design students is about 60 % male and 40 % female. Professionally, I think the ratio would be similar. It is still a male-dominated field but women are however making headway, as in all professional fields. I suspect that one of the driving forces in this change is the changes in technology. Designers no longer need “big equipment” that is only available in specialized offices and can more easily work from home, which suits and empowers a lot of women, especially when they have children.

Since design is client-driven, however, the capacity to “get the job” is however essential and women may still be at a disadvantage on that count.

Do women and their male counterparts differ in any way?

To be honest, I’ve never looked at it this way. I tend to look at the work, rather than at who made it. Women may however get different jobs and engage with clients differently. Much would depend on the personality of designer, rather than on gender. A friend has said that female designers are more conscientious and perhaps they are also more flexible and easier to work with – that is certainly my experience working with designers at the NGJ. Are women designers taking a more leading role in the design field?

As I said before, it is still a male-dominated field. The CEOs of the main local companies are mostly men but there are some influential exceptions and I do think there is the potential for change.

It is really in women’s hands to take a greater stake in design and to have their presence felt.

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Typographer Head of design at Albert Bonnier Copywriter Creative Director Creative Director Founder, Designer Creative Director

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Carolina Laudon Nina Ulmaja Anna Qvennerstedt Tove Langseth Stefania Malmsten Ida Wessel Barbro Ohlson Smith

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Typographer Head of design at Albert Bonnier Copywriter Creative Director Creative Director Founder, Designer Creative Director

Carolina Laudon Nina Ulmaja Anna Qvennerstedt Tove Langseth Stefania Malmsten Ida Wessel Barbro Ohlson Smith

How and when did you become head of design at Albert Bonniers Förlag?

In 2005 after I had freelanced for 11 years. Before that I had worked with a lot of different publishers and also taught graphic design at Konstfack University Collage. I think my educational experience was one of the reasons they asked me. Before that the position didn’t exist, but there was a need at the time to raise the level of design and ease the communication between the publishing house and external designers.

Your mother belonged to the first generation that studied  computer programming in the 1960’s, while your father was a What does your position mean and what were the challenges stay at home dad. Can you tell us about them? when you started?

Having a workingwoman as a mother taught me that work is what Honestly, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I was you do in life and family is where you belong. You have to be meticsupposed to form the position myself. It wasn’t easy, but I immediateulous when you choose what to do for a living. Education and hard ly saw some things that could be improved, like the work processes work is a virtue and you should never give up. I am, in fact, enorand the knowledge of the client. mously stubborn. I thought all mothers worked with computers, I One of the things I stated early on was that we have to be profesdidn’t realize until later that what she did was a bit different for her generation. Therefore working with something that’s not mainstream sional and more constructive towards the designers, knowing more or less from the start what we do or do not want as well as ending colcomes natural to me. laborations that doesn’t work. The final result – the book – is what matters. The books have to look like they’re made today and not ten What makes a good font?

Most fonts are designed for specific uses and areas that require them years ago. A big part of what I do is acting like a sounding board, both internally and externally. to sustain certain characteristics. A font used in a novel have comWhat do you consider your greatest accomplishment? pletely different requirements than a font for a mobile application.

I’ve significantly raised the level of knowledge regarding design and It’s easier to make better typography by knowing the background of typography at Albert Bonniers Förlag. The design part isn’t somethe font. thing that you think of at the last minute anymore. I regularly work  Some say that typography is a very narrow discipline, but you with trend forecasting and I’ve held courses internally in readability and how to achieve good typography in practice. don’t agree?  Absolutely not. Typography is a very broad discipline within design, What have been the biggest challenges? not just a part of graphic design. There’s typography everywhere: It was hard to show what I wanted to do and get credit for it during on traffic signs, houses, containers, labels, on the Internet, in books, my first year. People didn’t really understand what a head of design newspapers and mobile phones. It ties multiple disciplines within does. The idea that the designer comes in towards the end of a project communication together. Text is present everywhere, I think it’s a and makes the final touch was deeply rooted. Now the designers get nice feature. onboard early in the process, sometimes when an author comes up As a typographer, do you also have an interest in linguistics? with an idea, that is, before the book is even adopted. This is to get a I’m a designer who loves typographical aesthetics and am deeply interested in the history of writing, where the development of languag- better idea of what a book it could be.

I got involved in processes where you probably didn’t expect me to, es is one part. such as how we outsource jobs, choose designers for specific assignments and what information the designer gets when we contact them.

People often talk about typography in terms of rationality and functionality, yet we feel like many designers have a very Still, improvement is a long-term work in progress.  emotional relationship to typography. Discussions regarding What are the pros of having someone as head of design and typography often degenerates and become dogmatic. Why is why don’t all publishing houses have? that?

I hope that you can see from our releases why it’s good to have someFonts affect almost everyone, most of us are large consumers of text one that is responsible for the design. That person keeps the publishand therefore of typography. You can’t ignore the fact that typograing house up to date on what’s going on in the world of book design phy sets a certain tone to a text or to words, whether you like it or and typography. And all companies want to be at the forefront of not. You can express a lot through typography, it’s a craft that takes their field, right? time to learn and there’s a lot to consider. Maybe it’s easier to emIt was daring of Bonnier to hire someone as head of design six brace a dogmatic approach to typography and hope it lasts. years ago. Innovative and cool for a 170-year old publishing house! It seems like more and more publishing houses start to understand the What is the best advice anyone has ever given you? benefits of having a design savvy person. Just like all other manuDare to be a beginner. facturing companies have done a long time ago. Books are books, but also products.

How did you first become interested in letters?

I made my first font as an assignment at HDK School of Design and Crafts. We were actually not supposed to make fonts, so I made a mistake. However, it came very naturally. The graphic expression and the craft behind fonts appeal to me, there is a clean and simple aesthetic when it comes to letters. The history of characters and fonts never cease to amaze me.

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1; The diaries of Lars NorĂŠn made by Nina Ulmaja

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2; Monopol typeface made for Systembolaget by Carolina Laudon

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Typographer Head of design at Albert Bonnier Copywriter Creative Director Creative Director Founder, Designer Creative Director

Why did you become a copywriter?

I have known since middle school that I have a natural ability to express myself in writing. Despite that I had different plans for my professional life, to be a product designer, it wasn’t until I moved back to Sweden, after not completing a four-year engineering degree in London that I heard of Berghs School of Communication. I applied to both the art direction and copywriting programs, but in the end copywriting won.

When we’ve looked for older female art directors in Sweden, we have found very few. How is it with copywriters?

In my generation there are few female copywriters. When I was at Berghs School of Communication in the early 1990s we were as many women as men in our class, but in the end it didn’t make a difference.

Though the male dominance is a problem in the advertising world, I think it’s heading in the right direction.

There have been times in my career when I’ve felt a bit trampled, there still are, but I think you have to be able to withstand a bit of that in this business. It happens to all of us and you have to find a way to bounce back.

You once said that you’re often asked to be part of different forums because you’re a woman. This is something we can relate to. What are your thoughts on that?

When I first became successes it was all of a sudden an advantage to be a woman. I could fill the female quota in a jury and a panel debate among other things, which has definitely helped my career. I used to think I got chosen only because I was a woman, not because I was qualified. I don’t think that anymore but that is really the only thing that has changed. Still, it’s unfair that exceptionally talented men don’t get the same opportunities. But then again, they have had it easier in other ways.

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Carolina Laudon Nina Ulmaja Anna Qvennerstedt Tove Langseth Stefania Malmsten Ida Wessel Barbro Ohlson Smith

Tell us about your first years as a professional?

I graduated from Beckmans College of Design in 1999. Though I didn’t spend that much time in school during my last semester since I had landed a job at the advertising agency Paradiset, which was the »it« agency at the time. I worked closely with Jocke Jonason for huge international clients like Diesel. Thinking about it now, I am amazed that he gave me so much responsibility from the get-go. I produced photo shoots around the world with some of the greatest photographers at the time. My God, I was so young! Later I understood that to work with all those talented people was a unique experience. Back then I simply thought it was kind of standard, since I had nothing to compare it to.

How did your sudden success affect you?

I honestly didn’t see it that way. I guess I am not the type to become too self-involved, instead I have a tendency to focus on what went wrong. It may sound kind of depressing but that’s how I work. When I was 25 and everything was moving so fast, that might not have been a bad thing though. People who think that they are great at 25 tend to be pretty hard to work with.

