Feminism & Design

DESIGN & feminism

JOANA SILVA

→

Feminism & Design

EDITOR’S NOTE This editorial publication is about Feminism & Design.

It brings together several articles on the same content in order to archive this theme and highlight the role of women in Design, which is often hidden and does not have due relevance.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

6/13

Why Feminism is Important in Design ?

14/17

25 Hours Minimum Per Week

18/25

Interview With Paula Scher

26/41

Clearing the Haze: Prologue to Postmodern Graphic Design Education through Sheila de Bretteville

42/47

Design & Discrimination

48/61

Interview With April Greiman

Why Feminism is Important in Design

TEXT Kshipra Sharma 10.10.2016

?

For Medium

YOU CAN GIVE FEMINISM ANY OTHER NAME FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE, BUT THAT REALLY IS A REFUSAL TO ADDRESS THE ‘ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM’ AND CALLING IT A FOX, AS THE ELEPHANT FEELS TO LARGE TO ACCOMMODATE. WE NEED FEMINISTS IN DESIGN. AFTER ALL, THE THINGS WE SHAPE, IN TURN SHAPE US.

Before I sat down to write this article I thought of other subtler ways to put the title like “Why Design teams should be inclusive of Women”, but in today’s day and age, we shouldn’t even be justifying inclusiveness of women, that would mean I’m ‘dumbing down’ (notice how I’ve used a term which was stereotyped with women for the general masses).

But what still disappoints me is even after people like Obama, Trudeau, Andy Murray, Amitabh Bachhan etc. becoming an influential part of the movement, the common man and a lot of women (6 in 7) view feminism as some extremist movement taken up by man-haters and dismiss it as marketing trend.

That’s sad! What people think as a recent marketing trend is in fact the struggle women went through for centuries to gain a right to vote, right to education and a right to be considered as an individual identity rather than another asset of a man.

Before I start off on why feminism is important in design, let me briefly explain what does feminism mean.

Feminism simply means removing the stereotypical gender roles from the society and considering men and women individual equals on the same parameters. So this should be called equality right? But we call it feminism instead of equality because it is the ‘feminine’ traits that both men and women are shamed for. It is the feminine traits that the society needs to accept and look at people as a spectrum rather than just their

biological gender. This holds even more importance today than ever before as we move towards a more individualistic society where gender identity holds a lot of importance.

Design has often been discriminatory and caters mostly for the people in power. Sure that makes sense, because the people in power are our clients who will execute the product after the design has been finalized.

Before design started becoming an intrinsic part of the entire product development process, designers had a limited role which was doing what the brief asked them to do, and handing over the design for production.

The lack of participatory design practices have often overlooked women’s needs, wants and preferences and catered for products from the male point of view.

Feminism simply means removing the stereotypical gender roles from the society and considering men and women individual equals on the same parameters. So this should be called equality right?

9

The women section is usually limited to a small corner in a two storey sports retail store, says a lot of about the perception of women being interested in sports and outdoor activities.

Often women’s sports are dismissed, and aren’t taken seriously by our policy makers and even the media. The women who do want to enter sports are often considered masculine, which is unfair towards them. Moving away from competitive sports, the general perception is women are not outdoorsy as compared to men; outdoorsy women have to make do with men’s products because they are offered so little in their own range.

I had to come face to face with this reality recently when I recently moved to the campus and had to buy a cycle for commute. Among the best options to cycle in, you could choose a ‘stepthrough frame’ with thin profile tyers (popularly known as the ladies cycle) or a Y-frame/unisex bike/mountain bike with wider profile and thicker tyer threads. Ideally the Step-through frame is faster for flat terrain, and the mountain bikes faster in hilly terrains. but bicycle companies only offer ‘Miss India’ and ‘Ladybirds’ in a generic female pallete of various shades in pink/mauve.

Similarly if you went to look out for a mountain bike in pink, you’d find none. See how a colour is associated with a bias, that if you wear flowy clothes (which often girls outfits do) you must love pink, and if you love pink you must not be the girl who likes to cycle on difficult terrains.

11

Similarly with automobile industry, cars are primarily designed and sold as men’s product which ‘coincidentally women tend to drive’.

Over the ages the gap is slowly fading, but the stereotype still remains that ‘women can’t drive’. The advent of adjustable seating and power steering has made commuting a lot easier, but a low car seating with lesser visibility of the road often rules out many cars for women. And if god-forbid the car does breakdown in the middle of your solo trip with a flat tyre, you know how difficult it is for someone with a weight of 50-60kgs to unscrew those bolts from the tyre. At any car show, a female size zero model will unfold the latest car, ever seen a muscular male model do the thing? But hey, the automobile industry is dominated by men, and the only place where most women are seen is the color and trim department.

When we’re in school, we see a good number of girls graduating , however as we go higher up to where the research is conducted, and ideas turn into reality and where the business happens, we start seeing the lesser number of females in the picture.

There are a number of reasons for this: the hardhat culture, the lack of opportunities, women considered as bad employees etc. but as a result, when designing happens,the products become more male-centric.

Good HCI practices asks technology to rehabilitate all types of cognition, and kinds of user. More often than not while considering user personas for uni-sexual products, women tend to be under-represented as compared

to men by the use of maybe a single persona to represent the needs of all types of women. Also their goals seem to be more superficial and aesthetic oriented than men.

A reason why our mothers have a harder time with technology than our fathers, is that technology was not wired keeping their cognition in mind. It was ‘assumed’ that women weren’t as interested as men in tech.

The practice of good HCI has shifted these patterns and slowly we are bridging these gaps.The presence of only female voices as Voice Assistants except when the role needs to dominate (eg: IBM Ross, IBM Watson) is a shocking realization on how deepseeded our patriarchy really is.

I would particularly like to cite that we are in a unique point in time, women definitely enjoying the best time in their own history. Design can help reduce this gap at an even more faster pace, as it can help overcompensate where nature cannot.

It can identify particular instances where a design interventions can help moving away from pre-historic roles, and stereotypes and biological shortcomings. Game design is another place, which currently caters mostly towards entertaining men. The female characters are highly sexualized and hence finds very less takers among women. Cities can start becoming much safer once the urban planning policies look at women reclaiming the community spaces and the nights.

The higher presence of feminine qualities like nurturing, listening, caring in our culture could significantly reduce the stress,

depression, and other mental illnesses in our society. Teams which have good number of women are in general better performers.

The unique power of design to change cognition and rewire us to form new habits may one day eradicate the way we look at gender roles. Design has power to empower and make everyone feel like an intrinsic part of the society.

With sensitive design we can break stereotypes, and for that designers need to look beyond cognitive biases, political biases, gender biases, social biases and start a dialogue on why should we exclude a particular group from our target users, but rather provide them with the power to choose. Through the ages, the greatest role of design has been to make life better; designers need to identify political movements which question the supremacy and the privileges of one group over the other. Feminism is just one movement that is asking the questions of inclusiveness.

