April Greiman

Information about the designer was sourced here.

'The graphic designer April Greiman was born in New York in 1948 in New York. She attended both the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland, and the Kansas City Art Institute before working as a graphic designer in New York while teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art. In 1976 April Greiman moved to California and opened "Made in Space, Inc.", a graphic design studio, in Los Angeles. April Greiman's graphic designs unite American Postmodernism with the rational clarity of the Swiss school. Often similar to collages, April Greiman's works consist in layered lettering and pictures whose constituents seem to hover. With her work, April Greiman exerted a formative influence on the Californian New Wave style. In the 1980s April Greiman was among the very first graphic designers to realize fully the design potential afforded by the new Apple MacIntosh and Quantel Painbox digital technology. Acclaimed as one of the most influential graphic designers using the digital media, April Greiman became head of the design department at the California Institute of the Arts in 1982. In 1990 April Greiman's book "Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design" was published. April Greiman has worked as a designer for the MAK Center for Arts and Architecture in Los Angeles, AOL/Time Warner, Microsoft, the US Postal Service, and the architects Frank O. Gehry, RoTo Architects, and others. April Greiman has received numerous awards and distinctions for her work.'

Greiman's work was well known for it's hybrid of style and technology all fused into one aesthetic that would be labelled postmodern.

In A TM interview, Greiman talks about her influences here.

Paradis, L. (2010) April Greiman. Typographische Monatsblätter (TM)  [Online], August. Available from: <http://www.tm-research-archive.ch/interviews/april-greiman/> [Accessed 15 December 2013].

Selected Excerpts:

LP   Why did you go to Basel after graduating from Kansas City Art Institute [KCKI]?

AG   I had three teachers from the Schule für Gestaltung Basel when I was at Kansas City—Inge Druckrey, Hans Allemann and Christa Zelinsky. They were all from Europe and had to leave when their visas expired. Feeling incomplete with my undergraduate education, I decided I would do graduate work in Basel. It was in 1970. We didn’t have a type shop in Kansas City and we were using Letraset, which wasn’t professional enough for me. I also always liked and used words and their roots in my design work, making words “editorial” and narrative in their own right. So I just knew I needed to know more about fine typography to complete my design education. That is why I went to Basel, really.

LP   Were you expecting to encounter a modernist style there?

AG   I was probably one of the youngest people in the class, and I really didn’t have any expectations. I just needed to learn typography. We also had an important exhibition of Armin Hofmann’s posters at our school in Kansas City. I just remember it to be such a pivotal experience for me. I didn’t know who he was when I walked into the gallery. I mean, I heard his name and we looked at his published books, but when I saw the posters in person, I felt like I needed to go directly to the source, which is what I did! He was such an influential force in my earlier years.

- Greiman was not aware of modernism at this time, and simply aimed to learn typography from professionals in Europe. Armin Hofmann was an influence for Greiman, and although he was seen as mildly experimental, his design was fundamentally modernist in it's concept and execution. It was not an aim for Greiman to become a figurehead in postmodern graphic design.

LP   Did you know that Wolfgang Weingart was teaching there?

AG   No, because he only started teaching a few years before and had nothing published yet. I was really quite uninformed, but truly inspired by my seeing Hofmann’s work.

LP   Do you think your time in Basel had a strong influence on your work?

AG   Yes. Weingart likes to take a lot of credit for everything that is formal, and he certainly is deserving of it, but one of the important things I learned from him was how to work; a healthy process. It was more of a process of discovery and exploration than of trying to make something that looks like the teacher’s or anybody else’s work. When he gave an assignment, he would encourage us to work on 20 different iterations all at the same time. I found that method very useful. Also, when I got a computer I could do the same kind of thing, because you can archive so many different versions and save them, then pick the one which is the most appropriate. They may all be good solutions, but maybe only one is really appropriate. I think that is the strongest thing I learned from Weingart: a playful, beginner’s-kind-of Weingart mind. In retrospect, I remember I was so nervous about going to Basel, thinking it was going to be hard to learn how to be a typesetter and run a printing press, but once I got there, oh my God, the atmosphere in the class was very delightful and full of spirit. In his class there really weren’t any mistakes, and you just tried things. Weingart was so very encouraging.

- This new way of working, for Greiman, was encouraged by Weingart at first, by way of experimentation and exhaustion. Technology, as Greiman used it, was never used in the modernist era, and as mac programmes would grow in quality, Greiman would utilise this profession within her practice as a designer.

LP   There have been a lot of technological changes since you entered the field of graphic design. Hand typesetting, phototypesetting, computers …

AG   I actually took a computer-programming course at Yale in the early 1970s as well, because I wanted to learn about new technology. In order to use certain of their computers, I had to take a programming class which gave me a migraine every week. And about halfway through the course, when I was failing, because we had to learn Fortran—a very serious mathematical programming language—the teacher asked me, “What are your goals?” I replied, “I just want to learn how to use these computers because they are hooked up to phototypesetting devices.” He said, “I had no idea you were in the arts, you don’t need to take any more tests. Why don’t I just observe you using this equipment?” So I would just work on phototypesetting and explore. I don’t have any of that computer work anymore, because it was on photographic paper, and there was no way to fix the print, so it lasted as long as it lasted. From this summer course at Yale, I made a lot of things and learned how to actually use phototypesetting equipment. I don’t remember exactly what I did with it, maybe a calendar and some other posters, but the teacher gave me an A grade. Then in 1982 I became head of the design program at California Institute of the Arts, and in 1984 I changed the program name from Graphic Design to Program in Visual Communications. I also became interested in videography in the early 80s. I purchased my own professional equipment and I started shooting video and bringing it into my print graphics. There are some posters I made using video imagery. Next I had to learn how to use a high-end camera, because at that time the only way to get an image was to shoot off of a video monitor. Then I started to work on Video Paintbox, and I started renting time in different post-production facilities. And they caught on that I was not in the entertainment business; that I was trying to export imagery, kind of a hybrid between graphic/photographic/computer graphics. So the owners let me have time for free, and I did some professional work on $700-per-hour equipment. However, they let me take the graveyard shift to save money, and so I would go there at 10 o’clock at night and stay up all night working, exploring. I would do that for a week and they would provide a Paintbox “operator” who knew how to use the half-a-million-dollar software. Then the Macintosh came out. Oh, and I had an Amiga first …

- Greiman talks about early technology she used, where her desire for learning a new process took her to use various kinds of programmes. As with her drive to learn typography, and going to the source of her inspiration in Basel, so she took the same drive to use technology to a design and produce typography in an efficient and new manner. It could be argued that this process was modernist in it's integrity, though truly postmodern in it's hybrid aesthetic.

LP   So basically, every time a new technology came out you felt scared but you needed to overcome it?

AG   When I find something so terrifying I usually have to conquer it. It is like jumping into deep water without knowing how to swim. That would be me!  The Harry and the Henry were the first editions of Quantel Paintbox, and they were video-resolution designed for broadcast use, which didn’t require being as high-res as was necessary for print graphics. So I learned a bit about them and their thinking, and that helped me a lot, having then a feeling for the technology and capabilities that would be our future.  However, those Paintboxes couldn’t handle fine typography, designed more for a spinning logo, or a word that moved across the screen quickly.

- Greiman reiterates her drive and passion to achieve something, by using technology. The technology in itself though became a commodity for Greiman.