What have your goals been?

I’ve never had any goals like »I’ll be a partner by the time I’m 30«, but tried to focus on the job at hand. That in turn has given me opportunities such as founding an agency in London with Jocke and becoming a creative director at Lowe Brindfors. It’s important to dare to take the chances that present themselves along the way. I think that’s a good goal in itself, to continue to take chances. It tends to get harder the older we get and that is something to watch out for. Continuing to surprise myself, that’s what I want to do.

What are your strengths as a creative?

I am hard on myself and very persistent. I am also good at looking at things from different perspectives, which can be difficult to do while you’re in the middle of a project. I am also equally good at both the idea and the design aspect. Ha, ha. That was a lot of things.

Do you believe there is a universal language in advertising and that you don’t have to always take gender in consideration?

I don’t think that gender always have to be considered since there are You’re on the board of directors for The Swedish Association more important thing to think about. I myself am very critical when it comes to advertising, so I usually try to convince myself first. Then of Communication Agencies. What do you think about equality in the Swedish advertising world? others are usually convinced as well, both women and men.

I’m very honored to be on the board and I think they have a clear focus on issues of equality. Things have changed for the past couple What is the best advice anyone has ever given you? of years, many more women are getting noticed today. In the past I’ve received several pieces of good advice thru the years, such as being able to say no. That was my ideal for a long time, to set bound- women tended to disappear once they had children, you see less of that now. Like Janet said about sports, my theory is that a business aries when there was too much work. But then I got the opposite adcannot change because you ask it to. You might have to accept the vice. To say yes. It’s good advice, I think, especially for women. Not rules of the game to get in, but once you’re in it’s a little easier to necessarily to say yes to everything, but to dare to accept an assignchange it. What I mean is that the advertising business is demandment that at first seems impossible. It’s what I try to do nowadays. ing. You have to have a thick skin and not give up because otherwise you tend to fade away.

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2; Campain for NK department store, 2008, by Tove Langseth

1; Digital campain for ”Berättarministeriet” a nonprofit organization dedicated to inspire children, aged 8-18, from areas of high unemployment to conquer the written word. By Anna Qvennerstedt.

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Typographer Head of design at Albert Bonnier Copywriter Creative Director Creative Director Founder, Designer Creative Director

Whenever we ask about older Swedish women in the design world, everyone mention your name.

We think that’s pretty funny because you’re not that old. Have you heard that yourself at some point?

No, I haven’t (laughing). But I remember one time in the late 1990s when me and Nina Ulmaja had been selected to represent graphic design at Artgenda in Copenhagen. I remember she said that when she went to the Konstfack University Collage, Lotta Kühlhorn and I were the only female graphic designers that she knew of. So maybe there is some truth in that. But then again, we have such a short history of graphic design in Sweden. There were no design agencies until the 1980s, only advertising agencies, and very few women.

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I studied art history in the early 90s at the Stockholm University and wrote an essay on the graphic programmes of Scandinavian modern museums. The following year I spent a summer at the Rhode Island School of Design in the US studying graphic design.

Using the portfolio I created at RISD I was admitted to Konstfack. After graduating and spending one summer at Parsons School of Design in New York, I spent a year in London working at one of the more adventurous and creative dot-com ventures boo.com.

You founded your studio BankerWessel together with your husband Jonas Banker in 2002, can you tell us a bit about your collaboration?

Jonas started out as an illustrator. My focus was on tyYou were very young when you started at Beckpography and art direction. After returning from Lonmans Collage of Design. How come? don, we felt we could make more original work comI originally wanted to be a photographer and I had bining our skills. Jonas changed his style all the time, taken a photography course. I met Joel Berg, we’re the and he was a great person to art direct whenever I same age and knew each other from before. He told needed more elaborate graphics to work with. We were me that he was applying to Beckmans Collage of Dein our early thirties and wanted to raise a family. At sign and I said »You can’t do that. You need experience that point we just felt like we didn’t want to »compete« from a different school, no?«. But then I thought »Oh, over whose career was the more important one. It was I’m gonna do that too.« In the end he actually never better to aim for the same goal at work and share evdid, but I applied and got in. erything at home. As a family business, I think we’ve ended up being quite adaptable and time-efficient. The As opposed to men, it seems like women’s careers downside may be that all we ever talk about is kids, peak later in life. design and business.

I think it’s typical for women to have a little more winding career. There are very few who have had that Why do you think so many women choose to start kind of one linear career. their own studios?

I can only speak for myself. When I started out in the Why is that you think? We can definitely relate to late 90s, I didn’t have any female designer role models, it, as we started this side project and have gone and I was afraid to get stuck in a structure in which beyond our professional roles. no woman had advanced before me. I felt it was really I think that you start to work and assume that you’re important to do everything I could to stay independent in it on the same conditions as men, and then suddenand be sure to get credit for my own work. But to be ly realize that you’re actually not. Someone else set the honest, I was also afraid I wasn’t good enough, which rules and you don’t really get to participate. That is is quite sad when I think about it today. when you start looking for new ways, different forms.

And that way – your way or my way – of working are What makes a good art director/graphic designer all accurate. You have to believe in that rather than do you think? giving up and becoming a yoga teacher or a gardener.

I think playfulness is underrated — it’s a skill. It’s so much more than adding colour and fun shapes. I think What do like about working with magazines? designers that can combine playfulness with experiI like to build systems, magazines are actually the per- ence can come up with really innovative and original fect system. I like when there is a context and continui- work. I also think good art direction or graphic design ty, and that you can remake things. Working with both have to be visually strong and shouldn’t need to be exphotographyand typography. It’s been a while since plained. I admire designers that manage to stay true I worked with a magazine, but that kind of thinking to themselves and use their own empathy as a tool to characterizes everything I do. I’ve often gotten those come up with great results. kinds of book assignments – publications that are similar to magazines.

What do you think women can do to create a more gender equal industry?

We’ve gotten the idea that the 1990s, when you I think we should focus on the quality of the end-restarted working, was a man’s world? sult. Do we think the industry is producing the very I just read Catlin Moran’s How To Be a Woman in best work today or not? I think there is a high tolerwhich she describes the 1990s. A time we felt was ance for uninspired work out there. I think a lot of that about equality because PJ Harvey was around and ev- is due to the fact that the industry isn’t a fair represeneryone wore Dr Martins. In reality it was a very male tation of who is actually out there. The standards need dominated scene with the magazine Loaded being one to be raised and clients should stop paying for generic of the results. results.

I can see a huge difference between younger men and It’s sometimes said that women contribute a differmen from my own generation. Many of the guys I’ve ent »angle« to the industry. I think we need to go so had as assistants have a different view. I think things much further. We need to start taking our own interhave taken a turn for the better and the old advertisests and feelings seriously and claim credit for our own ing structures have partly been demolished, even if you work. Instead of trying to adapt and »contribute« we still hear the most horrific stories about how women should create whole new playgrounds and collaboraare treated. tions that actually inspire us. Basically it’s about keepI think that sums it up. Because even if I’ve always ing out of the mainstream and finding our own ways to been aware of it, in school it was a huge differences create and deliver amazing work. A lot of women are between how men and women acted. There were guys doing this already with very successful results. who could put together an assignment in the elevator I also think we should consider why we continue supon the way to class and still deliver a presentation with porting structures that don’t give us our fair share of high confidence and get a good response while the girls fun and credit in return. It’s not about the question of started off by apologizing. It was a long time before I whether or not we can do the job. We must instead ask wanted to talk about those things. I wanted to avoid ourselves: »Are we letting men have more fun?« the entire discussion… you don’t want to get attention just because you’re a woman.

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Carolina Laudon Nina Ulmaja Anna Qvennerstedt Tove Langseth Stefania Malmsten Ida Wessel Barbro Ohlson Smith

Can you tell us a bit about you background?

I studied graphic design in London 1986–1989 at Central Saint Martins and worked in London for ten years.

I specialized in typography and letterpress during my final year at Central Saint Martins and then worked for Carroll, Dempsey & Thirkell Design Consultancy with everything from cultural to financial clients. One of my favorite projects was the rebranding of ENO, English National Opera. Back in Sweden I started as Head of Graphic Design at TV4 before founding my own design consultancy Ohlsonsmith.

What is the biggest difference between working in England and Sweden?

