Brave New World TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
FRANKENSTEIN
Coming in 2019
The Old Man and the Sea
Inferno
Crime and Punishment
ORWELL1984 CONRAD
JANE EYRE
Heart of Darkness
A PASSAGE TO INDIA Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights Commercial Classics
commercialclassics.com
07
EDITORS' LET TER: SL ACK
PERRIN [12:02 PM]
LIZ [12:07 PM]
MEG [12:02 PM]
MADDY_MORLEY [12:08 PM]
So how’d we come up with this one? Who pitched this theme? Who gets the pat on the back this time around? Wait where’s Liz? LIZ [12:02 PM]
Here!
LIZ [12:03 PM]
Sorry, just finding the right mood music to drown out office chatter. MADDY_MORLEY [12:04 PM]
I think I pitched “Gossip” a year ago, and this seemed like the right time for it, now that we’re seeing how big of an impact things like tabloids and fake news can have on politics and culture. LIZ [12:05 PM]
Right, but we quickly came to realize that gossip wasn’t just about those knee-jerk negative connotations, which made the theme waaaaay more interesting. PERRIN [12:06 PM]
Were we ever afraid that we wouldn’t find a design thread? That maybe “Gossip” was actually too esoteric for a graphic design magazine? EMILY [12:06 PM]
I reckon we were down with the idea of gossip as a form of communication pretty quickly. And of course, design is communication, too. LIZ [12:07 PM]
+1
EMILY [12:07 PM]
Like Liz said, that means gossip isn’t just trash-talking and housewife chat.
Unless you’re talking about Maddy’s piece on Tupperware—and then it really is. But even with the Tupperware piece, it became more about how, historically, gossip has been important for creating safe spaces. Decentralized gossip networks have long provided a place for marginalized groups to communicate, trade secrets, swap advice. MEG [12:09 PM]
We were always thinking about gossip as more than idle chatter—it can be a really effective way to communicate, and even to resist. Its power lies in the fact that it’s often overlooked and undermined. EMILY [12:10 PM]
That was the fun thing about writing about the New York School, who have come to be seen as such an important movement in art and poetry, but which even the most academic lit crit describes as being built from gossip, parties, and the like. PERRIN [12:11 PM]
I think because that kind of communication isn’t taken critically, that’s where people feel safe to share the truth, ironically. MEG [12:12]
Right, but the way information spreads these days isn’t always in service of the truth. There’s no way we could talk about gossip today without talking about fake news.
GOSSIP
MADDY_MORLEY [12:20 PM]
We also thought a lot about how we communicate online in other ways—how the internet has changed the way we read, when a browsing experience becomes a stream of interconnected stories, images, and words. We tried to reflect that in the structure of the magazine: each article relates to one another in a continuous stream. MEG [12:23 PM]
Perrin got some tips on magazine layout from her reporting trip to People. PERRIN [12:27 PM]
I was blown away by the level of rigor the designers at People bring to their work, even though it doesn’t look like a magazine that our readers might think of as ‘well designed.’ EMILY [12:27 PM]
I think what’s nice about that piece is looking at design from a place of “Who are we designing for?” MEG [12:28 PM]
Our designers got to design for both tabloid-y fodder and a “magazine about gossip” (not a gossip magazine!). TALA_SAFIE [12:29 PM]
The Spotted insert is hands down the funnest thing I’ve ever designed. We made sure to keep it visually distinct from the rest of the mag, borrowing obvious visual cues from tabloids, from floating heads to outlined italic headlines. LIZ [12:33 PM]
And when we brought on Allyn Hughes to do the overall magazine design, she instantly had a sense of what gossip means, both conceptually and visually.
TALA_SAFIE [12:33 PM]
Her style fits perfectly with our theme: loud type, subtle sense of humor. MADDY_MORLEY [12:33 PM]
She has her own experience with fake news. MEG [12:35 PM]
We knew that she’d be able to pull in a strong design voice in the issue, which is what we wanted. Her mark-ups and subtle design elements talk to each other, the content, and to the reader, and they reveal how design is always “editorializing”— providing hierarchy, giving emphasis, deciding what you see and what you don’t. PERRIN [12:35 PM]
It’ll be interesting to see how she lays out this conversation we’re having right now. Which of us will get the hierarchy?
ALLYN [3:28 AM] NO ONE IS GETTING SPECIAL TREATMENT!
