traightforwardly announced its breadth: Design / Writing / Research. Though it may sound simple to reative, communicative and scholarly abilities are like strings, keyboards and percussion: harmonious wh well, but rarely performed by a single band member. phonic richness and deceptively easy clarity have always been hallmarks of Miller’s design. A partner a e enhances the legacies of people and institutions that have defined culture, high and low. His environm identities have complemented buildings by the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Thom Mayne hibition designs and catalogues have lushly interpreted the art of Matthew Barney, the seduction of mo f superheroes. In his hands, the history of the Formica Corporation gets the same thoughtful treatment theory of the Bauhaus. ot just a magnifier of cultural beacons; he is also a source of light. Dance Ink, a magazine he art directed ies on paper without arresting the thrill of their dynamics, reset the bar for editorial design. Published f marked the beginning of his ongoing collaboration with its founder, Patsy Tarr. In 1997, they launche iannual paean to monomania. Edited by Miller, each issue of 2wice explored a single theme, including f and uniforms. Later, it assumed the dance focus of its predecessor and moved into the digital realm. ler has moved into creating iPad apps that approach the digital tablet as a completely new stage for dan h Wall, for instance, the choreographer and dancer Jonah Bokaer gyrates in a series of overlapping fram rotated (by Miller), prove to be shallow boxes. hwest Indiana in 1963, Miller enrolled at Cooper Union to study art and was caught up in the intellec s faculty. He was inspired by George Sadek’s emphasis on verbal wit, Hans Haacke’s insistence on the a and Niki Logis’s articulation of the language of sculpture. “Sometimes I miss that crazy intensity,” he “Where does that happen now?” ical day for Miller is a culture vulture’s dream. A recent one began with a meeting at the Guggenheim designed the identity, website and publications. On this occasion, he was preparing to show his dance ap Then it was on to the Brooklyn Museum and a photo shoot for a book about avant-garde shoe design. T presentation of his proposals for environmental graphics for Morphosis’s building at the new Cornell Te Roosevelt Island in New York City. l were his preparations for the forthcoming release of his own monograph and the opening of an Abbott niversity of Monterrey in Mexico. Both will showcase the scope of his career, with all of its cultural touc d Wright to Harley-Davidson. “I don’t see the pursuit of interesting and beautiful design as fundament with the broadest possible marketplace,” he has said. “In that sense I am an optimist.” r will be presented with the AIGA Medal at The AIGA Centennial Gala on April 25, 2014, in New Yor J. Abbott Miller collaborate in their art and their design. The name of theirgraphic studio, Design Writing Re American k as designers as well as writers, and points to their larger concern to approach design as a form of auth designer, rried through in their editorial and curatorial work on the history and theory of design in typography, writer, and industry. They are graduates of the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. 2014 AIGAInstitute, AwardCollege of Art in B Miller are co-chairs of the Graphic Design Department at the Maryland Medalist ublished Design/Writing/Research: Writing on Design , a collection of essays on design theory and cult ceived the 1996 New York Magazine Award, given to ten New Yorkers who have helped shape the cultu llaborative project for Graphicstudio, a set of two photogravures titled on/off is an exploraration in the forms. They created the images using the luminous screen of a computer, and then transferred the digit films for use in photogravure, an etching process of great tonal sensitivity and detail. s made by Remel Hoskins, sophomore at UIS, however the words are copyright of AIGA online, Wikip
J. Abbott
miller
“I got interested in letterforms and elaborate fonts – typefaces without knowing what a typeface was. When a fifth grade teacher asked us to present our vocabulary lists in different ways: I would represent letters with symbols, and develop my own Braille system.”
“It begins with immersion. The process involves getting yourself fully invested in the material to the point where you respond in a way that feels informed by the content and the situation.� - J Abbott Miller
The formalities of the Miller-Lupton alliance are less compelling to the couple than its fruits: two children, a comfortable home, and an intellectual partnership whose impact on the world of graphic design cannot be underestimated.
Ellen Lupton
Arguably, Lupton and Miller are to graphic design what Charles and Ray Eames were to industrial design— except that what Lupton and Miller accomplish as a team is matched, if not surpassed, by what they accomplish as individuals.
It is their differences that make them important. To Miller and Lupton, design has never been about how things look. With roots in other, related practices, it is a set of techniques capable of generating ideas, as intellectual as it is visual. The old dichotomies of left brain and right are losing ground to their investigations. It is more important to them that they work in the “culture industry” rather than merely the design industry.
Lupton and Miller met in 1981 in Nick Marsicano’s first Monday-morning drawing class at Manhattan’s Cooper Union. Lupton, who came in as a painter, and Miller, who was studying sculpture, film, and design, discovered a mutual interest in theory and criticism, and wondered why graphic design wasn’t engaging big theoretical issues the way architecture was.