London and England has a much bigger market than Sweden so there is more room for being an expert, having a special skill, working without having to be a generalist. The big clients are used to work with more than one agency and having a design- and branding agency as well as an advertising agency. So if you are good there will always be people that recognize that, even though the competition is tough. Talent is more important than who you know.

You founded Ohlsonsmith in 2006, why do you think so many women choose to start their own design studios?

Either to be in charge of their situation, or that they don’t think they can develop enough as creatives being employed. I started my own design consultancy because I thought that would be the best platform for me to do good work.

What makes a good art director do you think?

Someone who is both curious and determined. Being a good art director for me also means being clear of the purpose of the assignment and finding the essence of the brand.

You started your career in the 90s, to us who started to work in the 00s, it seems like the design industry was all about male designers back then. Was it?

When I worked in London it never crossed my mind that it was more about men. I realized that much later when I came back to Sweden, as well as when I developed the business side of running a design consultancy.

Do you think there is a difference between how men and women relate to brands?

Definitely. Some brands are specifically targeted toward either men or women, but there are also brands that have both men and women as their target groups.

It is interesting that many brands probably have to choose to communicate toward one or the other, or just do so without being aware of it. So you really have to ask yourself how to go about it – is there really a design or branding strategy that it unisex?

You also teach visual branding at Berghs School of Communication, do you think that your female students will have the same possibilities to succeed as their male classmates in the future?

Absolutely, but the female students really have to WANT success and go for it.

What is the best advice anyone has given you?

My mentor Mike Dempsey gave (and practiced) this advice: Make sure you give your assisting designer room to develop.

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1; Feminista book series, Modernista, 2003, by Stefania Malmsten

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2; Berghs Print, 2009– //// by Barbro Ohlson Smith

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3; Fotografiska. We’ve worked with Fotografiska from the very beginning in 2010. We made the logo and the graphic programme and have developed it in various ways.

By Ida Wessel

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Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Dean of Graphic Design and Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art, is one of today’s most prominent feminist graphic designers. In 1971, she founded the California Institute of the Arts, the first women’s graphic design program; she also founded the Woman’s Building and its Women’s Graphic Center in Los Angeles in 1973.

De Bretteville came to Yale in 1990. Since the late 1950s, under the strong influence of Paul Rand, the Yale program had been a “bastion” of modernist theory. When de Bretteville was selected as the new Dean, Paul Rand resigned on principle and wrote a manifesto in the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design in response. Rand wrote, “To make the classroom a perpetual forum for political is-

sues, for instance, is wrong; and to see aesthetics as sociology is grossly misleading.”

De Bretteville has become an outspoken designer and educator and an influential theorist of feminist design, which she defines as “graphic strategies that will enable us to listen to people who have not been heard from before. Feminism is about enabling those voices to be heard.”

JS: Type designer Tobias Frere-Jones recently said at the Yale Art School that historical resonances and aesthetic characteristics can shape a typeface. He, and others, have described Gotham–a typeface commissioned for GQ Magazine–as a masculine typeface. Is there a feminine typeface?

SB: This is a huge question. It sounds like a small question, but this is a huge question.

JS: In my typography class last semester, two typefaces–Joanna and Mrs. Eaves–were described as feminine.

Doesn’t such a characterization reinforce gender stereotypes or the gender categories of “feminine” and “masculine”?

SB: It depends heavily on gender stereotypes that I am not interested in fostering. I don’t think it serves anyone to do that.

I think a better way to describe a typeface would be to talk about its decorative aspects, basic struc-

ods of my time here. When I first came here, I know how many women were just ecstatic that I came here. I didn’t come here to be the first female tenured professor. My goal was not to be the first tenured woman at Yale. I came because I thought this area of study was lagging behind and needed to be refreshed and realigned with the present, in a way that would be helpful to the students who came here. This meant that many aspects of the tradition of this department, that I wanted to honor it, so I wasn’t come here to throw away the past and start a new society, I was looking for: what are the values we want to keep and what isn’t here that needs to be added.

In fact, at my interview, I said precisely that. I said I would bring what is absent from the Yale environment that I think would balance it and make more egalitarian and reactive to the world in which we live. And the

ture, figure/field, how each element relates to another element, how they can be different or the same. I think there is a whole range to talk about formal aspects of anything you look at without having to knee-jerk back into gender stereotypes…

[T]here has been a lot of very solid work that looks at how certain attributes that are formal have been ascribed to gender stereotypes and then devalued accordingly. So, why in 2010, why would we ever want to participate in continuing that?

JS: So what do you tell a student who describes a typeface as feminine?

SB: I would ask: “Is your language rich enough to find other ways to describe what you are looking at, rather than to have to use gender as a referent?” Surely it is not the only signifier out there.

Please. I think you free it up. If we were in the time when using historically ascribed attributes that have been bundled under

the feminine, with freedom for not being stayed glued to the feminine, and the feminine being a free-floating signifier, I’d be fine with it. But when you say it, and suddenly every female in the room has to press those adjectives against herself and see if that is in accordance with how she understands herself, I don’t see that as useful. And every man, someone who is genetically and physically male, has to see a connection to that action or it cannot be his. So this is not useful. If we were looking for a more democratic society, one in which there is equality, a non-hierarchy of gender, this doesn’t foster that kind of society. So in that respect, I think: “Hey, make up some more metaphors of your own.

Find some other language to describe what you see.”

JS: What does it mean to be a female designer in a mostly male institutional history and culture?

SB: It has meant different things over different peri-

On April 2, de Bretteville sat down with Broad Recognition Arts Editor Jessica Svendsen to discuss “feminine” typefaces, feminist form and content, and the difference between a female designer and a feminist designer.

interviewers said, “Well, what would that be?” as if they had everything already. It was a little bit like, where shall I start?

And of course, I would have to start with women, because in fact, there was a paucity of women who had ever taught here.

There was one female faculty member. There were many women who have studied here, that said publicly, that it didn’t matter to them that there were no female faculty members. Whereas, for me, it mattered because the absence of women left an imbalance that fostered a lot of stereotypical behavior on the part of the male faculty and the male students, that wouldn’t have been easy for them to simply to do if there were more women around, who were in positions of authority to help with those circumstances and to also provide a more diversified power source.

One of my teachers, actually, pulled me aside and kissed me in the

darkroom. And I had come from Barnard, an all-women’s college—I was called “Ms. Levrant” there. I was actually very young when I came here—I was twenty. It was just so not what I would ever expect in that kind of situation. I modeled, because I was very skinny and I needed to get a job. Of course, I’ve had people do that in those venues. I expected it there. But I didn’t know how to handle it there [in the darkroom]. I was just completely taken by surprise. So in that surprise, I was trying to point out the hierarchy that existed, which means that you don’t do this. If my classmate did this, I would know exactly what to do.

I would know precisely what to do because I am more used to it, but I had never thought [that would happen]. And that shows what kind of naiveté I had from Barnard… The hierarchy between genders was not my primary thought at Barnard, even

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[One year] a bunch of students were upset that the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) was having a conference in Florida, and they had, I think, one woman speaker. So they created a poster that pointed out the paucity of women

cannot be something from me to you. “I am helping you from me, as a person, not as a professor.” So they put it up. And immediately I got a phone call from organizers from the conference –Chee Pearlman—“Your students have pasted, all over Miami, these posters that say we have only X percent of women.” I said “If you had more women, you wouldn’t these posters.

You can’t blame me that you don’t have enough women. It has nothing to do with me. This is young people’s response to you not representing women’s productive view in your conference.” … The goal of having no gender hierarchy is really more of what I am working for. That is the ethos of the department. The school carries it as well. I cannot speak for the larger university.

Calling typefaces feminine is an unfortunate distraction. That’s not where our energies should be going, in my perspective. I

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c a th a w r m b e n e as a oue r e hind b r e e l o g hte th e fr d a f c a g e a e l e d a g stud this us sh i p g t ndin e r n e o g y e e d b s d e a e nt w nd , ith

about doing a pro-choice billboard?” They looked in the newspaper, at things that were going on, and one of the things that they discovered was that the percentage of people that were pro-choice was not common knowledge, and they looked for a way to express a public study of the discrepancy between the media representation and the opinions or perspectives of the majority of Americans.

That group of students became a collective, called Class Action.

It still exists 19 years later. They did another billboard that dealt with the issue of battered women. They have also done interventions about gun control.

It has to do with what the group feels the issue is of that time. It is totally student-run. It is now a student collective that is now only loosely connected with us…

I

though it was a women’s college. It never even came up, at least among my colleagues.

