April Greiman

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by Taylor Adams

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— April Greiman

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In many cases there is a picture in the foreground but the sense lies far in the background.1 — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Within the flatness of a poster, April Greiman eliminates all coordinates that are normally used to locate the viewer in a composition. Instead, she launches the viewer headlong into deep space and saturated color. This is exemplative of her innovative style. April Greiman (born 1948) is recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a reliable tool in design.2 Throughout her work, Greiman has pushed the boundaries of how we view type and composition. She is interested in altering our perceptions of the relationship between two and three­‑dimensional spaces. Her style is based on the exploration of words, images and the usage of color in space by combining art with modern technology. April’s design practice combines video, photography, computer graphics, architecture and environment. Her style thus epitomizes the postmodern trait of hybridization with an undoubtedly Modernist objective from her education in Basel, Switzerland. As a student of Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart in the early seventies, Greiman was not only influenced by the International Style, but also by Weingart’s Swiss Punk style. This style was a transition from the International Style to a movement later to become known as the New Wave, an aesthetic less reliant on the Modernist heritage.3

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The consumption and excess of the eighties were the result of an inward attitude based on materialistic goods and self‑image. These persuasions were enhanced by advertising utilizing graphic forms to sell ‘must have’ products in an increasingly image based society. As a result, the development of advertising and the selling of desire in a visually inclined culture accelerated the output of functional design. Greiman’s work is a reflection of this aspect of the surrounding culture at that time, however, with a primary focus on the experimental process behind her individual pieces. Greiman had produced many ground breaking contemporary pieces that were inspired by the arrival of the Macintosh computer. However, Greiman had been experimenting with different ways of producing her work years before the Macintosh’s arrival. From her beginnings as a designer, she was a pioneer in experimentation. By utilizing the latest technology as her foremost design tool, work was created using an analog computer and live video input that formed the foundation of many of her projects, as seen in the production of her poster for the Simpson Paper Company (fig. 3). The poster incorporates individual video textures as dominant graphic forms for the company’s annual promotion series which were brought together on the Macintosh.4 Greiman’s output during the eighties is a bridge between the modern and the postmodern while reflecting the excitement surrounding the new digital media available to the design industry.

[Front inset] Untitled video still 1986 [Back inset] Guardrail to Seville digital image 2006

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Designers avidly avoided computers and digitization at the time when Greiman embraced the computer, viewing them as challenges to the crispness of the International Style.5 However, Greiman did not feel that this should be a limitation; rather, she exploited pixelation and other ‘errors’ in digitization as part of digital art. In 1986 Greiman used the Macintosh computer’s rudimentary capabilities to create issue no. 133 of the journal Design Quarterly in which she titled ‘Does It Make Sense?’ (fig. 4). This was a groundbreaking project and has since become one of the key events in the postmodern evolution of graphic design. The magazine folds out into a life-size MacVision-generated image of her outstretched naked body adorned with symbolic images and text.6 This was a provocative gesture which emphatically countered the clear, rational and masculine tendencies of modernist design. The mixes in style in this piece stretch from Neolithic style illustrations to contemporary photography. Digital manipulation also incorporates scientific diagrams within the composition. This poster is a collection of elements relating to man, from the beginning of history to the present. A timeline runs the length of the poster marking dates like the invention of electricity and the first man on the moon.

Segments and ideas are pulled apart and pieced back together in an abstract way, a process that Greiman exploits, and then she asks the viewer, “does it make sense?” The poster represents Greiman’s spirituality which is at the core of her postmodern edge.7

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Disregarding the practiced discipline of her modernist education at Basel, Greiman sought experimentation with spacing, type weight, and angular type which changed the way we read the words and viewed the space they sit in. By altering the two-dimensional space of the page, Greiman makes it more three-dimensional with elements that depicted space and time. When you look at an earlier piece of Greiman’s work (pre‑Mac) you immediately notice her familiar bold style through her use of various tools to create her work, such as spray paint and collage. You will also see amidst the seemingly chaotic layout, a mix of styles as a result of experimentation.

The straightforward objective of Swiss design is evident in a poster for a lecture series at California State University (fig. 9) wherein Greiman includes photography and other media that challenge aspects of space and linearity within the second dimension. This method of viewing type and its environment was a catalyst for Greiman to move further away from modern design as she experimented throughout the nineties, creating enough viewpoints to the extent that she would instigate New Wave sensibilities that had profound resonance within the graphic design field.8

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Fig. 1 Untitled video still 1982

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Fig. 2 [Right] Untitled video still 1982 Fig. 3 [Far right] Simpson Paper Company poster 1982

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Fig. 4 ‘Does It Make Sense?’ poster for Design Quarterly #133 1986

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Fig. 5 ‘Does It Make Sense?’ poster for Design Quarterly #133 [back] 1986

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All dimensions that are known are present simultaneously. — April Greiman

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Fig. 6 Leafy Horizontal digital image 2007

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Fig. 7 [Right] Yellow Bus digital image 2007 Fig. 8 [Far right] Neon Swipes digital image 2007

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A trip to Death Valley represented a radical design process to April: “the desert is its own educational vehicle,” she claimed. She articulated that “while most processes occur at an invisible or microscopic level, the desert reveals its evolution in its very existence. I felt as if, for the first time, my eyes were wide open to the process of evolution, to growth, to change.”9 Greiman holds this postmodern view of there being no true structure to design as well and that there is no set path; the only way forward is through experimentation. April Greiman has studied and worked through the postmodern age, and while gaining from the reproducibility of art work she has also seemed to work under the postmodern ideal of consumerism, reproducing products that would replace a space of reality with a hyperreality. Greiman has continued to pioneer new technologies and to challenge prevailing attitudes towards graphic design in her work. By the start of the new millennium, Greiman was making her own photographic and sculptural works that explore the very same concern and processes of her design projects (fig. 6). This continuing metamorphosis proves Greiman’s interest in looking for the new and unexplored regions of design and its processes while maintaining that postmodern spirit.

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Fig. 9 [Opposite] Thinking About What You Think About poster for California State University 2004

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Notes 1.

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Rick Poynor, No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003), 99.

Ibid., 96.

Ibid., 24.

April Greiman, Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design, (New York, New York: Watson-Guptill, 1990), 50.

Poynor, 96.

Ibid., 97.

Ibid., 99.

Ibid., 24.

“April Greiman,” AIGA, Accessed April 14, 2015, http://www.aiga.org/medalist-aprilgreiman/.

Bibliography AIGA. “April Greiman.” Accessed April 14, 2015. http://www.aiga.org/medalist-aprilgreiman/.

Greiman, April. Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design. New York,

New York: Watson-Guptill, 1990.

Poynor, Rick. No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism. New Haven,

Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003.

Designed and written by Taylor Adams Composed in Helvetiva Neue and Letter Gothic Std, typefaces designed

by Max Medinger and Roger Roberson Copyright © 2015 Taylor Adams, Portland, Maine, Maine College of Art

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