09
EYE ON DESIGN: GOSSIP
TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITOR'S LETTER pg 05 DESIGNER'S LETTER pg 07 CONTRIBUTORS pg 158
BE UR BEST A comic by Raphaelle Macaron pg 10 CHURCHES OF CHATTER By Fiona Shipwright pg 12 WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT TALKING ABOUT DESIGN CRITICISM pg 20 DESIGNER FACE-OFFS By Anne Quito pg 32 PARTIES ARE THE ANSWER By Madeleine Morley pg 38 CREATING A BUZZ By Tala Safié pg 50
Never miss a story. Get the newsletter. aigaeod.co/EoDsignup Design doesn’t sleep. For daily coverage, follow us at: eyeondesign.aiga.org INSTAGRAM @AIGAeyeondesign TWITTER @AIGAeyeondesign FACEBOOK /AIGAeyeondesign Published by AIGA, the professional association for design aiga.org 233 Broadway #1740 New York, NY 10279 All paper courtesy of Mohawk. COVER Chromolux 700 in High White TEXT Via Satin in Pure White INSERT Via Smooth in light pink TYPEFACES Atlas Grotesk & Atlas Typewriter by Commercial Type Times by Linotype Arial Narrow by Monotype Printed, bound, and made with care by Hemlock.
HISTORY MADE IN THE MARGINS By Nathan Ma pg 54
TOP 10 CAREER TIPS FROM A TITAN OF DESIGN (A SATIRE) By James Cartwright pg 136
INTO THE GOSS By Perrin Drumm pg 66
THE FINE ART OF GOSSIP By Emily Gosling pg 140
IS WHAT YOU’RE READING REAL OR FAKE? pg 79
RITE OF PASSAGE By Allison P. Davis pg 148
THE DARK SIDE OF SHARING By Allyn Hughes pg 82
LOVE LETTER By James Cartwright pg 154
ULISES CARRIÓN pg 90 WHAT DESIGNERS SAY WHEN NO ONE’S LISTENING pg 92 THROUGH THE RUMOR MILL pg 98 SENSE & SENSIBILITY (AN INTERVIEW WITH APRIL GREIMAN) By Meg Miller pg 106 BRUTALIST DESIGN AND THE RAW WEB By Orit Gat pg 127
Eye on Design magazine is a tri-annual publication that explores the connections between graphic design and the wider world. Each new issue revolves around a central theme and is designed cover-to-cover by a guest designer, someone whose work we’ve long followed and admired. We think of the magazine as an extension of our daily online coverage (eyeondesign.aiga.org), and a space for longform writing, in-depth reporting, and collaborations with exceptional illustrators, photographers, and designers. 2018 Issue #01 Invisible Issue #02 Psych Issue #03 Gossip 2019 Issue #04 ????? Subscribe to find out. aigaeod.co/subscribe Subscriptions save up to 20% on the cover price + shipping.
“
You think you know People, but you have no idea—this is the story of what it’s like to design for more than 90 million readers each week
We’ve had some big, beautiful covers, but mostly there’s just a lot of stuff on them. I find that hard. Sometimes you just want to do something that’s pretty.”
Special Look Inside!
GOSSIP Image below: Phoebe Weekes, design director.
I’m watching shimmery pools of nail polish and smudges of eye shadow spin around a page like constellations circling a celestial object; in this case, it’s the bright, shining star, Emma Stone, who’s endorsing one of these products as among the season’s “20 Best Beauty Products.” There are artfully-cracked cakes of concealer, spurts of CC cream, and swipes of mascara all moving as if in a dance, choreographed by the cursor of one of the five art directors who work at People magazine. After consulting several mastheads for the weekly issues, the franchise issues, the special issues, the book-a-zines, and the digital properties, five is just my best guess. But depending on who you ask, the answer to a question as seemingly benign as, How big is the design department?, could be 10, or 16, or more than 36, if you count photo, digital, and video. Or the answer might be “Not nearly big enough,” or “I have no idea. See all these desks? I don’t know what department this even is.” People is big. With one of the largest magazine readerships in America, People has gamely laid the table for our insatiable appetite for the lives of others ever since it was founded in 1974. It’s a seductive, if not always stylish spread, designed to appeal to the widest possible audience and to be devoured as quickly as our fingers can flick the pages. The layouts invite us to tuck in and take a bite without feeling too guilty about what we’re consuming. Advertisers are eating it up, too—annual ad revenues regularly top a billion dollars. At a time when print advertising is supposed to be dying a slow, silent death, how do they pull this off? People is also the country’s oldest celebrity entertainment magazine, so it’s had a few decades to establish itself in the hearts and homes of its devoted readers. As someone who’s previously only thumbed through it at the nail salon (and only if it was the last thing on the rack, and only if no one was looking), People has never been in either my heart or my home. I lumped it in with the other happy, shiny covers at the supermarket checkout; the ones full of low-grade celebrity photos and exclamation points at the end
