CREATION OF A FEMINIST GRAPHIC DESIGN MAGAZINE

MARCH ISSUE.001

#womencandesign

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THIS ISSUE

Design has been governed by men, where they have been the main protagonists of the industry, leaving aside women, but it is true that women have made great contributions in the world of design and have not obtained the recognition they deserve, that is why, from organizations and education, we must encourage the promotion and gender equality in the world of design, specifically in graphic design. we must enhance female representation. This issue of DESIGN(H)ERS magazine has been created with the purpose of giving visibility and importance to women in graphic design. It presents different women who have been important throughout history and who have been fundamental in the industry, but who at the time did not obtain recognition and it is fair to expose their biography and their works to vindicate the gender inequalities that exist in the graphic design industry. In this issue, you will find biographies and works of well-known, and some not so well-known, female graphic designers, accompanied by their works and some interviews, as well as presenting some movements and projects that support women in the creative world.

giving visibility and importance to women in graphic design.

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CIPE PINELES APRIL GREIMAN BARBARA KRUGER PAULA SCHER THE GUERRILLA GIRLS JESSICA WALSH LADIES, WINE & DESIGN NIEGE BORGES INTERVIEW

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Paula Scher / Jessica Walsh / Sylvia Harris / Susan Kare / Louise Fili / Jane Doggett / Irma Boom / Jessica Hische / Carolyn Davidson / Marian Bantjes / Gali Anderson / Debbie Millman / Muriel Copper / Lotta Nieminem / Ellen Lupton / Fanette Mellier / Cipe Pineles / April Greiman / Anaïs Bour / Zuzana Licko / Briar Levit / Astrid Stavro / Jacqueline Casey / Emily Oberman / Bonnie Siegler / Carin Goldberg / Elisabeth Hase / Godela Habel / Ruth Ansel / Eszter Haraszty / Rosalind Dallas / Jessica Helfand / Julia Hasting / Janene Higgins / Ruhi Hamid / Sheila Levrant de Bretteville / Faride Mereb / Deborah Sussman / Margo Chase / Ann Willoughby / Lora Lamm / Sara De Bondt / Anna Berkenbusch / Veronika Burian / Alicia Rainaud / Laura Messeguer / Betty Willis / Hilda Dallas / Pati Núñez / Chiara Aliotta / Leta Sobierajski / Lupi Asensio / Luba Lukova / Ena Cardenal de la Nuez / Jing Zhang / Sarah Boris / Kelli Anderson / Nina Geometrieva / Marion Bataille / Chelsea Cardinal / Natasha Jen / Tina Roth Eisenberg / Indrè Klimaitè / Jiani Lu / Raewyn Brandon / Verena Michelitsch / Teresa Sdralevich / Tracy Ma / Anna Kuts / Becca Clason / Alex Proba / Veronica Fuerte / Monika Lang / Katarina Medić / Shanti Sparrow / Kellyn Walker / Stinne Wilhelmsen / María Pradera and Lorena Sayavera / Marta Gawin / Laura Pol / Marta Veludo / Vicki Turner / Niege Borges / Naomi Otsu / Samya Arif / Nubia Navarro / Valerie Nelson / Daniela Castiblanco / Gabriella Tato...

A playlist made to empower yourself while enjoying this magazine.

Cipe Pineles was born in Austria in 1908. She is known for being a pioneer of American graphic design between 1930 and 1960. She began her fine art career in 1926 at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In the 1930s she began working with Mehemed Fehmy Agha, chief art director of Condé Nast publications such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. Pineles used figurative typography in the double-page spreads of editorial and fashion sections, where objects replace letters, to create visual games. She was fond of food painting, and applied it in her editorial work, as in the case of a double-page painting with illustrations of potatoes that she created for Seventeen magazine, for which she won an Art Directors' Club award in 1948.

In 1942, Pineles became the artistic director of Glamour magazine, the first woman to hold this position. For her, women's magazines were not simply a catalogue, but rather a means of showing the new role of women, where they could develop their ideas freely. She then worked for three years for Seventeen magazine, where she produced content that respected teenage girls and saw them as young women, not silly girls.

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CIPE PINELES

In the 1950s, she went on to work on the publication of Charm magazine, which was subtitled "the magazine for working women". the magazine recognised that women had two jobs: one in the workplace and one in the home. pineles described charm as the first feminist magazine. She later worked as an art director for Mademoiselle and went on to teach editorial design at the Parsons School of Art and Design until 1980.

Pineles broke down several gender barriers in the publishing world and developed her work with the goal of producing smarter magazines for young American women.