As we move towards a more global and diverse society, these questions expand to diverse gender groups,ethnic minorities, linguistic minorities, economically underprivileged, specially-abled and so on.

We really can’t gain equal footing as women in the society if we don’t get men standing by us.

You can give feminism any other name for your convenience, but that really is a refusal to address the ‘elephant in the room’ and calling it a fox, as the elephant feels to large to accommodate.

We need feminists in design. After all, the things we shape, in turn shape us.

13

25 Hours Minimum Per Week

TEXT Mรกrio Moura 27.06.2019 THE RESSABIATOR

Here comes an exhibition in Oporto at the Rampa space of which I am a part, dedicated to the Guerrilla Girls. I was asked if I didn’t want to do anything in parallel programming and I think I will take the opportunity to address a difficult topic that is women in the history of design.

Investigating history tends to be seen as an intellectual activity that is disconnected in practice. In my experience, it is something physical, which is done with the body, which bends our backs and spoils the view. You need your time, you need your resources. I have devoted myself more to history in part because I became a father. My wife has a job from nine to seven. The university leaves me time to work at home, so I have the duty to pick up and take my daughter to daycare, prepare her, give her dinner and go to bed when I’m alone. Even when I am in the nursery, if the night is going well, and I have help, I occupy a minimum of five hours a day. It is a minimum (never reached, always exceeded, merely indicative) of 25 hours on working days, much more at the weekend.

I no longer have the availability I had to go to exhibitions or conversations.

What I find easier to consume are the portable formats of the story: the book, the magazine, what I can watch or read on the computer. So, history became something close to what I did, to criticism, and that I can reconcile with being a father. I like to do it but I am aware of what allows me to do it compared to other formats that are now more difficult for me.

Commissioner exhibitions and it is much more difficult to reconcile with my duties as a father.

Of the monographs on designers published in Portugal, there is only one dedicated to a designer, Ana Salazar. With good will, we could include the catalog that was made about Maria Keil. The difficulty is perceived. I spent the last few months reading the history of Portuguese design and women barely appear. They are few and their tends to disappear. Many have worked in leading firms for which, in the end, what is left is a monograph on the man who ran it.

A friend told me about a certain institution where the director was a man but all middle managers were women. He told me that it was an egalitarian organization only at first sight. He thought that women fulfilled the function of being able to yell at them more easily. And, I never thought about it, but it’s true, yelling at women is a lot more common. I remember the story of an old student who was forced to work with an intractable guy who constantly screamed and abused her. She had the brilliant idea of ​​starting to take his father to work, and only then did things get better. It is the kind of constant pressure that a woman has to endure and is invisible to most men.

*Ana Salazar. 1990. photography of the Archive DN. One of the worst arguments that is being made to postpone the attempt to make a history of design in women is that this would be to make the genre a pre-selection of quality. It is a stupid argument because the way our society is organized already makes gender a selection criterion. My colleague’s take on the way you get lost is exemplary. I could also recall the classic quote by Paul Rand, who thought that design would only be taken seriously when it was less effeminate. In order for gender not to be a prerequisite for quality, measures would be needed that would really give opportunities to women.

So I am in favor of quotas, I am in favor of extended parental leave.

I am in favor of those design contests aimed at young people, who give two more years of age for each child.

17

It's Nice That 15.11.2017 INTERVIEW WITH PAULA SCHER Photography Caroline Tompkins Words by Lucy Bourton

PAULA IS AN ERUDITE DESIGNER, BUT THE INDUSTRY’S LOVE AND LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP WITH HER IS ALSO BECAUSE OF A ZEALOUS AND THOUGHTFUL PERSONALITY. PAULA SCHER IS THE GUEST AT A DINNER PARTY WHO SAYS WHAT SHE THINKS, THE THING YOU THINK TOO, BUT COULDN’T FIND THE WORDS. SHE PAINTS AND DESIGNS THOSE WORDS.

21

Each of these attributes make Paula the ideal choice as the ‘graphic designer’ in the eightpart Netflix documentary Abstract: The Art of Design, which aired earlier this year.

Paula watched the documentary the same way many of us interact with Netflix, tucked up in bed. “Seymour [Paula’s husband illustrator Seymour Chwast, who she met when she was 21] wasn’t there at first, but I put it on because I am very self-conscious of what I Iook like, so I had this moment of ‘my god, can I do this?’”

Her concern was quickly diminished however, due to the documentary’s blockbuster opening that sets you up for watching someone so powerfully cool. “It was the very beginning when I was walking through traffic and I heard my voiceover and thought I’m not going to be able to deal with this. All of a sudden these graphics come on and, holy shit, they looked so powerful to me.”

When speaking about the film with Paula she characteristically downplays the attention.

“Most of the time I spent with him [director Richard Press] was riding around in taxi cabs, walking in traffic, going up and down the steps of Pentagram a million times, and I really wanted to kill him!” she says.

“There was this thing, it was a summers day and I had to walk down sixth avenue on this really crowded street, and people kept walking in front of me, or he didn’t catch it right, and I had to go back and do it 100 times. We had to spend one whole day in traffic and he is making me sketch, all that shit. It looks totally natural in the movie, but you don’t realise how much of movie making is that.” But Richard’s dedication worked, “people who know me feel it’s very much me, and it was, I feel that too”.

This year also saw the designer’s work celebrated in Paula Scher: Works a monograph published by Unit Editions. The book presented an opportunity to tell an alternative story to Make It Bigger which revealed her thoughts on the design industry. This time, the book dives into her

portfolio from political posters to paintings.

“It was 15 years since my last book was published and I had accomplished what I think is quite a lot of significant work in that period,” says Paula. “I wanted to do it, I was thinking about doing it, I just didn’t want to write it.” The offer from Unit Editions “thrilled” the designer, and had helpful serendipitous timing. “I was shocked, totally gobsmacked, it was such an honour.”

Works takes you on a journey of the designer’s polished career. The night before our interview, I went to see Paula speak on her own and in conversation with one of the monograph’s editors, Adrian Shaughnessy.

In the first half, Paula teaches the audience ten life lessons in design. Her “hardest piece of advice,” is based on the career expectations we go through over each decade of our lives. “In your twenties you don’t know anything, what’s interesting is how much growth you have,” she says. “In your twenties you’re either kind of a peanut or a wonder kid. It’s not great to be a wonder kid, because you have no where to go but down. But mostly you’re starting out not knowing something, and then you begin to grow.”

When Paula was in her twenties, she was working at CBS records — a classic dream job of any designer, whatever age. “That was lucky, I didn’t even know I had a great job. I was just a kid! I had moved to New York and no one even knew what graphic design was, it was just the 70s.”