With son, Jay, 11, and daughter, Ruby, 7, the Lupton-Miller family now lives in Baltimore so that Lupton can work at MICA. Their Bolton Hill neighborhood borders two colleges and is lined with trees and redbrick town houses.
“We complement each other,” says Miller, “and it’s been like that from the beginning.” §
“There really is no ‘too low’ for me! It’s more that I have a weakness for beauty and formal integrity that is sometimes irrelevant in the mass-market context. But I don’t see the pursuit of interesting and beautiful design as fundamentally at odds with the broadest possible marketplace. In that sense I am an optimist. I think we could all be more aware of the civility of design, of how design fosters meaning, interest, beauty. How design can be purposefully constructive in a poetic sense, not just like a sneeze of capitalist excess. Yeah. I love that classic sequencing of spreads and of images. Dance Ink had a kind of a flow because a lot of it was arrested motion. With 2wice there are more static elements: the rhythm is different. So a lot of times I’ve been partitioning off something into a dance segment. Or staging an eruption in the middle of the issue. It’s not a through line all the way from front to back. 2wice is the sum of my interests and my publisher’s interests. It’s not for profit, it’s not constrained. The ‘Car’ issue of 2wice was totally different in its persona to the ‘Spring’ issue. We have that freedom.” - Miller 2008 Abbott Miller was presented with the AIGA Medal at The AIGA Centennial Gala on April 25, 2014, in New York City. He continues to revolutionize the world of design daily.
urators—and the changing role of the designer to producer, author and entrepreneur. The show is the fir ocus on graphic design in 15 years, following Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Cultu in 1996 and the Walker’s landmark exhibition Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language Histor n 1825, the National Academy Museum and School has a mission to “promote the fine arts in America exhibition.” Founded by a group of artists that included Thomas Cole, Asher Durand and Samuel F.B tution of its kind to integrate a museum, art school and honorary association. It is modeled after the Ro nd is guided by a membership of esteemed artists and architects elected by peers. Members have included ic Edwin Church, Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois, Philip Johnson, t, Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, Frank Gehry, Robert A.M. Stern and Maya Lin, among many al Academy is housed in a 1901 Beaux Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, sited between the per-Hewitt on New York’s Museum Mile. This fall the Academy completed an ambitious $3.5 million re se its profile and create a better visitor experience. Timed to the renovation, Pentagram’s Abbott Miller identity and developed a new program of environmental graphics for the institution, including a striki ic installation of members’ names on the ceiling of the museum’s foyer. r Design for a Living World, the landmark exhibition presented by the Nature Conservancy and design Abbott Miller, has traveled to the Field Museum in Chicago, where it remains on view through Novem Living World was co-curated by Miller and Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at Cooper-He useum, where the show debuted in 2009. The exhibition commissioned 10 designers from the fields of fas ial design to develop new uses for sustainably grown and harvested materials from a specific place where The participating designers include Yves Béhar, Stephen Burks, Hella Jongerius, Maya Lin, Christien ahi, Ted Muehling, Paulina Reyes from Kate Spade, Ezri Tarazi and Miller himself. Locations include Australia, Micronesia, China, Mexico, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Alaska, Idaho and Maine. The resulting de y choosing sustainable materials, designers can actively contribute to the advancement of a global conse o co-curating and participating in the exhibition, Miller and his team at Pentagram designed the exhib ook and website. The exhibition is designed to travel and the modular scheme originally installed at Coo ansion in New York has been adapted for the Field Museum. The installation includes a new piece by M inspired by the Conservancy’s Nachusa Grasslands in northern Illinois. visual and performing arts journal, has always provided an alternative performance space for dance, on ge of being a permanent record of this most ephemeral art form. Now 2wice has published its first iPad m Event,” a tribute to the legendary choreographer (1919-2009) that combines live-action video, intervi hotography originally developed in collaboration with Cunningham. The app is available for free downl Tunes, building upon Cunningham’s lifelong interest in using technology to present dance in new ways s Ink Collection of wallcoverings for KnollTextiles has been honored with a Best of NeoCon® award, pr n® at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. The collection won a silver in the wall treatments category of tion. NeoCon® is North America’s largest design exposition and conference for commercial interiors. ection uses liquid movement as a point of departure for three highly graphic wall covering patterns, Dr series was inspired by Miller’s experimentation with a single drop of ink that yielded drops, branch-like letters. Ink is designed for commercial and institutional applications, like hotels and schools, but may a crossover applications like private residences. lection is one of 72 contract furnishing products to be honored in The Best of NeoCon®, selected from a itted in 40 categories of the competition. The awards are sponsored by Contract magazine, Merchandise ternational Interior Design Association (IIDA), the International Facility Management Association (
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