JS: You talked about how you introduced female faculty when you came here, but what was the reaction to your theoretical approach to teaching?

SB: So let’s go back to the question you’re really asking: what was I thinking?

My thinking has changed over time. I came here with a real desire to be both a citizen of the town as well as a teacher, head of this department and area of study. I took that very seriously.

My first acts were to understand what was going on here, at the town at the time. I looked to Hill Health Center, for example. The students decided to do a pro-choice billboard. The students were able to use a billboard on I-95. The students decided to do this themselves, it was the thing they wanted to do. It wasn’t as if we told them, “Hey, how

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speakers at the conference.

And they wanted to post them all over Miami. We were connected with a group who would put up the posters in the middle of the night. I told them that it is illegal to do this.

Every piece of public property is owned, therefore, if you put something up, you are vulnerable to being arrested for defacing public property. Therefore, it

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think trying to get a kind of lack of hierarchy in gender, to understand that it is constructed, to not participate in the reconstruction of stereotypes, is much more valuable. Energy is real. You have to choose your battles.

JS: I can understand the connection of feminism, politics, and expressing gender in terms of content, like the way you described the billboard campaign. But I am also interested in how a gendered perspective is manifested in form, and you have talked about how breaking down the modernist grid, allowing for multiple perspectives or subjectivity, is one way to enact feminist design.

SB: Yes, I said that, that’s true. In 1973 and again in 1981. But not until we have gender equality, do I want to forget the word feminist. It is really to infuse that equality into feminist thinking, that I think is important. Because, in fact, there are a

lot of young women now, who think of gender in stereotypical ways, even after the work of Judith Butler and Monique Wittig, just beautiful work, that has tried to unpack that in such a way that we really question the category women, and we open it up.

When you look at the word democratic as a part of feminism, that equality and that ability to argue with each other, come into friction with each other or come into connection with each other, on an equal plane, that is inherent in the ideal of democracy. If you try to transfer that into a feminist perspective, it holds that same meaning that we can talk with each other, agree or disagree, and work it out, as a part of self-criticism, as well as a criticism of feminism, as well as a criticism of modernism, how a democratic and more equal society is created so that whatever kind of gender—there is as much difference with-

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1; Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Suzanne Lacy Moving Sheet Rock (1975) 2; First Woman’s Building Brochure (1974) 3; To Love, Honor, Cherish (1978) Feminist Art 4; Laundry Works (1974) Mother Art 5; Workers Heaven or Hell?

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in each gender as between the gender. You come from that perspective, it makes it very hard to talk about men and women all the time, around it. But I do think the word feminism is important because it carries with it an activist buzz. It really belongs to paying attention to how women are being treated, which, until we are treated absolutely equally, then I cannot let go of the word.

JS: Many women designers acknowledge the glass ceiling and everything that surrounds them being a woman designer, but they are not necessarily feminist designer. Can you clarify the distinction between a female designer and a feminist designer?

SB: A female designer is often talking about herself, as many of the women who voted for Hilary in the election. These women talked about the experience with misogyny as their reason for voting for Hilary, rather than looking at what Hilary might do as President. That was not what they were looking at; they were looking at their experience, and where they felt dissed. Voting for a woman was acknowledging themselves. That is similar to women designers who acknowledge the glass ceiling are really looking at.

I think to be feminist is to really care about women in general, not only designers, not only at privileged institutions like Yale. Thinking about women who don’t have anything, and what are the forces at work in our shared globalized culture that keep women from actualizing their potential.

That is not what those women are talking about.

They are talking about their potential and their actualizing. That is the difference between being just a woman designer or being a feminist designer.

It doesn’t mean that you are always working on feminist content, it means

you think about, more broadly, women as a category and how that category is used against women, wherever they are, on a socioeconomic level in a globalized world. That, to me, is feminism. It was never about me, whatever “me” or “I” is. It is about “we.” … It is a different kind of perspective. I have a history that makes for that. Some of it is actually theoretical and part of a feminist consciousness and why the feminist movement was absolutely arresting. It was like, immediate. I was part of the resurgence of feminism in California, at a time in Los Angeles, when we all came into our own. I came into my own in my work.

I became a mother. I became a feminist, all at the same time. All at the same time. It was an incredible overlay of things. I came into my own work, I came into the feminist movement, I became a mother, I lived in a new city that was more foreign to me than any other city. I lived in Milan, New York, but L.A. was something else.

All of those things shaped an experience that is going to change over time, but coalesced in a very particular kind of way.

JS: There is one thing I would like to return to. You mentioned the Miami poster campaign, and many people associate feminist graphic design with more confrontational or aggressive tactics, like the Guerilla Girls or Barbara Kruger.

What alternatives are there for feminist design?

SB: I am one of the alternatives. I chose to focus on what we don’t have and how to get it, not on what is oppressing me or oppressing us. Some people are filled with a tremendous amount of anger and the way to express it is through their work and through their work about what is oppressing them. I think that that is very important work. It just happens to not be my work.

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JS: You ended one of your publicized conversations with designer Ellen Lupton with “Good design is feminist design.”

[SB laughs] Is that still the case? Do you have a changed perspective over the years, especially as feminism has changed?

SB: Yes, because it is also how the notion of good design has changed. Both have changed. I just felt that Yale was known for good design, which was very much aligned with modernist design at that point. So I was trying to open up the design, trying to open up the feminist design. A statement, like that, out of context, requires a lot of unpacking. Both around what is “good” and what is “feminist.”

I had an interesting conversation with some students the other day. It wasn’t about feminism, but it is like this: two students were doing work that had images of like, kittens and sunsets and palm trees, but they came off of Google images—they were getting them off the net. I was trying to locate what it is that those images were serving. One of the other students, who was older than the two students who were doing it, said, “It’s generational. The response to that.”

I said, “I don’t think that if that’s operative, it is not all that’s operating.” It turns out that one of the students was doing it as a reaction against good design, clean design. Here we are, 2009, and someone is choosing, what I call trashy, low, images to signify “sweetness” as a reaction. My comment was: “You are here at Yale to do your own work.

You don’t have to react against something. Go for something.” Because to spend your time against that now, unless you do it from an extremely informed, thoughtful, broadly-researched base, is a very knee-jerk, against, kind of activity. It is not that you cannot use kitty

kats and sunsets. It is more: Why are you using [these]? I want to here from you, why, something other than “I am against good design, clean design, all that design I learned at RISD.” I want more. I want to hear more. Talk about it more. Tell me more.

JS: How would you “unpack” feminist design in 2009?

What stays constant is trying to have a vision of what is desired: in this case, for me, it is a non-hierarchy within gender; an understanding of its constructed nature; a questioning of the category woman. That was not as clear in 1973, it was clear in ’83, because Gender Trouble had come later. When I read it, it was like a revelation. Monique Wittig and Judith Butler were like a revelation to me. Since I came from parents who work in factories, I did not even know where suburbia was, let alone, who was living there. So Betty Friedan made no sense to me. But whereas these women did make sense to me. I could locate what they were talking about among the people I knew. I come from four generations of working women. I do not know the other kind of life. Betty Friedan was angry at me, but I wasn’t angry at Betty Friedan.

She thought I was sending women back to the bedroom, to do sheets, to iron sheets, but I said: “That is not what I’m talking about.” But she couldn’t understand it. I gave a talk in ’71 and she was in the audience, and she just completely couldn’t get behind what I was talking about. Because I was thinking about what is attributed to women, and how do we free up those attributes from gender. I don’t see why gender and these attributes have to be attached.

Jessica Svendsen is a senior in Yale College.

She is the Arts Editor for Broad Recognition.

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Éva Valicsek master’s diploma is a redesign of an epistolary novel, Dangerous Liaisons.

The book is a French epistolary novel and was written by Choderlos de Laclos. It is the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two rivals and ex-lovers.

As an epistolary novel, the book is composed entirely of letters written by various characters to each other. She created an analog interactive typographic system.

The separation of the two main characters, who turned out from the moral order of the world, re-creates the contents, while the turning of the pages resembling opening letters reinterprets the form. Thus the setup of the book aimes at a two-fold, unique and original change.

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York Times is about as real as it gets.

other things - why creating a fake New

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Permanent Auckland to discuss - among

Anderson ahead of her lecture at Semi-

and prescribed reality. We caught up with

to question and subvert our preconceived

designer who employs various mediums

Kelli Anderson is a multidisciplinary

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F R OM : www.alwayssometimesanytime.com/

What piqued your interest in design in the first place?