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"Design must seduce, shape, and perhaps more importantly, evoke an emotional response"

APRIL

April Greiman is a graphic designer born in the United States in 1948. In 1970, Greiman studied at art school in Basel, where she coincided with such influential figures as Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart. She is known for devising the new wave style, an approach to design that is strongly associated with 1980s California and totally at odds with the Swiss style. It is a style influenced by punk and postmodernism, characterized by a departure from the norm, without typography, photography and graphic elements following a hierarchy. In the late 1970s, she began her studies at the Kansas City Art Institute. She is also known for being a pioneer of digital design, being one of the first to use a Macintosh as a tool for her designs, mixing the analogue with the digital.

Greiman published one of her works for the magazine Design Quarterly, the work called "Does it make sense?" It was an image of the naked body of the author herself in poster format, made up of different images and text, which was considered unorthodox, moving away from the traditional, but managed to get designers in the industry to recognise the possibilities that digital design could offer. To date, she has won numerous awards such as the AIGA Medal or 4 Honoris Causa.

GREIMAN 9

“I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become”

BARBARA KRUGER

Barbara Kruger is a conceptual artist born in 1945 in New Jersey. She studied at Syracuse University, School of Visual Arts and continued her studies in art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson's School of Design in New York. In 1966, when she had not yet finished her studies, she started in the publishing world, at Conde Nast, for Madeimoselle magazine, which within a year she was head of design. She later taught at the California Institute of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley.

She has a very distinctive style, based on black and white images with a slogan in red, black or white, making use of Futura Bold Oblique and Helvetica Extra Bold typefaces. Much of his designs provoke a focus on feminism, consumerism and individual desire.

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One of his most iconic works is Your body is a battleground, which clearly expresses his concern for social issues. It was originally conceived as a poster to promote the 1989 women's march. This protest called for legal abortion and the right of women to decide about their own bodies.

The work is a black and white photograph accompanied by a colour text with the artist's classic typography and the slogan "your body is a battleground" addressed to women's bodies. It refers to the body as a place that the enemy intends to conquer (a battleground) and the artist defends the right of women over their own bodies, dividing the woman in the image into two halves, one in positive and the other in negative, where Kruger comes to say: either you are with us or against us.

PAULA

Paula Scher was born in 1948 in Virginia and studied at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She soon began her work in the world of advertising and design at CBS Records where she was hired in the advertising and promotions department. She later decided to move to the competitor, Atlantic Records, where she became Art Director and began designing album covers for artists such as the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan among many others.

“It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds” In her years at CBS Records, Paula Scher moved between pop culture and fine art; giving her designs an eclectic approach that became highly influential. She developed a typographic solution based on Art Deco and Russian Constructivism, incorporating obsolete typefaces into her work. In 1984 he founded the advertising company "Koppel & Scher" together with Terry Koppel, where he worked for 7 years. In 1991, Scher started working at the prestigious advertising agency Pentagram. Her approach to typography became highly influential and she has been a partner of the brand ever since.

SCHER

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“It's through mistakes that you actually can grow.

You have to get bad in order to get good”

In the mid-1990s she created the visual identity for The Public Theater.

Scher created a graphic language combining street typography and graffiti. This raised public awareness and brought more audiences to the stage.

And for this, he was awarded the prestigious Beacon Award in 1996. His graphic identity for Citibank and Tiffany & Co, became a case study for the contemporary reinvention of American brands. Scher has worked with many clients, having done branding and identity design work for The New York Times Magazine, MoMA, Microsoft and New York Botanical Garden, among others.

In 1992, she became a professor of design at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. Her teaching career led her to work at Cooper Union and Tyler School of Art. She has received over 300 awards from international design associations. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and represented in permanent collections such as MOMA, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She is currently a member of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts). She has been awarded the Chrysler Design Award and the Type Managers Club Medal. She has been a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) since 1993 and its president since 2009.

Paula Scher has been a member of the board of directors of Public Theatre.

In 2006, she was appointed to the New York City Arts Commission. Finally, she is the author of Make It Bigger (2002) and MAPS (2011) and has been featured in Abstract: The Art of Design, a Netflix documentary series on leading figures in design and architecture.

one of the most influential graphic designers in the world

ARE THERE MORE NAKED WOMEN THAN WOMEN ARTISTS IN MUSEUMS?

This poster with the phrase "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" was one of the most emblematic pieces created by the Guerrilla Girls. It was made in 1989, and it is composed by a naked woman with the gorilla mask worn by the activists, it is inspired by the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique, La Grande Odalisque (1814). The image of the woman is represented on a yellow background of 27,9cm x 71,1cm and is accompanied by the text: "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female".

THE GUERRILLA GIRLS The poster was originally designed for a billboard commissioned by the Public Art Fund in New York, but was rejected. In response, the Guerrilla Girls rented advertising space on New York City public buses until the company cancelled the lease on the grounds that the image was too inciting. Today, the Guerrilla Girls have had their posters included in the permanent collections of many modern art museums.