Paula’s move to New York has provided the biggest learning curve in her career. The city has offered both inspiration and endless briefs through her work for institutions such as New York City Ballet and The High Line, consequently in 2006 she was named the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. “The biggest donation I’ve ever made was to the city of New York because I redid their whole signage programme in the parks department, which is enormous and they’re still rolling that out. But that got me nothing as a designer, I did it because it was something I knew how to do, and I love New

York City! They have signs, they should have good signs, and I can do it.”

The design contributions Paula has made during her career is due to a personal, and often controversial, ethos that designers should do work for free. “Everybody always talks about that, it is actually common of designers from a previous generation. I mean this is a thing I know about, you invest yourself in personal projects for a variety of options.

It could be because it changes the way you work, it could be to experiment, it could be because you liked the cause, they’re all the reasons I’m talking about,” (...) “In the States, young designers have been kind of forced fed this thing of ‘all work has value, you should always be paid.’ As a result, they find themselves with the inability to change what they have made, because if they’re working for somebody else that’s all they do. They’re not figuring out that you can go outside that box by finding a cause, or volunteering services, or making a relationship… It’s becoming more and more rare and I find it really troubling. It means that it takes the profession and sort of turns it into a pure business, instead of a craft or a calling that you’re working to improve.”

Due to this ethos, Paula is respected as one of America’s greatest liberal designers. It is inevitable therefore that our conversation at some point turns to Trump. Within her team at Pentagram, Paula explains that a shift has already begun since the start of his presidency. A proudly global group of associates, “there are things that have changed that I have felt already,(...) “If Trump is talking about a good deal for American business, this isn’t.” But most of all it is the discussions the designer heard 40 years ago resurfacing that she finds worrying.

“The cause of feminism has not really — yes there are better numbers — but it’s really not where I thought it would be. I just can’t believe I am having the same conversations all these years later, I’m just totally horrified by it.”

The lack of female graphic designers is a constant discussion within the industry and during Abstract Paula recalls back to the

70s when all women were in organisational roles, agents or reps. “I would sit there and think ‘oh my god what are they gonna do with me, what am I gonna do with them.’”

Surprisingly, the designer still experiences sexism, saying during the film: “If I am sitting with a new client, I can see in the first glance that he’s wondering why he’s got this old lady.”

During our interview I explain my dismay that this still happens to a designer of such stature, the first female partner at Pentagram with the world’s biggest and exciting creative clients under her belt. “It doesn’t really happen if they know who I am, but a lot of times they don’t. They call up Pentagram because they’ve seen a piece of work or they want to know who did something or other, and something about the appearance seems shocking to them.”

“I’ve gone to meetings with my partner Michael Beirut and if he’s in the meeting, the eyes go to him. I see it and I feel it in the room. He’s also a mansplainer sometimes and I have to smack him, but really it’s horrible, I mean he knows it too, I have to yell at him about it — not in the meeting — we’re friends. But in most instances he will be awarded confidence, and I will have to earn mine. It’s the only way to describe it, it’s a free pass. Women do it too by the way, it’s not just men who are guilty, I have women clients who do the same thing.”

Still in the midst of a career including countless successes, and during a year where her work has been celebrated in book and film form, Paula says she remains excited about what she does. One particular project she is still proud of is her identity for New York’s beaches from Coney Island to Rockaway. “I was really proud of the beach project because they were disseminated and I wasn’t capable of doing a case study on it at that time. But it was a serious project that they had to accomplish really quickly, and it was successful. Also in the Rockaway’s, everyone knows who I am.”

Proving again Paula’s ability to be more

than the designer behind the desk, but the character conveyed in her work.

Even on the surface, Paula’s contribution to graphic design is nothing short of astonishing. Her work has informed pop culture through record sleeves, but it also visualises technology when Windows computers are turned on all over the world.

Her identity designs sit on the mastheads when prospective students receive letters from The New School or University of the Arts London. Her signs direct people when they’re trying to meet friends at the beach or the park, or when your hungry for instance Pentagram’s identity for Shake Shack, where this feature is shot. Her ideas give a voice to non-profit arts institutions that keep this industry thriving. Galleries such as MoMa, The Guggenheim, the Victoria and Albert museum, who represent the best of the art world, choose her to represent themselves. Her work for Planned Parenthood is immeasurable in what it has done for the organisation.

Of course there are other designers whose work may be more instantly recognisable, but Paula’s work is embedded in our everyday lives. Her work is ubiquitous and embodies the notion that design in its purest sense should be communicative.

Paula will also continue to do this, showing no signs of slowing down even though she is in her 60s. “Let’s take tools and see how far we can expand them,” she says when I ask what she would like to do next. “Let’s see if it still works.”

* Paula Scher: Rockaway Beach

25

*Sheila Levrant de Bretteville Women in Design: The Next Decade 1975

Clearing the Haze: Prologue to Postmodern Graphic Design Education through Sheila de Bretteville

PART OF SERIES Insights Design Lecture Series TEXT Izzy Berenson & Sarah Honeth 26.04.2016

AUTHOR’S PREFACE: At the outset, this project was defined as an intensive effort to examine and reassess the work of Shelia Levrant de Bretteville. The initial motivation was driven by the connection of the RISE OF FEMINIST VOICES IN DESIGN, the Woman’s Building, postmodern design, and experimental pedagogy. We recognize that many female designers worked in the 1970s and ’80s, however we saw that few had as large a contribution on contemporary graphic design today as Sheila Levrant de Bretteville.

*Picture of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

In the process of researching the historical contribution of de Bretteville, it became clear that while several publications exist that address the history of graphic design and female designers, an in-depth exploration on the topic has not been documented. There is tendency within design history to glaze over important accomplishments and accolades by women. If anything, we can say there has been false nostalgia as to the honest history of what happened. The commentary of these times is scattered in hard to access publications and with this, our research questions the cultural and academic recognition written in history books in current circulation.

¶

Acting as facilitators, instigators, and participators, this essay was conceived with a level of framing extended towards feminism, equality, women’s rights, challenging the status quo, and encouraging students to think proactively and experimentally.

It was our feeling that if we are going to talk about graphic design in our contemporary landscape, it is imperative to go beyond presuppositions and intellectual establishment and clear the haze of historical contribution. The impacts of these examinations interject important conversations into the creative and academic fields. De Bretteville’s teaching and practice changed the face of contemporary graphic design, and should be adequately acknowledged in history for her monumental work.

¶

Historical perspectives are important for the enrichment of the history of North American graphic design education. The history of graphic design in the contemporary construct is increasingly hard to unravel, let alone the history of the Design School at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, California.