To be honest, it took a while for me to realise that what I was doing was considered design. I’ve always made all manner of visual things for as long as I can remember, but while I was attending grad school in New York, friends began approaching me to help out with their album art, music videos, etc, and I began doing more and more of this collaborative work. Turns out that having assignments and deadlines is a great motivator for getting-all-manner-of-things-done.

And the public nature of design makes it naturally interactive - and means that many different types of people will participate with the work, which gives it a life beyond what I can do with it.

What attracted you to infographics?

I like understanding how things and systems work, so I’m a natural diagram fanatic. (Ikea Furniture assembly = guilty pleasure.) But also: It’s a good moment for infographic work (as distinct from data visualization) because the cultureat-large presently approaches them with a degree of healthy skepticism - people know that the presentation of facts and figures can obscure the truth just as readily as any other type of communication can obscure the truth. That has had the effect of taking infographics to a whole other level: they seem to talk about our relationship with data, as much as they present data.

I also like that guiding every little design choice about lines or typefaces are the aspirations of clarity and usability.

When you create an infographic, you are designing for the human mind - the ocular and biological way that we ingest information.

Tell us how you started to get involved in the subversive, user-focused projects you have been associated with.

Well, it wasn’t really a conscious decision to make work that subverts assumptions. I was making lots of things and occasionally had these overwhelming “wow, that’s cool!” moments and then had to go back and retroactively analyze what seemed so exciting about them.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my favorite projects (the stuff I get really excited about) is the work that challenges complacency; that goes back far into the fundamentals, refusing to take them for granted. This type of work (if successful) has the potential to resurrect meaning in places where it has been used up.

There is boundless potential in a piece of paper, but when you see a pile of mail on your desk day after day, it is easy to forget the material’s wonders.

I think design work can remind us that there are possibilities which lay latent in the things we take for granted.

What was the first project you worked on?

The first project that would qualify would probably be the paint-pen-andacrylic science diagram illustrations I was making in high school. They were about physics concepts but were rendered in this totally inadequate visual language of campy illustration.

You’ve created subversive projects both online and in reality. How do you find gaining public interest is different in the different mediums. Do you find one easier to achieve? Do you find one more powerful?

That is a good question. It’s a nice surprise when people I don’t know get excited about a project. Gaining public interest probably has less to do with physical-vs-digital divide and has more to do with how the audience receives the experience: whether they have to seek it out or it gets handed to them.

When we put hundreds of thousands of fake NY Times in peoples’ hands, there was concentrated interest that day. But something like a small website experiment is more likely to be gradually noticed - people come to by and by.

I keep interested people abreast of current projects through Twitter and dribble. I also write long blog posts about each project when it is complete just to work out my own ideas verbally, but also to contextualize what I’m doing.

You are essentially framing reality with these projects. Do you have any particular messages you are trying to deliver?

Not necessarily—while some of the work I make is overtly about activism, most of it isn’t. However, I am a person-with-apoint-of-view and I follow my interests, so my passions and beliefs probably end up being pretty transparent.

In your TedTalk you argue that reality is structured in a particular way and doesn’t necessarily have to be, and you subvert this using design. Why do you think design has the ability to subvert reality particularly well?

Design, even more than art, is integrated into everyday experience. It is those everyday experiences that form our basis of reality (through sheer repetition.) As designers, I think this puts us in a position of great power, because we are essentially working with this medium of the overlooked/everyday. It is ripe for intervention, which can prove to be shocking or whimsical or surprising, but always readily provokes wonder in these little corners of life we cease to consider.

(I think of Spike Jonze’s music video for Björk’s ‘It’s so Quiet’ (wherein the transacts and mailboxes begin dancing in the street).)

Design can get directly at the very heart of what we have forgotten to think about.

Your design-oriented work is quite political as you question the established forms of media and government. Do you think it’s more important now than ever given the global control some corporations / media organizations / governments are wielding? Discuss your thoughts on this in relation to the faux NY Times project you undertook.

Yes, I mean, it is easier to have a voice/ lobbying power in the world if you have piles of money. In America, there are a gazillion different official and non-official loopholes that the corporate elite actively exploit to affect policy. This isn’t the way that American was designed to work, and we wanted to remind people of this with the NY Times. All of the positive changes heralded by the paper were the effect of “popular pressure.”

As part of this NY Times project you also mentioned that you only put ‘good

news’ in the newspaper. It reminded me of something that Stephen Colbert said in his Correspondence Dinner speech in 2006: “You weren’t telling us and those were good times, for all we knew”.

Is escaping reality as much a part of your work as re-framing it, or are you trying to seriously instigate change?

No, it was intended to remind people of what should be possible in a democracy.

We actually named our collaborative secret group (the group who officially released the paper): ‘Because we want it’ to represent the simple little idea that the people’s interests should be the driver of change in a democracy. We released it just after Obama was elected because we wanted to remind people that one man was not going to save the ship and that if we desired change, we had to continue to visibly push for it.

Again, the NY Times project: you discuss a futuristic Utopia. What did this futuristic Utopia consist of? What do you think the major problems we as society face at the moment? Do you think we’re at all likely to sort any of our problems out?

Yes, the paper was “set” six months in the future and depicted a world created by pressuring our elected officials to do the things that we thought would most benefit the collective good. It was sort of “progressive wish list” of policies which included big things like closing Gitmo, fixing health care, instituting a maximum wage law, but also smaller (but equally important) ideas like bringing high-speed internet to Appalachia and returning Civics class to high school curriculum. It was a very detailed policy piece, as well as a hoax.

Climate change is probably the largest challenge we face as humanity—the more we learn, the worse the prognosis gets. It is really pretty scary. Ugh.

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S OLA R POWE R E D POP S I CLE S This project, lead by Jason Anello, is rolling into towns where this solar power company (Sungevity) operates and hand out free, artisanally-made popsicles to the energy(and apparently popsicle-) consuming public.

With any luck, this combination of sugar, facts, and the threat-of-humanity’s-self-inflicted-demise-owing-to-dirty-energy will be persuasive enough to get some people off the grid.

CO U N T E R F E I T N EW S PAPE R S A collaborative project wherein Kelli and co distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of a perfectly-counterfeited New York Times—providently post-dated and describing a utopian future. Intended to catch bleary-eyed commuters off guard, it initiated a conversation about activism and democracy, while providing a blueprint for a better world.

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The most common explanation is that type design is a “technical” profession. This is rubbish. Yes, font production does involve some programming, but, as a whole, doesn’t type design have much more to do with the patience required by classic female handcrafts, like needlework and knitting?

My guess is that the real answer is found in gender-specific socialization, both in general society and in the type design scene itself.

In Germany, women and men are still not treated equally. Young boys are rewarded much earlier in life, and for much less, than most young girls. Being born as a boy — and therefore a son and heir — is for many parents an achievement in itself. They project this sense of worth on their son. Everybody is already proud of him, by default.

As a daughter, you have to prove that you deserve being rewarded. Yet even a concerted effort may not lead to a positive reaction from adults. The girl also isn’t worthy of the same support because she won’t carry the family’s name.

Looking at type design as a working process, you must eventually decide when the typeface is finished.

For most designers it’s difficult to find an end and be satisfied with the result. Then you add the expectations of others, amplified by the gender gap. Women constantly think they could do better. It’s never enough, they could get judged, they have to please, etc.

There are many of women who have great type designs tucked away in their drawers. They don’t dare to show them to the public.

The same is with women on the stages of type conferences. For most guys, public speaking is less of a problem. They are used to show off with every little

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bit they produced, knowing they will get rewarded — and if not, well, it’s no big deal.

I have the impression that this imbalance in our upbringing is stronger in Germany than elsewhere in the Western world. It could be one reason why some great female designers with German or Swiss roots had to get out and become successful abroad.

Another aspect is networking, which is still a male thing, and which women typically aren’t taught. They tend to be solitary fighters, which of course has a negative effect on their careers.

Later, if that career does progress, our social structure simply makes it very difficult for women to combine the time working on a typeface with having a family, given the mother’s traditional role as primary caregiver. You find a lot of over-qualified female designers doing production for type foundries, which gives them a financial security in their beloved profession.