The Guerrilla Girls is a feminist group founded in 1985 in New York that aims to promote the work of artists whose work has not yet been recognised. The group operates anonymously under a King Kong-inspired gorilla mask. They denounce the sexism and racism of art institutions through publicity strategies and street protests. They criticise the dissemination of art, discrimination of minorities, corruption in cultural institutions by filling the streets and museums with posters, flyers and stickers. Their style of work is to show the public the discrimination that artists have to endure and to blame the organisations directly. The sarcastic messages and provocative and ambiguous comments about their hidden identity helped to draw public attention and interest in the group.

The collective was motivated by the 1985 exhibition at MOMA in New York.

There were 169 contemporary artists on display, only 13 of whom were women. In response to this, the Guerrilla Girls demonstrated at the gates of the museum, making their first appearance. In their public interventions they used the names of deceased artists such as Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse or Lee Krasner as pseudonyms, thus claiming their achievements.

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THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A WOMAN ARTIST: Working without the pressure of success.

Not having to be in shows with men.

Having an escape from the art world in your 4 free-lance jobs.

Knowing your career might pick up after yourʼre eighty.

Being reassured that whatever kind of art you make it will be labeled feminine.

Not being stuck in a tenured teaching position.

Seeing your ideas live on in the work of others.

Having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood.

Not having to choke on those big cigars or paint in Italian suits.

Having more time to work when your mate dumps you for someone younger.

Being included in revised versions of art history.

Not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius.

Getting your picture in the art magazines wearing a gorilla suit.

JESSICA WALSH

The designer Jessica Walsh was born in New York in 1986. At the age of 11 she started in the world of design with web programming and later began studying graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design. At the end of her studies she moved to New York to do her internship at Pentagram with Paula Scher. She later worked as an art director at Print magazine. She has designed and illustrated projects for books, magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine. Jessica's style is characterized by combining craft, photography and painting with digital design. Her style has been described as "bold, emotional, transgressive and provocative" with some surreal elements. Her creations are thought-provoking, politically charged and feminist, Walsh promotes social awareness and gender equality. She mainly focuses on branding, typography, website design and installation art. In 2010, she met designer Stefan Sagmeister, who, impressed by her portfolio, invited her to work with him, and two years after 9 years working together, she became a partner at Walsh & Sagmeister. Her clients include brands such as Kia, The New York Times, Levi's and Adobe among others. Due to her talent she has won numerous awards including Type Director's Club, Art Director's Club, SPD, Print, New York Festivals, D&AD, TDC Tokyo, and the Graphis award among many others, and has been included in the Forbes 30 under 30 list. In July 2019, she formed her own creative agency in New York, under the name & Walsh.

She currently lectures at various universities and teaches design and typography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Among her most outstanding projects is "40 Days of Dating", with which she collaborates with the designer Timothy Goodman. It is a social experiment in blog format, in which they documented their relationship for 40 days, to reflect on relationship problems and how to overcome them. The blog was so successful that Warner Bros bought the film rights, as did Abrams Publishing for a book. Years later, they embarked together on a new project called "12 kinds of kindness" based on an experiment consisting of 12 tasks that show the kindness of different subjects and people's reaction to these gestures, with the aim of opening people's eyes, minds and hearts.

Finally, one of Walsh's most successful and innovative proposals is the Ladies, Wine and Design project, an initiative that encourages creative women to support each other and work together.

“DO THE WORK THAT FEEDS YOUR SOUL, NOT YOUR EGO”

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LADIES, WINE & DESIGN

Ladies, wine and design is a global non-profit initiative, a project that supports female creativity. This initiative arose to provide a solution to the situation of women in the world of work, as only 10% of creative management positions are held by women. That is why Jessica Walsh, the founder of this project, created in 2015 a programme of meetings of creative women to exchange experiences about design, life and the business world. In addition, it was created as a result of the discredit she had received for her achievements in the industry, much of this criticism coming from other women, and she decided to set up a programme that would promote support among creative women and help them to leave aside competitiveness to turn them into partners to help and support each other, with the slogan "Empowering creative women around the world". It now has more than 180 cities, each with its own organization and coordinates its own events. It offers monthly meetings where creative women, whether they are students or professionals, meet to enjoy wine and talk about aspects such as creativity, design and the working industry, as well as talks, workshops, exhibitions and conferences.