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of every headline. In the past few weeks, however, I’ve easily spent more time with the magazine than I have in my whole life combined. I have also gone to meet the people of People to observe them in their natural habitat, and I’ve discovered that I was wrong, that we were all wrong, and that there is a very clear reason why they are the biggest and the best-selling business in the print media game. I figured out how they do it, and I’m going to tell you, but you won’t like the answer: standards. Ethical standards. Moral standards. And yes, design standards. I will soon learn that Ms. Stone’s immaculate complexion has not, in fact, been photoshopped, that neither her hair nor lip color will be altered in any way (a practice that’s more common than you might think) before this “20 Best” beauty page lands in the mailboxes of the magazine’s 3.5 million subscribers and reaches its total, worldwide, digital, social, and IRL audience of over 90. Million. People. With great circulation comes great responsibility, and despite what its rainbow-bright color palette and excessive punctuation might imply, People takes that responsibility seriously. It doesn’t alter its photos. It doesn’t change the background or add fake ones. It doesn’t crop out bodies, rearrange them, or move them closer together to suggest relationships that don’t actually exist. It doesn’t slim anyone’s figure or remove anyone’s wrinkles. It’s very protective of children’s right to privacy, and it absolutely does not stand for stalkerazzi. Some readers are actually disappointed by how respectful People is. When other magazines go low—printing sensational rumors, half-truths, and outright lies—People sticks to the facts. Which makes designing it all the more challenging: How do you make facts go down like candy that tastes just as sweet to your retired grandpa, your single-and-lovin’-it gal pal, your working mom, your stay-at-home dad, and your celeb-obsessed 6th grader? As the art director puts the finishing touches on the beauty page, I watch an assistant scurry over to alert us that executive creative director Andrea Dunham will see us now. This is the meeting I’ve been trying to nail down for weeks. Staffers have been skirting around me all morning trying to extract a few minutes from her schedule; they are consulting their calendars and whispering behind low cubicle walls, and though no one says anything outright, I get the sense that I should be feeling lucky indeed to get any face time at all with this very busy woman. It seems that in pursuing this interview, I have made an odd request. For a magazine that says so much about the world, the world hasn’t had
GOSSIP All images of People magazine courtesy of People magazine. Images below: Royal Wedding Covers 1. Diana Spencer September 15, 1997. 2. Kate Middleton April 4, 2016. 3. Meghan Markle June 4, 2018.
much to say about People. It’s said even less about its design, and less still about its designers. There are no “famous” art directors or design tastemakers on the masthead—for instance, ones with personal Instagram accounts just as popular as the brand’s own. I start to wonder if this isn’t symptomatic of an internal power struggle. At the lively morning pitch meetings, the editors banter like old college pals while the design team sits quietly taking notes. There is one designer, however, who has a seat at the table, and that’s Dunham. The table where she’s seated at the big Wednesday morning pitch meeting is one of those comically long ones that exist only in the movies or in the boardrooms of banks or hedge funds or magazines owned by Time Inc. and Meredith, People’s parent company. Dunham seems extremely at ease there. She is one of those effortlessly chic women for whom I’ve been trying to think of a more clever nickname than “silver fox.” Her sleek, steel-gray mane cascades over louche layers of black (Mary Kate and Ashley, eat your hearts out), and I’m wondering if I’ll be stepping over some invisible line if I ask her where she got her buttery soft leather flats. The roughly three dozen staffers who gather at this mega-pitch meeting look like an advertisement for diversity and inclusion in the workplace; every age, race, and gender seems to be equally represented. They laugh and joke as the meeting kicks off with a slideshow of their fave celeb pics of the week. The first photo is of two British royals eating cake, and someone notes how sweet they look; it’s so nice to see them getting along after their recent public spat. Then there is a picture of Angela Bassett celebrating her 60th birthday at the beach, looking bangin’ in a bikini. Someone admires her abs. Someone calls her their hero. Someone wonders just how she does it. If you’re noticing a lack of negativity—and a lack of speculation about who’s doing what with whom behind who’s back—that’s because this is not a gossip magazine. It’s too true and too fact checked to be hearsay. This is People, people—a celebrity entertainment magazine where nice news is good news and actual reporting is the rule. The information they print often comes directly from the mouths of celebrities themselves, not “anonymous trusted sources.” When Hollywood picks up the phone, People is on the other end of the “party line,” congratulating them on their recent wedding, their new baby, their weight loss, their recovery, their three months sober. It’s a step above tacky tabloids, and a few steps below other weekly titles like New York Magazine—which turns out to be a very good place to be, indeed.