One more sad truth: as a lesser known woman, the (male) type scene just doesn’t take you seriously. You are just a “student” who fancies the cool “boys”. You can sit down and listen to them, but you won’t be asked to give your opinion on “serious” type issues.

This attitude may seem prehistoric, but honestly, I’ve heard it often.

The solution? Women should be aware of self-censorship, be less hard on themselves, and continue to maintain a high standard of quality without hiding in their chambers. (And some guys shouldn’t jump on stage at the drop of a hat. These changes alone would enhance the quality of some type events.)

I had to do this too. I pushed myself to give lectures and presentations and face the reaction of other type designers. And now, I like it a lot.

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Picture of legendary typographer Beatrice Warde (September 20, 1900— September 16, 1969.

A colophon is a note appearing at the end of a book that describes the volume’s design and production. From the Greek kolophon, meaning summit or finishing touch, such commentary falls outside a publication’s main body of content, belonging to the technical apparatus of end matter, along with the index and other credits. A summit is also a peak, a climax, and it is fitting that in a book about the field of design in its broadest sense, the final chapter should confront the medium of publishing itself.

The preceding chapters of this book present remark-

able evidence of women’s creativity in the applied arts, across a wide range of practices and over a century. The pages themselves and the cover that encloses them are also evidence of design, reflecting the efforts of a team of collaborators. The letters that have gathered together to form printed words also are objects of design, exemplars of the art of typography. Each of these elements – cover, page, type – was designed by a woman.

The book, a physical artefact and a medium of communication, offers an appropriate opening for a survey of women graphic

designers. Today, women are among the most influential designers of American books, having forged key paradigms in the exterior packaging and internal architecture of jacket and page. Across the twentieth century, women found opportunities to work in the publishing world, as editors and authors as well as designers.

The printing trades had provided employment for women during the nineteenth century, especially as typesetters, although they were subject, as in other trades, to lower pay for equal work. During this industrial era, the appearance of books, mag-

azines, and advertising was largely determined by printing technicians.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the field (then better known as ‘commercial art’) of graphic design began to emerge as an artistic discipline.

The transformation of book design owed much to the Arts and Crafts movement, which revered the book as an object both functional and aesthetic, a part of everyday life yet worthy of care and adornment. William Morris had turned to typography in the 1880s, late in his career. Reacting against the harsh, sparkling pages

of spiky type made possible by nineteenth-century printing and paper technologies, Morris reclaimed the weighty, dull-edged letters of early Renaissance typography.

The Arts and Crafts movement that spread from Britain to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century nurtured a new attentiveness to the book arts promoted by the operators of small private presses as well as by designers working for commercial publishers.

Margaret Armstrong’s design for Wanted: A Match-Maker exemplifies the Arts and Crafts ideal of approaching the book

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as a total object, from outside to inside. With its use of slender, attenuated letterforms and light colours, Wanted: A Match-Maker rejects the ponderous density of William Morris’s printed pages in favour of a more conventional and pragmatic attitude, appropriate to the book’s commercial distribution and light-hearted romantic content.

Promoting moral uplift through meaningful labour, the Arts and Crafts movement was relatively open to women, who belonged to many of the Arts and Crafts societies founded around the turn of the century. As historian Ellen Mazur Thomson has argued, membership in clubs aided designers’ professional advancement, and apart from the Arts and Crafts organisations, most denied access to women until much later in the century.

In Boston, a strong publishing industry provided fertile ground for experiments with typography, calligraphy, illumination, illustration, and bookbinding. The Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston, founded in 1897, celebrated the book arts in its exhibitions and included numerous women among its active members, such as Sarah Wyman Whitman, Julia DeWolf Addison, Mary Crease Sears, and Amy Sacker. Several of these designers ran small schools and workshops and taught bookbinding, illustration, and other skills in fields that might provide suitable employment for young women.

While the workshop of Mary Crease Sears produced hand-tooled bindings using luxurious materials, other Boston designers worked in the commercial arena. The prominent society woman Sarah Wyman Whitman designed numerous machine-stamped bindings for Houghton Mifflin, as well as interiors and stained glass windows and screens for private clients.

Amy Sacker’s 1902 design for the commercial binding of The Kindred of the Wild achieves a sense of depth and drama with a minimal number of colours and simple, linear illustrations.

While the Arts and Crafts movement provided

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philosophical fuel for progressive graphic design in the early twentieth century, by the 1940s the formal and technological experiments of the Bauhaus and such European avant-garde movements as Futurism, Constructivism, and Surrealism had reached a small community of American designers. Fewer women gained entrance to this new American vanguard than to the fine press movement. Among them was Elaine Lustig Cohen, who married the graphic designer Alvin Lustig in 1948. Elaine Lustig managed her husband’s studio in Los Angeles and later New York, serving as an all-purpose secretary, production assistant, and draftsperson – the ‘office slave’, as she recalls. Alvin Lustig suffered from diabetes, a condition that led to blindness, and as he lost his eyesight, he increasingly relied on his wife to implement his ideas.

After Alvin Lustig’s early death in 1955 at age forty, Elaine married Arthur Cohen, publisher of Meridian Books, and established her own design practice. In her innovative covers for Meridian Books, designed from 1955 through 1961, she used geometric symbols, evocative photographs, and expressive typography. For her cover for The Noble Savage 4, she affixed a typographic moustache to a marble statue, adorning a literary journal with a Dada flourish.

Several women were leaders in the postmodern return to historical styles that reshaped the top level of commercial book cover and jacket design in the 1980s. Working in New York, designer Louise Fili literally changed the surface of mainstream publishing, rejecting the shiny finishes and garish foil-stamping that served as standard packaging for mass-market books. Fili’s designs for Pantheon used matte, laminated coatings to create mysteriously soft yet durable, highly plasticised surfaces. Her cover for Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (1983) was a lasting icon, later serving as the basis for the motion picture promotion (1992).

Along with her contemporary Carin Goldberg,

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Fili explored historic alphabets and decorative vocabularies, assembling these elements with a modern sense of color and composition.

The neo-historical designs of Fili and Goldberg readied the publishing industry for a more flexible approach to cover and jacket design, a medium made rigid by conservative editors and marketing managers. Carol Devine Carson became art director of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, in 1987. According to Carson, the book business traditionally has made a place for women: ‘We have always done a lot of the real work in this industry. The difference in the past fifteen years is that it’s more common for women to be rewarded for the work they do.’ Carson and her core staff of gifted younger designers – Chip Kidd, Barbara de Wilde, and Archie Ferguson – transformed bookstore shelves across the country.

Knopf’s covers often impart new meanings to familiar images by changing their scale or shifting their context. Carson’s designs for books such as Damage, Degree of Guilt, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil became icons of popular culture in the 1990s. Her cover for Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red takes a distant view, its modesty undercut by the implied eroticism of an erupting volcano, heaving like a breast from the supine earth.

The interior architecture of books, and not just their facades, has also been subject to renovation. In the publishing industry, the design of covers typically is divorced from the design of a book’s content, especially in text-dominated works of literature and nonfiction. In an organisation like Random House, the interior pages often follow a formulaic design, in contrast with the glamour and novelty afforded the book’s cover.

Illustrated volumes about art and architecture are a different matter, however, involving a greater level of skill to successfully combine elements. As design director at MIT Press, Muriel Cooper focused on the book as an intelligent device for storing informa-

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tion. In 1974 she became one of the first designers to set her own type on a computer, using an IBM system to design Herbert Muschamp’s collection of essays, File Under Architecture. The only font available was Courier, but this limitation was offset by the freedom discovered in ‘mise-en-page” typography. Cooper’s other groundbreaking books for MIT included the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas (1972), a large-format interpretation of the famous pop document, and Hans Wingler’s Bauhaus (1969), a vast archive of visual and verbal documents compiled within a massive yet eminently manageable volume over 650 pages long.

Lorraine Wild’s 1985 design for Mask of Medusa, a book of images and texts by architect John Hejduk, was published by Rizzoli at a moment when architects were producing an astonishing number of monographs, each an assertion of personal greatness and professional viability during a period of rapid stardom in the field of architecture. The acknowledged master of the architectural monograph was Massimo Vignelli.

Often using a single typeface, he orchestrated his books around a consistent grid, creating a cinematic sequence of images – large views underscored with drawings and plans, fullpage images confronted with generously framed details. Vignelli’s books are big, simple, and direct.

Then along came Mask of Medusa, a tribute to poetics, which asserts the architect’s pleasure with ideas rather than the construction of monuments.