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@carlota_guerrero

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@niegeborges

NIEGE BORGES

Graphic Designer and Illustrator Niege Borges is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York and originally from the sometimes super cold sometimes super hot south of Brazil. She graduated in Graphic Design in Brazil and worked at Box 1824, a research bureau in trends, behavior and innovation. After that she started freelancing full-time, and since then she worked with clients such as Unilever, Kia Motors, Twitter, Christieʼs, GE, IBM, Visa, Shutterstock, Giorgio Armani, Seamless, BBH, Sagmeister & Walsh and Canon. Niege is known for her colorful and fun designs and also for her highly illustrated work. Even though she works with different illustration styles she has her own personal style, which is very vibrant, irreverent and modern.

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LADIES, WINE & DESIGN NIEGE BORGES

04.

Do you have any advice you’d give to other women who are aspiring creatives?

Surround yourself with people that believe in your potential as a creative person, practice a lot, always keep looking for new sources of inspiration and donʼt feel guilty if sometimes you just need to relax instead of making something.

05.

What are some goals and ambitions you have for your future work?

I would like to work on bigger illustration projects and expand my work to other fields. I was always interested in print design (as in for clothing) so maybe thatʼs something I will try at some point – I did it once for a brand but maybe I would like to try something more personal.

01.

We love & respect your work and what you’re doing in the industry. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today, and what you’re up to now?

I am a freelancer illustrator and graphic designer originally from Brazil and based in Brooklyn, New York.

Iʼve been a freelancer for most of my professional life, I started working at an advertising agency in Brazil that opened doors for other companies to hire me for freelance projects and eventually I started working on projects for international clients. I started my career focusing on graphic design but since I also had illustration skills most of my design projects would have illustrations and I started to get known for my illustration work. I worked for clients such as Instagram, Apple, Sephora, Dropbox and Refinery29.

02.

Did you have any women mentors or inspirations as you came up in the industry?

On my first job before I started freelancing I had a super cool boss, Desirée Marantes, she gave me freedom to work on a bunch of fun projects and to create freely, which definitely helped me to build an interesting portfolio. Lately Iʼve been working with Chelsea Ennis, she is great at project management and we worked on a lot of fun projects for big clients together. I am inspired by a lot of women in different fields, the first ones that come to mind right now are Kelli Andersonʼs graphic design work, Karen Mabonʼs prints, Dusen Dusen, and Jordan Casteelʼs paintings.

03.

What's the best piece of advice you were given in your life?

Probably that I shouldnʼt be too hard with myself and that itʼs best to have something finished than to never finish it trying to make it perfect.

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LADIES, WINE & DESIGN NIEGE BORGES

06.

Anything new these days?

you’re

working

on

Iʼve been doing some oil paintings, which I really like because itʼs a escape from working on a computer all day (even though I love making digital illustrations). During quarantine I made a few larger scale paintings and I had a lot of fun, so whenever I have free time Iʼve been working on that. Besides that, I am working on illustrations for a couple of clients but I canʼt talk about it yet.

07.

Do you have any tips or advice from your own creative process?

I learned that the creative process can be very difficult and thatʼs ok, struggle is part of the process.

I think that movies and social media sometimes make us think that everyone creates things very easily out of nowhere, but everyone goes through a process and everyone has baggage. Creating things can take a while and it can be hard sometimes, but itʼs all part of a learning process that will ultimately lead to good results and personal satisfaction.

08.

What are you reading these days?

I just finished In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and I definitely recommend it. Now I am listening to the audiobook of The Vegetarian (I think Iʼm a little late to the party on this one but enjoying it so far). I am also slowly reading a massive book about one of my favorite painters, Willem de Kooning.

09.

What do you think about work/life balance?

I have an office at home, so sometimes itʼs hard to know where work and life begins and ends, but I think itʼs extremely important to find a balance between both and I think I am usually good at that.

When I have a lot of projects going on it can be a little difficult, but I learned through the years to organize my work flow and schedule. Living in New York definitely helps since thereʼs a lot of stuff to do, I am a huge theater fan so I have a lot of options to take myself out of the house. I also have a few freelancer friends, so itʼs good to exchange experiences and ideas and have some time off together, go to galleries and museums or just have coffee.

10.

What keeps you motivated, and what helps you unwind?

I am motivated every time I see amazing art, going to galleries and museums just makes me want to create more stuff. I also get motivated when I finish a project (commissioned or personal) that I am proud of. I love to travel, which helps me to unwind and is also very inspirational (obviously not possible right now, unfortunately). I was exercising way more before the pandemic and that used to help me but now I mostly do yoga at home and that has been good, especially after spending so much time seated. I also love going for walks by myself in the city, I always see something that is inspiring or makes me happy.

WOMEN WOMEN WOMEN WOMEN

MARCH ISSUE.001

A MAGAZINE FOR EMPOWERED WOMEN DESIGN(H)ERS