Women in Graphic Design. by Stefania M Padalino

Women in the Graphic Design World

Stefania Padalino | Art 327 Advanced Typography Structures | Faculty: John Bowers | Oregon State University Women

in the world of

Graphic Design Introduction The history of Visual Communication is intimately connected with the history of art, civilization and trade, and it dates back to prehistoric time. As a profession, Graphic design began in the middle of the twentieth century. In the history of art we can see the work and influence of women as early as the 15th Century; however, the work of women in the graphic design field can only be traced back to the period between 1960 to present. As a woman, I feel compelled and sometime scared about the challenge that women face when attempting to step into a world that is primarily dominated by men. I have the feeling that to achieve a level of respect that is comparable to a man, women have constantly to prove themselves. In this ‘Timeline’ poster, I am presenting a very short history of graphic design from 1960 to 2004, and the biography and work of few female graphic artists. The idea I wanted to convey is the struggle that women have to face all the time in order to compete in a very challenging field. Also, the awareness that some women, a little by little, with an incredible determination have conquered a status that have been denied to them for centuries. The image of a dormant woman is to signify what the status of women was before the 1960s. For the history of graphic design I have extrapolated pieces of information from Graphic Design: A Concise History by Richard Hollis, published by Thames & Hudson. The graphic artists mentioned are: April Greiman, Paula Scher, Katherine McCoy, Jessica Helfand, and Muneera U. Spence.

She uses historical design to make visual analogies, and for its emotional impact and immediate appeal to contemporary audiences. Scher has developed identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for a wide range of clients.

Paula Scher studied at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and began her graphic design career as a record cover art director at both Atlantic and CBS Records in the 1970s. From 1984, she co-founded and ran Koppel & Scher in New York for seven years, then joined Pentagram as a principal in 1991. In the 1970s and early '80s Scher's eclectic, period-oriented typography for records and books became widely influential and imitated. She has often been credited as the major proponent of 'retro' design. However, her body of work is broader and more idea-based than this suggests.

April Greiman has helped shaped graphic design in the 20th and 21st century. Her work in the 1980s and 1990s embraced digital technology both as a means of production and source of mystical inspiration; she developed an image of the designer as technological visionary. April Greiman’s approach questions the conventional idea that dualities are opposed pairs. Instead she suggests that they are interdependent possibilities at play in a common field. Her broader themes - the constancy of change, form as energy, and the interconnectedness of matter in space and time – take this approach to its limits.

6 4 1

Katherine McCoy is a Senior Lecturer at Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, having formerly co-chaired Cranbrook's Department of Design for 24 years. Born 1945 in Decatur, Illinois, USA. Educated at: Michigan State University, degree in Industrial Design. She is a 1999 AIGA Medalist, a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America, and served as a vice president of the AIGA.

She consults in communications design and design marketing for cultural, educational and corporate clients. She writes frequently on design criticism and history, co-produced a television documentary on Japanese design, and chaired the first Living Surfaces Conference on interactive communications design. Along with her husband Michael, she recently formed High Ground Tools and Strategies for Design, offering professional education workshops for designers. Katherine McCoy’s graphic design work and teaching methodology have been published internationally.

April Greiman

Paula Scher

1. Paula Scher's self-portrait 2. A Sam Shepard play star studded cast 3. 1960 Gerstner + Kutter 4. Jenifer Lewis's one-woman show poster 5. Swatch poster 6. Noise/Funk campaigns

7. 1968 Max 8. 1966 Wilson

21 19

"Designers need strategies to speak appropriately 'Katherine McCoy said' to targeted audiences with tailored messages that resonate with each audience's language, cultural values, needs and preferences."

Muneera U. Spence is a Professor of Graphic Design at Oregon State University. Her research interests are in exploring interdisciplinary and collaborative teaching methodologies applied to Graphic Design curricula and the humanities at OSU and in Newly Independent Nations specifically in Central Asia. Her professional work in Graphic Design constitutes a broad range of projects. Her personal work explores mediums such as painting, drawing, photography and concrete poetry, focusing on issues pertaining to the family in a multicultural context.

1970

Muneera U. Spence

Jessica Helfand 31. Happy New Year 2000 card 32. Recycle, poster 33. Aldo Argiro Memorial Exhibition

34. John Maeda 35. The 'Questions-Video, IBM

9. 1966 Kelly + Mouse

1960

Katherine McCoy

Jessica Helfand is par tner with William Drenttel in Jessica Helfand & William Drenttel, a design consultancy in New York that concentrates on editorial design and the development of new models for old and new media. Clients include Newsweek, Business Week, Lingua Franca, America OnLine and Champion International Corporation. Helfand is also media columnist for Eye magazine and a contributing editor of I.D. Her book, Six (+2) Essays on Design and New Media was published in 1995 by William Drenttel New York. She is visiting lecturer in graphic design at Yale University School of Art and adjunct professor at New York University's graduate program in Interactive Telecommunications, and has lectured at The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Columbia University School of Jounalism and the Netherlands Design Institute, among others.

2003-2004

2000-2002

1990

1980

Few historical facts Psychedelia, Protest and New Techniques The late 1960

During the 1960s graphic design was seen as solving problems of communication. It was also presented in the popular media in the same way as fashion: concerned with good taste, with being up-to-date, even advanced. Because it was visual, graphic design responded to fashion, but changes in its style were the result of a number of pressures, from developments in technology, in the media and in society. And because it was not only visual but also verbal, it could be addressed by academics who were becoming aware of the social importance of communications.