Nevertheless, let’s consider this a unique moment in the history of graphic design: an interesting moment as a result of the people who had been involved in shaping, inspiring, and educating graphic designers at a high-level; yet also interesting as a result of the dissemination of the methodologies and philosophies that CalArts developed within it’s graphic design program, specifically of those developed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Clearing the Haze, is an attempt to contextualize the design education of the times rather than to explicate or theorize it. The context is of our own experience as graphic designers and former CalArts students, in a way linking our participation and passion to our own pedagogy.

¶

*Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Arts in Society: California Institute of the Arts: Prologue to a Community, 1970

Historical perspectives are important for the enrichment of the history of North American graphic design education. The history of graphic design in the contemporary construct is increasingly hard to unravel, let alone the history of the Design School at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, California.

Nevertheless, let’s consider this a unique moment in the history of graphic design: an interesting moment as a result of the people who had been involved in shaping, inspiring, and educating graphic designers at a high-level; yet also interesting as a result of the dissemination of the methodologies and philosophies that CalArts developed within it’s graphic design program, specifically of those developed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Clearing the Haze, is an attempt to contextualize the design education of the times rather than to explicate or theorize it. The context is of our own experience as graphic designers and former CalArts students, in a way linking our participation and passion to our own pedagogy.

In the fall of 1969, Sheila returned to New York after working in Italy in a design studio at Olivetti.

She took a desk in an office shared by Robert Mangurian and Craig Hodgetts. Shortly after Craig was tapped to become Associate Dean of the School of Design at CalArts, Sheila was asked to come and work on preparing branding materials (letterhead, posters, etc.) to attract students for each school at the newly established CalArts. A special issue of a journal fell into her lap, making her editor as well as designer of the issue titled, Arts in Society: California Institute of the Arts: prologue to a community1 which came out in June 1970. The School of Design was seeking students for whom “ecology, technology, and human needs trumped taste and style”2 as the basis of meaningful work. At the request of Richard Farson, Dean of the School of Design at CalArts, Sheila joined the Design faculty as CalArts began its first academic year at an interim campus at Villa Cabrini in Burbank in 1970.

¶

Having no previous teaching experience, Sheila drew from past assignments3 from her studies at Yale4 and from a former high school5 design faculty’s text,6 which included a chapter on design education, to create the curriculum.

Additionally, Sheila reviewed the way in which she had been taught, in the light of her experience to the events occurring around her at while attending Yale—the civil right movements in the States, the protests of our war in Vietnam, the assassination of MLK and the Kennedys—in addition to her work collaborating with Emanuel Sandreuter on freedom of the press and TV posters for the Italian Communist Party. In Italy,

Sheila read the teaching pedagogy of Paulo Freire and was convinced that teaching could be a horizontal exchange of information. She explored the best ways to open up assignments in such a way as to capitalize on the different experiences, knowledge, and skills which the CalArts students brought to the school.#

Mashing up these international influences—Bauhausian/Modernism from Yale; a progressive/radical awareness; a more traditional graphic arts education from her Brooklyn, New York, high school years—Sheila reworked assignments in a prescient Postmodern graphic design pedagogical mode. Her choices can be seen directed to “enable the sexploration of visual phenomena.”7 Sheila knew that an able designer required a set of visual and formal skills in order for that student/ designer to better access their own unique voice in a well thought through and well made manner. In this new context, students were encouraged to express their own experiences and make choices that reinforced their ability to speak through form. The intent was for all students to move toward producing meaningful content of their own.

¶

The spirit of the early 1970s was one of collaboration where each person’s contribution was honored and the work done was not strictly circumscribed by media specificity. For example, Sheila taught a class with Craig Hodgets where two-dimensions and three-dimensions of form were created by each student.

Another was an interdisciplinary class taught with Jivan Tabibian, a political scientist and Ben Lifson, a photographer. This multidisciplinary class included an aspect of what has become known as “the object project,”8 and the beginning of her faith in the meaning of every choice in physical and visual form making.

“The object project” asked each participant to bring in an object.

As students went around the room and each person described the physical aspects to the object chosen, Sheila was astonished to see how much information was inadvertently being revealed about the person as the student described their chosen object.

New to teaching, Sheila was unsure how best to deal with what was embedded in the physical form of the objects, which was much more than she had ever anticipated. She knew that each of us is intimately connected to the things that we choose, but it took a fair amount of time for her to recognize that she could use this intuitive attraction to objects, events, and situations to develop the intimate connection to the physical qualities of the work that students produce.

*Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Everywoman newspaper centerfold, 1970#

In 1971, two years later, CalArts moved out of the temporary quarters at Villa Cabrini and into the current CalArts Thornton Ladd9 building in Valencia, California. Sheila had outfitted the printing lab to not only have lithography and engraving but also a Vandercook flat-bed printing press, a Rotaprint Offset Printer, and a Diatronic photographic typesetter. This made it possible for students to have their hands on the means of making multiple copies. The first years at CalArts were open to having “Institute Students” who could take courses at all or any of the CalArts Schools and students like Albert Innaurato and James Lapine who became dramatists, along with Bia Lowe and Bernard Cooper, who both became fine writers—all took classes taught by Sheila.

*The Women’s Design Program at CalArts, 1972. Unknown Artist, Courtesy of the CalArts Archive

During the summer after Sheila’s first year of teaching at CalArts, she was asked to create a special issue of the Everywoman newspaper.10 Sheila designed the layout in the format of Consciousness-Raising (C-R), which creates an equality of voices.

The newspaper gave a two-page spread to each writer, each having an equal amount of space, regardless of hierarchy in the newspaper.

The dissolution of hierarchy was also a way to counter patriarchy.

Empowered by the new publication’s focus on women and as the only female faculty member at the CalArts School of Design,11 Sheila approached Victor Papanek, then Dean of the School of Design, to start the Women’s Design Program,12 in which reading and discussion had an equal place alongside design work.

After some prompting, he agreed. The work of the program was published in the sixth issue of the British journal Icographic13 along with an essay

by Sheila on the rigid separation between men and women in design and the workplace. Sheila’s writing, titled “Some Aspects of Design from the Perspective of a Woman Designer” asks designers to help to revalidate what have been designated as ‘female’ values and devalued as such.14 The publication also included comments from each of the students and their visual work, which included type studies, photography, and documentary video.

Sheila’s critique of both design and contribution to feminism worked to establish an equality based on reframing not by gender (male and/or female), but as equal individual people, individual designers.

The Women’s Design Program ran in tandem with Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s joint Feminist Art Program at CalArts. Paul Brach, Dean of the School of Art, had agreed to offer the Feminist Art Program, a separatist program, at the behest of his wife Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago considering that there were no permanent women faculty members to mentor young women.