Wild used varied column widths and a range of typefaces to interpret a rich diversity of texts – poems, commentaries, interviews. Working before the Macintosh computer put the tools of typesetting into the hands of the graphic designer, Wild carefully customised her approach to each section of Hejduk’s work, creating a book of enormous subtlety.

The sea change signalled by Mask of Medusa expanded beyond the architectural monograph; Wild’s exhibition catalogues, designed for the

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Whitney Museum of American Art and other institutions, helped revise standard expectations of the museum publication as a neutral portfolio of essays and reproductions. The book, like the installation of works in a gallery, became recognised as an interpretative context. Other women designers working in the 1990s who helped rethink the art book included Bethany Johns, Laurie Haycock Makela, Rebeca Méndez, Susan Silton, and Susan Sellars.

Magazine publishing is another field where women have found opportunities to thrive. While names such as Grace Mirabella (Mirabella), Tina Brown (Vanity Fair and the New Yorker), and Anna Wintour (Vogue) have figured high on the mastheads of great magazines, women’s roles as art directors and designers have been far less prominent. An exception is Cipe Pineles, whose brilliant achievements beginning in the late 1930s recently were documented in a critical biography by Martha Scotford Lange. Pineles, a Polish immigrant who came of age in Brooklyn, began working in 1932 as assistant to M. F. Agha, art director of Vogue and Vanity Fair. Agha, testing ideas from European modernism within the heady world of New York publishing, was forging new attitudes towards photography and layout. He conducted many of his experiments with Pineles at his side but gave her considerable independence, and she designed numerous significant projects on her own. For a Vogue cover proposed in 1939, Pineles drew the magazine’s name with jewellery and pushed the model off the edge of the page.

In 1942 Pineles became art director of Glamour, a Conde Nast publication directed at younger women. The looser and more popular style Pineles crafted there was linked to modernist principles of structure and abstraction while making playful use of images and type.

Her open-hearted brand of modernism continued to evolve in her work as art director of Seventeen (1947-50), Charm (195059), and Mademoiselle

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(1959-61). She paid keen consideration to the physical setting of fashion shoots and their two-dimensional impact, using typography to echo and emphasise images. Approaching the magazine as an environment with its own scale, as well as a window onto other worlds, Pineles often staged three-dimensional objects on the page, allowing samples of reality to converse with printed texts.

Although few women achieved the status of magazine art director in the 1940s and 1950s, some filled other executive positions. Estelle Ellis, a colleague and collaborator of Pineles, became promotion director of Charm, the ‘magazine for women who work’, in 1944. She had also worked with Pineles on the marketing of Seventeen. In 1951 Ellis commissioned one of the first market surveys of working women, charting women’s spending on shoes, stockings, cosmetics, and other high-status items worn in the office.

Ellis worked with women designers on some of her advertising campaigns, including Helen Federico, who used modernist collages and photograms to depict the material world of the working woman.

In more recent decades, several women have served as chief designers for major magazines. Bea Feitler was art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Ms., and Rolling Stone during the 1960s and 70s. Rhonda Rubinstein has worked since the late 1980s as art director of Esquire, Mother Jones, and other publications. New York’s downtown-style magazine Paper was given its signature identity – irreverent photography and pop – retro typography – by art director Bridget de Socio during the 1990s.

Perhaps the most influential magazine of the 1990s, conceived and executed by women, has been Martha Stewart Living, which has had a considerable impact not only on publishing but on electronic media, the mail-order catalogue business, and mass-market merchandising. Launched in 1991, Martha Stewart Living revolutionised the genre of the home style

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magazine. Any subsequent publication dealing with cooking, gardening, or decorating, as well as any upscale catalogue devoted to home furnishings, has been forced to confront the Martha Stewart Living ethos, with its use of soft, organic colours, crisp, overlapping typography, and atmospheric photographs that seek to capture the effects of natural light, often by combining soft and sharp focus within a single shot.

The magazine’s distinctive look was created by Gael Towey, who now, as creative director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, oversees the design of all the company’s products, publications, and programs. With a circulation over 2.1 million, the magazine presents a mix of articles – at once educational and sensual – that combine detailed, original research with a romantic sensibility that provokes pleasure and longing. An article about cheese juxtaposes a photograph of a lamb against a tower of handmade cheeses, staggering in its variety and scope.

The magazine’s editorial content fuels the company’s product development. The Martha Stewart brands of paint, for example, originated in an article about decorating with colour, inspired by the eggs from Stewart’s own flock of Auracana chickens. An exclusive line of paints was put into production, and later, a less expensive grade was developed for sale nation-wide in Kmart stores.

Thus a magazine, created by one of America’s most famous women, working with a largely female staff, transformed the everyday domestic environment and the way we use and imagine it.

Political and public realms A book or magazine is an inward volume of pages reflecting out on the world of events and ideas.

Designers use words and images to directly engage the physical environment as well. There is a long tradition in the United States of posters promoting social and political causes or cultural events. Graphic design also marks the landscape

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with wayfinding systems, commercial signs, and institutional identities, annotating public space with logos, icons, and directional cues.

Suffrage was the central issue for feminism in the early twentieth century. As art historian Paula Harper has pointed out, the suffrage posters of the 1910s (as opposed to cartoons and other graphic work) tended to be conservative in their rhetoric and visual style. While such works dated among the earliest uses in this century of the political picture poster – anticipating the medium’s widespread deployment during World War I – the strategies chosen by the posters’ publishers and designers aimed not so much to agitate as to reassure. While many nineteenth-century feminists had taken a revolutionary stance against society’s norms and institutions, the suffragists of the 1910s did so by suggesting that women’s vote would strengthen rather than destroy the existing culture.

Bertha M. Boye’s 1913 poster ‘Votes for Women’ is symmetrical in design, reinforcing the sense of serene stability emanating from the statue-like figure at its center; the orb rising behind her head is both sun and halo, suggesting unambiguous warmth and virtue. The poster’s slogan appears not as an argument or battle cry, but as an unassailable truth, an ‘inalienable right’ whose time had come.

In contrast to the 1910s, the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s viewed itself as a counterculture phenomenon, appearing within the context of the battle for Civil Rights, the protest against the war in Vietnam, the international student upheavals of 1968, and the sexual revolution. Feminism’s ‘second wave’ unfolded within – and sometimes against – the anti-Establishment freedoms promoted by these movements. Posters, buttons, and bumper stickers, carrying such slogans as ‘Women’s Liberation IS the Revolution’ and ‘Women Are Not Chicks’ suggest that feminism was its own battle within the broader

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counterculture.

The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, conceived as a studio and exhibition space for women’s art and design, was founded in 1973 by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Judy Chicago, and Arlene Raven.

Printing equipment – from offset lithography to letterpress – was made available as a resource for personal and political expression. De Bretteville’s 1974 poster ‘Women in Design: The Next Decade’ promoted one of the many public events organised there. Marching across a gridded landscape are eye screws fitted with bolts – translations into hardware of the female symbol that had become the movement’s icon.

De Bretteville, who worked as a successful commercial designer in the 1980s (redesigning, for example, the Los Angeles Times), as well as an educator and public artist through the 1990s, continued to assert her identity as a feminist. Few women designers have willingly used the ‘f-word,’ fearful, perhaps, of alienating their colleagues or of casting doubt on the legitimacy of their own success. De Bretteville articulated a set of design strategies in the early 1980s that reflected feminist principles, such as the attempt to represent a subject from multiple perspectives, to allow words and images to contradict each other, or to allow viewers to complete the meaning of a communication. Such strategies coincided with the theories of experimental typography and postmodernism that were emerging around the same time.

Marlene McCarty is part of a younger generation that has used graphic design as a tool of social agitation. She was part of the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where she helped keep women’s issues on the AIDS agenda. McCarty also was an active member of WAC, the Women’s Action Coalition, founded in 1992. Together with designer Bethany Johns, she created posters and media-savvy demonstrations on current issues.

McCarty founded the New

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York design studio Bureau with Gran Fury colleague Donald Moffett in 1989. During the 1990s, the firm pursued commercial work for clients such as Clinique and Elektra Records, as well as creating graphics for various political organisations.

Their large-scale poster ‘You and Your Kind Are Not Wanted Here,’ promoting gay civil rights, was sniped in the streets of New York in 1994.