California, the Underground and the Alternative

Computers now made possible the rapid organization and storing of information. But at this time they did not significantly affect graphic designers, who continued to work on paper, not at a computer screen, whose use became widespread only in the 1980s. New graphic forms developed independently of established graphic design, as it was understood by the profession. These new forms filled a gap between the cold formality of the Swiss style and popular taste. In design still bore a local stamp; change still came from individual designers out of their particular circumstances.

Drugs were legal in California until 1966, and their influence on perception, mimicked by stroboscopic lighting at concer ts, was simulated in graphic work by the dazzle of repeated contrast of black and white or complementary colors. 'Underground' was the term used to describe the anti-establishment attitude of many of the young middle class in the 1960s who took an alternative cultural or political stance outside and opposed to conventional society. Internationally, underground magazines joyfully accepted the poor quality of offset printing on cheap paper.Together with overprinting text on coarse color image, they intended 'to make sure that no-one over thirty reads it.' This style, whose informality encouraged the idea that producing a magazine required no special skill, quickly spread.

Graphic design had expanded during the 1960s into areas previously ruled by craft traditions, like newspaper design, and into the new media of television and video. Designers’ still images, although they could be generated and controlled electronically, had to compete with, and sometimes join, the moving images of the television screen. In the 1970s graphic design become part of business, mainly used to give a company a recognizable 'image.' Most graphic design had become part of marketing or part of the media and entertainment industry. The stereotype of graphic design was the Swiss style, which derived from European modernism, with no decoration, white space, sans-serif typefaces and the use of the grid.

Alternatives to the International Style

National Styles and International Influences

The 1970s and 1980s

In a world of mass communications, the graphic style of many countries retained nevertheless a powerful national identity. In the 1980s the Polish, Czech and Hungarian tradition of drawn posters was influential in the West as well as in the Soviet Union. Graphic design in marketing become international, there was an enlightened, intelligent application of modernism to the identities of multinational companies. There was a reaction to this, and particularly to the rigorous discipline of the Swiss approach.

11. Poster, Design Quarterly, 1986

18. "Architecture, Symbol &

12. Prospectus Folder, 1986

Interpretation" poster 19. Plaque, Formica Corporation Sterling, 1985 20. Oliver 21. Cranbrook recruiting poster, 1989 22. Fella Eye 23. Hadders 24. xplicit

13. The Modern Poster, 1988 14. Poster, Workplace, 1987

15. Baur, Kubiny 16. 1982, Odermatt + Tessi 17. 1987, Hersey

Two alternative responses to the Modernist approach developed. The first was related to Punk, mainly in Britain; the second retained many of the elements of Swiss modernism, and become a 'new wave,' especially in Holland and the United States. 'New Wave' used the new photographic and electronic technology either to 'loosen up' the old forms or conversely, to ignore them altogether by making the graphics look crudely improvised and brash.The overall reaction was expressed in a shift to informality; rectangularity gave was to a kind of photographic and electronic Art Nouveau.

The United States

From 1990 to the New Millennium

Epilogue

While America was exporting mainstream modern design to service the international corporations, it was still importing design ideas, particularly from the European avant-garde. In some ways, there was a convergence of the techniques of East and West. The proliferation of typeface designs on digital data discs led by the 1980 to the availability on a single system of more than one thousand designs. The new Californian graphics were chiefly identified with one of Weingart’s students, April Greiman. Her early work of the late 1970s introduced two features of 'new wave.' First were what was often described as 'cocktail graphics' – type and small images with typeset oddments dispersed over the whole area of the design, taking spaced type to extremes. Second were color collages made with the photographer Jayme Odgers. Their spatial play, the overlapping of images put into perspective, anticipated her work with computers.

Personal computers in the office, the classroom and the home brought the handing of text and image within everyone’s reach. Readers became users, even designing their own website. Digital technology was the impetus of an astounding variety of new typefaces. Innovation followed innovation in inventive fantasy, mirroring the diversity of end-of-the-century culture, a medley of traditional, modern and raffish vernacular, and sometime all three in the same font. New fonts, using specialized software, were designed in bedrooms and sold and downloaded from websites.

The graphic-design community is responding to this new age of electronic circuitry by an involvement in media graphics, systems design, and computer graphics. The need for clear and imaginative visual communications to relate people to their cultural, economic, and social lives has never been greater. As shapers of messages and images, graphic designers have an obligation to contribute meaningfully to a public understanding of environmental and social issues.

25-27. Editorial presentation

of broadcast programs 28. Milton Glaser, The Sound of Harlem, record-album cover 29. The Virgin project. Typography, 3-D animation. 30. The 'Questions-Video, IBM

The same Late-Modernist tradition could be seen in the training at Cranbrook since 1972 under Katharine McCoy. Apart from Greiman, the most significant Californian contribution was Émigré, a large-format magazine launched in 1982 by a Dutch immigrant, Rudy VanderLans, and his wife Zuzana Licko. During the 1980s designers in America became more aware of the need for theory and history to back their own practice. Professional journals like the monthly Print introduced historical articles, and Industrial Design provided a critical view of graphic design.

Bibliography

Meggs, Philip B., A history of graphic design. New York, John Wiley & Sons, c1998. Greiman, April, Hybrid imagery : the fusion of technology and graphic. New York, Watson-Guptill, 1990. Triggs, Teal, Type Design: Radical Innovations and Experimentation. New York, HarperCollins International, 2003. Scher, Paula, Make It Bigger. New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. McQuiston, Liz, Women in Design: a contemporary view. New York, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 1998. Friedrich Friedl, Nicolaus Ott, Bernard Stein, Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type design and Techniques Throughout History. New York, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc. 1998.