Both the Women’s Design Program and the Feminist Art Program were investigatory, meaning that the class structure was about a way of exploring things they didn’t know about. It wasn’t just the transfer of knowledge from teacher to student: it was about the teacher and students exploring something together from which both were learning.

Ultimately, both Chicago and Sheila decided that they would do better without CalArts and in 1972 they sent out brochures inviting students to their separatist program for the following year. In 1973 Sheila, Chicago, and Arlene Raven named their newly established program the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW): the first independent school for women artists, which later became the Woman’s Building in downtown Los Angeles.

*Courtyard of the Grandview Woman’s Building, 1973. Courtesy of Otis College of Art and Design Library Woman’s Building: Women’s Graphic Center The Woman’s Building rented the former Chouinard Art Institute building (which officially dissolved in 1972) from CalArts for $3,000 per year—a deal brokered by Sheila—and opened on November 28, 1973.15 Woman came from around the country to work and create in this new feminist, creative, separatist space, until the Building’s unexpected sale in 1974, at which time Sheila and Cheryl Swanack searched Los Angeles for a new Woman’s Building, eventually relocating to downtown L.A. during the summer of 1975.16 The Woman’s Building fostered a kind of utopian communalism which was a unique philosophy for the time. Being an artist meant “accepting the responsibility for being one (lone artist as individual producer).”17 Moreover,·it·was·about·something· other·than·being·an·artist:·it·was· about·being·a·fully·formed·person,· who·was·able·to·come·to·terms· with·the·suffering·and/or·injustice·she· had·previously·experienced·in· her·girlhood,·through·her·family,· and/or·through·her·community· of· origin. During·the·renovation·of· both·Woman’s·Buildings·(one·at· MacArthur·Park,·the·other·a·public·center·in· downtown·L.A.),·the·help·of·men·and·children· affiliated·with·the·women·there·was·enjoyed·and· welcomed.#

In realizing this project, we are deeply grateful for the generosity of our contributors and supporters, in particular Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Peter de Bretteville, Naomi Honeth, Michael Ned-Holte, Jenni Sorkin, and Lorraine Wild.

*Sheila Levrant de Bretteville photographed in 2014, at her home, in New Haven, CT Photography: Thomas Giddings

1 Arts in Society: California Institute of the Arts: prologue to a community, Volume 7, Issue 3, 1970.

2 Sheila de Bretteville, phone conversation with the authors, April 20, 2013.

3 Wayne Peterson, a Yale colleague kept all the assignments given at Yale and sent Sheila de Bretteville copies.

4 Sheila de Bretteville received her MFA from Yale University, 1962–1964.

5 Sheila de Bretteville attended Abraham Lincoln High School, a public school in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, which includes many notable alumni, including Alex Steinweiss and Gene Federico who became influential graphic designers working in New York City after the war. Leon Friend was the chairman of the art department at Abraham Lincoln High School and “exposed students to working artists and visiting critics, including emigre designers such as Austria’s Joseph Binder and Germany’s Lucian Bernhard.” He also directed a student club called Art Squad, which “produced work in all media, including graphic design.”

The work of Art Squad “was an awkward yet energetic interpretation of the modern style that reflected the influence of sources ranging from Bayer to streamlined product design.”

(Wild, Lorraine, ‘Europeans in America,’ from Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History, 1989, 153.)

6 Friend, Leon, Graphic Design: a Library of Old And New Masters In the Graphic Arts, New York and London: Whittlesey house, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1936.

7 Sheila de Bretteville, email with authors, April 17, 2013.

8 “The object project” is an assignment Sheila de Bretteville has been giving to her students since the beginning of her teaching career, and has become a requirement for first year graduate students at Yale from 1990 to today.

9 Thornton Ladd was a Modernist architect who designed CalArts and the Pasadena Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum).

10 Everywoman, designed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, 1971. Everywoman was a collective newspaper designed for the Fresno Feminist Art Program by Sheila de Bretteville, who had encountered the program as an invited visitor.

11 “CalArts was a place of intensive masculine bravado; the premiere American art school of the 1970s, the place to make a Happening alongside Kaprow, the progenitor of the genre.”

Sorkin, Jenni, Learning from Los Angeles: Pedagogical Predecessors at the Woman’s Building, 40–41.

12 The Women in Design program (1971–1973) came out of a question posed by Sheila de Bretteville, “what would happen

if I only taught women?”

13 de Bretteville, Sheila, Icographic 6, Croydon, England, 1973.

14 de Bretteville, Sheila, Icographic 6, “Some Aspects of Design from the Perspective of a a Woman Designer,” Croydon, England, 1973.

15 Sorkin, Jenni, “Learning from Los Angeles: Pedagogical Predecessors at the Woman’s Building,” 47.

16 What followed was then a frenzied search for a new building that would offer the same public visibility, until the former headquarters of Standard Oil in downtown LA was secured as a location. Sorkin, Jenni, Learning from Los Angeles: Pedagogical Predecessors at the Woman’s Building, 48.

17 Sorkin, Jenni, Learning from Los Angeles: Pedagogical Predecessors at the Woman’s Building, 42.

41

Design & Discrimination

TEXT Mรกrio Moura 25.06.2018 THE RESSABIATOR

It is not very difficult to find cases of discrimination within the design. Just think a little. For example, I teach design classes for nineteen years and I don’t think I have caught ten African students or Afro-descendants in all. In the United States, the same happens, and the reasons have already been considered. It is very difficult for most people of African descent to invest a lot of money in a profession that is known to be precarious. Hence, affirmative action initiatives are advocated.

Almost from the beginning, the presence of women in classes has grown to the point of becoming the majority. But people are still caught, teachers even, saying that design is not a women’s thing. The arguments are the usual ones - the children, the house, etc. Some women already have some visibility, but looking beyond the surface, it is clear that in many cases the work is done and paid for in a very different way. Here in Oporto, most women with international visibility tend to work as an employee. Most men tend to be the boss of their own studio.

Almost from the beginning, the presence of women in classes has grown to the point of becoming the majority. But people are still caught, teachers even, saying that design is not a women’s thing. The arguments are the usual ones - the children, the house, etc. Some women already have some visibility, but looking beyond the surface, it is clear that in many cases the work is done and paid for in a very different way. Here in Oporto, most women with international visibility tend to work as an employee. Most men tend to be the boss of their own studio.

Perhaps the most obvious and least obvious case of segregation within design is that of homosexuality.

Just the other day, a woman (non-designer) who described a terrible case of discrimination to me that she had been subjected to, added that in the design there would be the problem of being dominated by the “gay lobby�.

For her, as for many people, design would be an area so dominated by homosexuality that one could even speak of a conspiracy to keep heterosexuals out.

For anyone working in graphic design, the idea is ridiculous. There are very few designers who assume a public LGBT identity. Even more rare those that are successful.