It features birds chirping around an strangely cheerful sunburst, surrounded by an explosion of pop letterforms recalling mainstream consumer packaging.

In addition to punctuating the landscape through guerilla postings and political announcements, designers create signage that explains and identifies public spaces. Over the past several decades, information systems increasingly have pervaded the built landscape.

A leader in this evolution has been Deborah Sussman, who founded the firm Sussman/Prejza with Paul Prejza in 1980. The firm has created urban signage programs for numerous cities in California, as well as environmentally based identities for corporations such as Hasbro and Apple Computer.

One of Sussman/Prejza’s most famous projects was the environmental design program for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The signs and related kiosks and pavilions needed to guide an enormous international audience through a complex space, while visually celebrating the games and the surrounding city. Sussman’s system of bright colours, striped columns, and large-scale graphics was both functional and popularly accessible. Sussman/Prejza also created signage for Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where the languages of public information and commercial iconography joyfully mingle, as Mickey Mouse peers over the top of a standard-issue highway sign.

Paula Scher also creates institutional identities that merge with the built environment.

In 1991 Scher became

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the sole woman among over a dozen partners in the international design firm Pentagram, making her what she has called ‘the only girl on the football team.’ That doesn’t make her a cheerleader or a trophy date, but an equal player in a pack of heavyweights. Pentagram brought Scher a level of visibility and cultural clout virtually unattainable to a woman working on her own, while in turn, her fresh, energetic approach earned new recognition for Pentagram, a venerable company whose reputation had begun to level off.

Scher’s work for clients ranging from museums to global corporations has grown increasingly environmental, encompassing banners, building signs, and urban advertising campaigns. In 1994 she conceived a total design program for the New York Public Theater that ranges from billboards, street signs, and lobby interiors to logos, tickets, and stationery. Scher used a rhythmic mix of sans serif letterforms, drawn from the American printer’s vernacular, to construct a visual vocabulary that is both diverse and coherent – like the theater’s programming. Many of her posters combine evocative images with dramatic typography to reflect the spirit of the production, rather than showcasing individual stars. Although print is Scher’s native medium, the impact of her work, like that of Deborah Sussman, Sheila de Bretteville, and Marlene McCarty, is felt most powerfully on the street.

Designing the institutions of design During the last quarter of the twentieth century, women played a central role in building the discourse of graphic design. During this period the profession came of age both as a recognised business and as a field of study in university art and design programs, including at the graduate level. Women were no minority among the educators, critics, editors, and curators who defined the theoretical issues of the time. Schools and museums provided accessi-

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ble platforms from which women could influence the direction of graphic design.

Many of the women already discussed in this essay as key practitioners also were influential educators, including Cipe Pineles, who taught during the 1960s at Parsons School of Design; Lorraine Wild, a professor at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California; and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, who in 1990 became director of the graphic design program at Yale University School of Art. De Bretteville’s appointment at Yale signalled changes and rifts within the design world. Since the late 1950s, the Yale program had been entrenched in high modernist theory, associated in particular with the work and philosophy of Paul Rand, a legendary corporate designer and stalwart defender of modernist ideals of direct communication and simple form.

De Bretteville arrived at Yale advocating a more socially oriented, critical approach to design that would address the needs of multiple audiences.

Rand resigned after de Bretteville’s appointment and convinced other key faculty to do so as well. In an angry manifesto published in the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, Rand railed against the violation of modernism by screaming hordes of historicists, deconstructivists, and activists. Behind each of these challenges to modernism stood a powerful woman: behind historicism was Paula Scher, behind deconstructivism was Katherine McCoy, and behind activism was Sheila Levrant de Bretteville.

Katherine McCoy, co-director of the design program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, from 1971 to 1995, promoted ideas of postmodernism and critical theory in relation to typographic practice. She developed pedagogical exercises that converted modernist grids and letterforms into vehicles of personal expression, grounded in vernacular, rather than universal, forms. She and her students developed

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a model of ‘typography as discourse,’ drawing on post-structuralist literary theory, that posited the reader as an active participant in the communications process. Designers at Cranbrook employed layers of texts and images to create complex, deliberately challenging compositions.

McCoy’s 1980 poster ‘Architecture Symbol and Interpretation,’ created with Daniel Libeskind, shows how the theory of postmodernism that was gripping the architectural community was finding its own life in the field of graphic design. Neoclassical forms are deployed in an unsettlingly Surrealist manner and are titled with letters that are modernist in their individual form yet wilfully disconnected in their spacing.

Many of McCoy’s Cranbrook students became prominent teachers and practitioners. Lucille Tenazas, working in New York and then San Francisco, was a student at Cranbrook in the early 1980s. Her 1986 brochure for Springhill engaged neoclassical geometry, photographic imagery, and flat, decorative patterns. Nancy Skolos is a Boston-based designer whose 1987 poster ‘Fonts,’ produced with photographer Thomas Weddell, plays elaborate games with space, pattern, and dimensionality. Laurie Haycock Makela and P. Scott Makela created the poster ‘Sex Goddess’ as a student project in 1989, revealing the turn towards more harsh, direct imagery that took place at Cranbrook at the end of the 1980s. The Makelas succeeded Katherine McCoy as co-directors of the school’s two-dimensional design program in 1997. Since Scott Makela’s death in 1999, Laurie Haycock Makela has filled the post on her own.

Rebeca Mendez is another designer who built a remarkable career while working within an institutional setting. Born and raised in Mexico City, she studied design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. While serving as the school’s design director from 1991 to 1996, she created numerous publi-

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cations and posters for the school and other institutions. Mendez combines typography and photographs in delicate, permeable layers, exploiting the possibilities of digital production in ways that engage the physicality of surfaces.

In addition to their roles in schools, women occupied positions of great influence in museums during the late twentieth century. Mildred Friedman, as design director at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1970 through 1991, set an international standard for exhibitions and publications on design. In 1989 she curated the first largescale museum survey of graphic design in the U.S., an exhibition that greatly expanded public knowledge of graphic design. Among the legions of other women who have promoted design awareness through their museum work and publishing during the 1980s and 1990s were Karrie Jacobs, Dianne Pilgrim, Chee Pearlman, and several of the women contributing to this volume. Such critics and curators laboured hard to raise the level of public discourse about design.

Design for screens While the printed word provides an apt opening for discussing design in the twentieth century, the screen suggests a view to the future. Designers have produced graphics for film and television since the inception of these media, and new genres have continued to emerge with the explosion of interactive and networked technologies.

One of the great pioneers of film title design was Saul Bass, who, beginning in the 1960s increasingly collaborated with his wife, Elaine Bass, on film design. In the 1990s they jointly created several stunning film titles. Their opening titles for Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) and Casino (1995) were conceived as films-within-a-film, narrative sequences that set the tone for the drama to follow, in a language that is at once set apart from the main film and compatible with it. In Casino the spinning wheels and flash-

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ing lights of Las Vegas mix with a surreal image of a body thrown from a burning car and drifting through space. Younger designers for film include Karin Fong, an art director at Imaginary Forces in Hollywood, whose witty titles for Dead Man on Campus (1998) consist of a meandering pan across a page of primer-style instructions for committing suicide. Emily Oberman and Bonnie Siegler, co-founders of Number 17, a New York studio, have created numerous graphics for television, as has the Los Angeles designer Margo Chase.

A pioneer of design for digital media was Muriel Cooper, who founded the Visible Language Workshop, part of MIT’s Media Lab, in 1975. Cooper worked with her students to create an electronic language for building ‘typographic landscapes‘ – complex, malleable documents in real time and three-dimensional space. Cooper gave concrete functions to such principles as layered information, simultaneous texts, and typographic texture. April Greiman’s film Inventing Flight carries forward some of Cooper’s ideas about text as three-dimensional form.

Many women are excelling today in the fields of user-interface design and electronic media, including Red Burns, head of New York University’s Interactive Technology Program; Jessica Helfand, critic and designer of interactive media; and Loretta Staples, head of U dot I, specialising in the design of graphical user interfaces (GUI). Perhaps ‘interface’ is an electronic counterpart for realms of culture that traditionally have been feminized. Office tasks known as ‘women’s work’ often involve mediating technologies.

From answering phones, transferring calls, and taking messages to typing letters and making copies, female office workers historically have formed a human link between managers and machines; women have served as bodily extensions for communications equipment.

The contemporary ideal of the ‘user-friendly’ electronic environment reflects the continued desire to humanise technology.

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