Some years ago, someone told me in a low voice about a top and deceased figure of Portuguese design who, despite being married, “occasionally had affairs with men� - I think it was the closest thing to a historical reflection on the subject here in Portugal. Besides, I never got anything written, I never got anything checked. In fact, the most common thing is to hear people reinforcing the idea: I remember Peter Saville playing at a conference that, when he worked in the fashion world, took on gay manners.

In other words, it is an idea that we have about design but that designers do everything for everything to contradict.

In the case of graphic design, there are also classic texts, still taught in schools, where it is understood that design will only be respected when it is less effeminate. Much of the modernist designer’s ethos is built against this identity.

Some·years·ago,·someone· told·me·in·a·low·voice·about· a·top·and·deceased·figure· of·Portuguese·design·who,· despite·being·married,· “occasionally·had·affairs· with·men”·-·I·think·it·was·the· closest·thing·to·a·historical· reflection·on·the·subject·here· in·Portugal.·Besides,·I·never· got·anything·written,·I·never· got·anything·checked.·In·fact,· the·most·common·thing·is·to· hear·people·reinforcing·the· idea:·I·remember·Peter·Saville ·playing·at·a·conference·that,· when·he·worked·in·the· fashion·world,·took·on·gay manners.·In·other·words,·it· is·an·idea·that·we·have·about· design·but·that·designers·do· everything·for·everything· to·contradict.·In·the·case· of·graphic·design,·there· are·also·classic·texts,·still· taught·in·schools,·where·it·is· understood·that·design·will· only·be·respected·when·it·is· less·effeminate.·Much·of·the· modernist·designer’s·ethos·is· built·against·this·identity.#

47

Eye on Design #03 03.22.2019 INTERVIEW WITH APRIL GREIMAN Photography Nolwen Cifuentes Words by Meg Miller

Rumor has it that you attended Alan Kay’s 1984 TED talk, and from there you went immediately to Macy’s department store and bought your first Mac. Yes, that’s true.

I was the guest of one of the founders of TED, Harry Marks. In my mind, Harry is the inventor of broadcast motion graphics. He and I were video buddies; he showed me a lot about how to use video and we used to go out on shoots together. So I went to the first TED conference with him, and he said, “You gotta go see this computer.” I said, “I don’t want to see this stupid computer,” but he dragged me. I bought my first Mac from Macy’s in Carmel, California. I was probably making the line go around the back of the store while I engaged with it. I just couldn’t stop looking.

What convinced you that you had to have it?

I didn’t really get what it was. I just thought, “Oh, I should get this computer because I can probably have some fun with it.” I don’t think I realized what it would become.

At some point you started to think that you could use it to design, which was not necessarily a prevailing attitude among graphic designers in the mid-’80s. Some years into the Macintosh, maybe in the late ’80s, I went to a lecture of Milton Glaser’s at ArtCenter [College of Design in Pasadena].

There are very few people in the world that give a better talk than Milton Glaser. I have the greatest respect for his work and his mind. But at the end of his presentation, a student in the audience asked what he thought about the MacIntosh. He said he was proud to say that the original Mac that Steve Jobs sent him was still sitting in the box, unopened, in his basement. Meanwhile, I won my first color Mac by entering Macworld’s first art competition—I could never have afforded it otherwise. So I’m there drooling, wondering who puts together that mailing list for Steve Jobs.

One of the funniest thing that’s ever been said about it was also in the late ’80s, maybe early ’90s, at a lecture that Paula Scher gave at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles.

She is a genius in so many ways. Somebody

asked her whether she used the Mac, and she said no. They asked her why, and she said, “Because it doesn’t smell good like my other art supplies.” I mean that’s so Paula, right? That’s so brilliant.

When I was starting to work on the Mac in the early- to mid-’80s, I was head of the design program at CalArts. I was schlepping my little Mac into the classrooms to let people play with it and think about it. The students were not too up for it, I think because the predominantly male faculty that had preceded me in the design department were saying things like, “Greiman’s work is like she takes a bunch of typesetting and stands at the top of the stairs and throws it down, and where it lands is her design.”

I was also on the national board for AIGA at that time, and this is what got me to resign.

I got so tired of some of the famous men who were also on the board saying things like this, “This is the end of everything,” and that the Mac is crap and they’ll just stick with their pencil. I’m sure I’m quoted somewhere as saying “This is just another pencil.” Or I would challenge some of these men by saying, “You know how much crap has been done with a pencil over the last couple of thousand years?”

In fact it wasn’t true that the Mac was just another pencil. It was an incredible creativity-enhancement tool, kind of a cocreator, if you will. But those were the kinds of things that people were saying.

Your dad was a computer scientist and analyst. Were you exposed to computing early on? I was never really privy to seeing him work. When I was growing up in the late ’50s and early ’60s, he worked as the VP of Data Processing for the lighting company Lightolier. He set up their mainframe computer, which had the air-conditioned room, the platform enclosed in glass, and all that. When the president of the company moved to California, they imported my dad out here to Los Angeles. He worked as a consultant to Technicolor, setting up the first minicomputers for film processing

and writing the code to do so. Then he did the same thing for Warner. I was already out here when my parents got the bug and moved to L.A for good. My mom actually moved out first; she came out and got a job and a condo, and then my dad joined her.

She kind of left my dad in the dust to figure out how to wrap things up back East, which is where we were all born and where we lived until 1980.

You grew up in New York and then left to study graphic design at Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. That must have been quite a change of scenery. What type of design education did you get at KCAI? The head of the program was a Yale graduate, Rob Roy Kelly, and he was setting it up for all of us to become corporate designers. The program was influenced by the Modernists for sure. We were doing giant logos and

collateral systems. Everybody was gaga for grids. The irony was that our school in particular didn’t have a type shop, so we were rubbing down body text and headlines and doing all these major things in typography without having access to real equipment. That was one of the seriously motivating factors for me to go to Basel, to really learn how to make typography.

Was it a much different environment at Basel?

When I got to Basel, instead of continuing on the path of doing Swiss gridded typography, I had the Madman of Typography, [Wolfgang] Weingart, as a teacher. He freed us up to experiment and try different things and think about type, not merely as the little column of stuff you put at the bottom of a page or flow into a grid system, but as something that could be expressive. In a sense, it encouraged me to start to see type as image. Type as image fully blossomed when we had the tools to do that, like the Macintosh and other technology.

Later, when I moved from Philly, where I was teaching at the former Philadelphia College of Art, to Connecticut, and I took a course at Yale in computer programming.

We were learning Fortran, which was dreadful; I pretty much failed. I thought I needed to learn at least the basics of programming because I wanted to design a calendar using one of the phototypesetting machines that I knew that they had at Yale. My teacher pulled me aside one day and said, “Why didn’t you tell me that you’re an artist?” He set up a time for me in the computer lab where I could experiment with some help from a computer operator.

Did you retain any of your Fortran knowledge, or end up using that programming experience in your later work? Not so much on the programming side, but watching somebody operate the computer gave me a glimpse of how computers think. I had a feeling, almost through osmosis, of what was going on. It wasn’t until many years later, in the early ’80s, when I started working again with video Paintboxes that I had become a little more fearless with technology. Whenever I encounter fear, I don’t flee—I kind of fling myself into deep water and see if I swim.

or publication design. I always wanted to do all of it. I just didn’t have any particular track I wanted to focus on.

What is a Paintbox? The first Quantel Paintbox was for making broadcast graphics. When you see little spinning TV logos from that time, those would have been done on the first Quantel Paintbox. It had its own font library, and you could scan things in and animate them for broadcast. Since they were just appearing for two seconds, the output was video quality—it was much lower res than print.

I wasn’t that long off the boat from Basel, and I liked being free and experimenting and using a lot of color. The influence was Armin Hofmann. I interviewed at Saul Bass’s design firm with his partner Herbert Yager. I dropped off my portfolio, and when he called back I was so excited. When I came in, he just said he’d never seen a portfolio like that, he didn’t have a single question for me; he couldn’t even begin to ask me questions. [My work] was too non-corporate, I guess.

I started playing with those because I was working with Esprit and Lifetime Television, doing their motion identifiers. A few years later, Quantel came out with what is known as the Graphic Paintbox. That was like my toilet training for the release of the Macintosh. The Mac seemed like it mimicked everything those high-end Paintboxes could do. Those tools got me immersed in understanding computers. Not technically, as an operator would, but conceptually.

At that time, I also had my typography typeset by Vernon Simpson, who was the finest typesetter in Los Angeles. That’s what made up my “hybrid imagery”—sometimes it was my video images and sometimes it was handset type, traditionally pasted up.

Why did you move out to L.A. in the late ’70s? I was working freelance at MoMA, and had finished up a project, so I started interviewing. In New York at that time you had to be a specialist: you either had to design annual reports or you had to do signage or you had to do corporate design

I went to the Aspen Design Conference in the summer of ’76, and I met some people from Los Angeles and San Francisco. I was going to go to San Francisco anyways to see some relatives, and they said, “If you’re going to go to San Francisco, we’ll pay for you to just come down to L.A. for a couple days.” I think they thought I was good party material. I did that in early summer and I had such a good time here.

Before that, in New York, I had also applied for a junior designer position at Chermayeff & Geismar. I dropped off my portfolio and after a week they called and said, “You can come pick up your portfolio.” When I went to their office, Tom Geismar actually came out into the reception area and said, “Why are you applying to this job as a junior designer?” And I said, “Well, I would like to work here.” And he said, “Two things: One, your work is so welldeveloped and so different than what you’d do here.” But he also said, “You’re way beyond junior designer level.” It didn’t matter to me, I just wanted to work in a good office and have the feeling of what it’s like. But that’s how it went down.

I did get offered a job by a friend who started a corporate design planning firm in Century City. He said he liked me, so he hired me to work. I said, “Great, I’ll move out to L.A.” Then he fired me.

Why did he fire you? Because for one

of the projects we did, an ad campaign, I hired Jayme Odgers, who was working as a photographer at the time, and who later became my creative partner. My employer noted that he had a feeling that Jayme and I would become a couple, which we weren’t at the time. One morning I was standing there talking to his receptionist and I glanced at what she was typing. It was a resignation letter written from me to my boss. When I asked him about it, he said that he felt like I was developing a stronger personal relationship with this photographer and that I’d rather go into business with him.

I worked for three years with Jayme, and we did end up developing a personal relationship. That body of work is quite famous, like the early CalArts folder poster and Wet magazine.

You and Jayme are credited as founding the California New Wave movement. Did you have a sense at the time that what you were doing would end up being so influential? I kind of always resented later being called “Queen of New Wave” or “Pomo.” Those aren’t anything that I identify with. But then, you know, that’s how journalism sometimes goes. I felt like as soon as you’ve given it a name, it’s dead. Jayme and I were just having fun. His work was spatial and kind of spiritual. I call him the inventor of the drop shadow in graphic design, because anything that he photographed had a shadow, or he would airbrush in a shadow. Everything was always floating. He was Paul Rand’s assistant for many years, by the way.

I didn’t know that. Jayme probably still has some of the best hand skills of any designer I know. I learned a lot about pasting things up and cutting things and wrapping things and preparing artwork. But also, his work was, even as a photographer, in alignment with my work. The strong thing about that period creatively was that we were combining word and image. Typography, for us, wasn’t just a little column at the bottom of the poster or the ad. It was integral, that combination of word and image. Why people didn’t put typography on the diagonal.

When Jayme and I started collaborating, the only cover of Wet we did together was that cover with Ricky Nelson. Prior to that, I worked with him to produce what were known as space mats under the name Visual Energy. Space mats were like placements, only they were our photographic or collage images, offset printed and laminated.

We sold them around the world, to Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. We had a little run for a couple of years, so we would put our own ads in the Wet magazines.

That sounds like so much fun, which is also how the work you guys made together looked: loud, colorful, irreverent—almost joyous in a way. That’s the reason I stayed in L.A. I was completely knocked out by this natural light color here. I remember being mesmerized every day around sunset when this golden light, this pink gold light, would just drape the whole city. It was spiritual, but it was also something that I felt really affected my physical experience, too. It woke up a sensibility in me that I hadn’t really felt in New York, like ever. I ended up doing some early work, even corporate work, in bright colors and DayGlo orange.

A lot of the work from the ’80s I’ve just started thinking about as a strong body of work. You can really follow a technological thread through my work, from high-end photography, to videography, to computer work, to hybridized design, to motion, to doing things that had sound.

Right, called “Does It Make Sense?” Can you talk about how it came about? One of my biggest allies and supporters was Mickey Friedman. We met at an AIGA Leadership Retreat, because she was on the AIGA national board at the same time I was. When she commissioned me to do an issue of Design Quarterly, I could have easily done a magazine that was a full retrospective of work that had already been published, which would have been a completely boring thing for me to do. Instead I said, “I’m going to tackle something new and learn a new piece of software and just try some things.”

*‘Pacific Wave’ Museo Fortuny’ Venice poster. 1987.

Image courtesy of April Greiman.

*‘Iris Light’ poster.

1984. Image courtesy of April Greiman.

When I was head of the design program at CalArts, I was suffering from bad criticism in the U.S., being called an airhead, and “let’s see if she’s in business in five years,” that kind of stuff. This was “the end of design.”

My work was too personal. My “Does It Make Sense” piece for Design Quarterly arose from my own internal chatter and imaginations. I was at a crossroads in my early career. My work in the late ’70s and early ’80s was both infamous and highly acknowledged, contributing to a sort of early fame. At the same time, there was this backlash from the established New York male graphic design community, who were saying it wasn’t graphic design at all, it was fine art. So the chatter—the dialogue, that conversation in my own head—had to do with them saying my work was personal and not real, serious design.

I was going back and forth on what’s personal and what’s public, or what’s a personal agenda versus a client’s agenda.

The title, “Does It Make Sense?” was me trying to reconcile with my abilities, my thinking, my skill sets. Did things have to make sense along the rigid line that was being drawn by that predominantly East Coast male community of designers who

were twice my age? And in fact, was there a line? From there I began to ask, “What is creativity?” Aside from the biblical creation myth, if you go with the sciences and physics, you would say everything was created out of the Big Bang.

That’s the idea behind the whole running chronology of dates at the bottom of the piece. I cut ahead quite a few years to when the Macintosh got introduced, then there’s landing on the moon and other things that I thought were relevant to my personal timeline. The journey was about, “What’s personal and what’s professional design or commercial design?” That timeline was to help me give it sense.

The piece is radical in a lot of ways: You were looking at creativity and its origin, and questioning the line between personal and commercial in graphic design. You were challenging the medium by making the magazine a poster.

But also, putting your body on the piece like that takes a lot of guts. Did you ever second guess yourself? As I thought about what’s personal and not personal, I said, “What could I use to represent that?”

And then I thought, I could use my person. I could literally use a portrait of myself as the canvas for representing the evolution of thinking.

My biggest fear was presenting it to Mickey first.

I was fully prepared for her to say “Whoa, I don’t know about this,” but she was just like, “This is great.” I found the printer, but Mickey got the paper donated, so she had to bring them a full-sized comp and present them my idea. They said they were absolutely not donating paper; their only policy was that nothing they sponsor could ever portray nudity. She said to them, “Well, you’re setting yourself back preRenaissance, then. There’s nothing lewd

or pornographic that’s being displayed here.” They ended up saying that we could use the paper if we didn’t put their name on.

Wow. How fortunate to have an advocate like that. Mickey was a genius. I mean, she just egged me on. When I told her what some of these established male designers were saying about my work, she said, “Well now you know you’re a serious threat, if they’re acting so badly.” She was such an ally, and remained so until the very end of her life.

What do you think you were doing stylistically that made you such a threat? I don’t know. I was using a lot of color. I was putting type on the diagonal. I was designing pieces that you could turn upside down.

For a catalog for a big museum show, I literally trimmed off the corner and made it a trapezoid. Some people realized that there was a thought process and there was a concept behind what I was doing. But for other people it was just, “Where are those Swiss grids?”

I read somewhere that Massimo Vignelli made a comment, after seeing the Design Quarterly poster, that he wanted to see the back side. I realize it was in jest, but were you getting back a lot of comments like that?

Well, my current husband, Michael [Rotondi], was a subscriber to Design Quarterly. He was aware of my work, but after he got that, he said, “I definitely want to have a meeting with her.” [Laughs]. I think there’s also a male design journalist who’s fairly well known and who wrote an article about it calling me overly self-indulgent and narcissistic. But nothing too bad. I think people were genuinely embarrassed that I did this, because there was nothing like it.

There were at least a couple of female journalists who wrote about my work in that period and accused me of being kind of brain-dead, and accused my work of being all fluff and no content. They didn’t see the thought behind it.

This was the ’80s, when feminism was experiencing something of a backlash. Did

you consider yourself, or the work you were doing, to be feminist? I was a quasi-feminist.

I wasn’t hardcore, and I regret it because I wasn’t being thoughtful enough about the long-range plan. A lot of the women I knew personally who were hardcore feminists were really pretty rough to be around.

They were too severe for me, too stern, too principled. It didn’t allow for any fun or any acknowledgement that there were good things about being a woman.

I got some really good work and appreciation from clients because I was easier to work with. Instead of the handful of male designers they would call for a job, I was the only woman, and I was young, and they enjoyed my being lighter and a little more energetic about collaborating. There was one job for this artificial intelligence company, a very early one, and one of the main competitors I was bidding against for the project was Saul Bass. When I saw who I was being interviewed against, I couldn’t believe it. It emboldened me, and when they asked what kind of fee I would charge, I just came up with something really high.

One of the things I liked reading about with your time at CalArts is that you lobbied to change the department name from Graphic Design to Visual Communications. You also prefer to go by trans-media artist, not graphic designer. I love this pushing up against language that you feel is limiting to what you’re actually doing. I tried to introduce video as an option to students in my program, and made a proposal to the provost to bring in a couple of Macintoshes.

The school followed through with that, but then when the equipment arrived, they put it right into the film school. It was mpossible to cross creative lines; it’s a misnomer, these schools that call themselves multidisciplinary.

When I left, I was kind of on a roll with my own design practice. I didn’t know where it was going, which is why I liked it so much. It was an undefined aesthetic. Video and the computer—those were things I felt needed to be explored and not judged.

“I got so tired of some of the famous men who were also on the AIGA board saying things like this, “This is the end of everything,” and that the Mac is crap and they’ll just stick with their pencil.”

DESIGN Joana Silva TEXTS

“Why Feminism is Important in Design?”.

Kshipra Sharma. medium.com/dodesigniit-guwahati/why-feminism-is-important-indesign-867971b93b52 “25 Hours Minimum Per Week”.

Mário Moura. ressabiator.wordpress. com/2019/06/27/25-horas-minimo-porsemana/#more-16459 “One Step Ahead: we meet Paula Scher, the trailblazing Pentagram Partner”. Lucy Bourton. itsnicethat.com/features/paulascher-graphic-design-151117 “Clearing the Haze: Prologue to Postmodern Graphic Design Education through Sheila de Bretteville”. Izzy Berenson & Sarah Honeth. walkerart.org/magazine/clearing-the-hazeprologue-to-postmodern-graphic-designeducation-through-sheila-de-bretteville-2 “Design & Descrimination”. Mário Moura ressabiator.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/ design-e-discriminacao/ “Don’t Call April Greiman the “Queen of New Wave””. Aiga eye on Design. eyeondesign. aiga.org/april-greiman-is-still-ahead-of-thecurve/ All rights reserved © 2020

TYPEFACES Set in PP Woodland and Gatwick by Pentagram.

This is an academic project. Produced by Joana Silva developed within the discipline of “Design Studies” 2019-20, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of OPorto.

This editorial publication is about Feminism & Design.

It brings together several articles on the same content in order to archive this theme and highlight the role of women in Design, which is often hidden and does not have due relevance.

June 6â‚Ź