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It’s honest-to-goodness kindness, not catiness, that gets People the direct celebrity access for which its known. They get exclusives. Actors, musicians, chefs, politicians, and reality TV contestants trust them, actually want to talk to them, because they know they’ll be handled with kid gloves. The exclusives may sometimes be puffy, like when a past U.S. president was asked about his “favorite family traditions” and what he puts in his girls’ Christmas stockings, but at a time when a major tabloid publisher is a key source for a federal investigation against the current commander-in-chief, it’s somehow comforting to know that there’s at least one mass market magazine that doesn’t have to skirt journalistic standards to chase sales. The celebrity exclusives extend to photos, too. At one point in the meeting, during a discussion about what imagery will be used for a celebrity news story, a low-res, low-quality photo is projected on-screen, and a few editors get excited. It’s a candid shot of two stars that looks like it was taken in a rush. I can’t understand why anyone with eyes on their face would get so excited about a shitty iPhone photo, but I’ve apparently missed the whole point. This “shittiness” means the photo wasn’t art directed and staged and then disseminated by the celebrity couple’s PR to every media outlet, rendering it a nonexclusive, and therefore nearly worthless. It means it was passed along to People by an insider, and that People alone will get to run it. I wonder how the design team is taking this. They’re the ones who’ll have to set this image in layout later today and make it look good. Or at least as good as they possibly can. They don’t betray much in the boardroom, but they’ll soon be opening up to me about things like shitty photos and shitty type and constricting page layouts. There’s a hushed reverence when I finally file into Dunham’s office along with a handful of people from the design and photo teams she runs. The office is small and warmly lit, and I see immediately that I was wrong to be put off by the protective PR bubble that’s been built up around her. She is open, direct, well-spoken, and surprisingly funny—and a pro, who, like everyone she manages, arrived at People with design experience at massive pubs like New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and Women’s Health.
Andrea Dunham, executive creative director, and Sarah Burrows, photo editor (seated).
GOSSIP Image below: From right to left, Andrea Dunham, executive creative director; Phoebe Weekes, design director; Dean Markadakis, deputy design director; Sarah Burrows, photo editor; Elliot Stokes, deputy art director; David Janus, art director.
I’m told that this gathering, which includes deputy design director Dean Markadakis, design director Phoebe Weekes, and deputy art director Elliot Stokes, is unusual. Not that they don’t all work together on a daily basis, but crowding around the boss’ desk and calmly, methodically discussing design—that just doesn’t happen. With the unforgiving pace of producing a weekly magazine, I get the sense that page approvals happen on-the-fly, desk-side. Which is not to say that this is a messy, unstructured operation—just the opposite. The People design process runs like a fast-moving, expertly-oiled machine. As such, their design choices are often based on practicality and efficiency over cleverness or beauty. “Phoebe’s famous line is that we can never have anything nice,” Dunham laughs. She is kidding but also not kidding. “I do wish we had more flexibility with the covers,” says Weekes. “There are so many things you could do with them to make them more beautiful.” She’s referring to the template, which, rigid as it may be, has relaxed under the direction of Dunham, who’s more attuned to modern standards of editorial design. At the end of the day, however, the stories reign supreme, and it’s the editors who run the stories.
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“Our editorial director is very good at saying, ‘Okay, if there’s too much stuff, then take it off,’” Weekes admits. “And we’ve had some big, beautiful covers, but mostly there’s just a lot of stuff on them. I find that hard. Sometimes you just want to do something that’s pretty.” While Dunham is quick to clarify that the editors know good design when they see it, their primary concern is with readership, which is getting older and busier (40% of their readers are working women, and 40%— men and women—are raising children). That means anything “pretty” takes a backseat to clear, simple type and practical layouts. “Sometimes we fight back because we want a particular image that’s more beautiful, or we want a typographic treatment that’s a little more special, and we have to battle that,” says Dunham. Working at People, you have to know when to pick your battles. “From week to week you suffer the indignity of designing something you really like, and then an editor saying, ‘I don’t like that fancy type,’ which is anything that they find illegible in any way. Or, ‘My daughter doesn’t like the color yellow,’ so we should never use it,” says Weekes. “For the daily pages, they just want us to be intelligent storytellers,” Dunham concedes. “And we’re all journalists—that’s what sets us apart from the design and photo teams at any other place I’ve ever worked. It’s that investment we feel in telling the story. We have to get it right.” Not just right, but fast and flexible, with the ability to compress a story (if more ad pages are bought), or expand it (if an ad falls through), or turn it into a cover feature at the very last minute. “This team is very good at putting those puzzle pieces together,” she says. “This is a news magazine, and it functions like a daily. We’re constantly reorganizing and reworking the lineup.” Weekes recalls the moment in 2014 when Robin Williams died. “We found out about it very late on a closed night and everybody stayed till 4:00 a.m. and redid an entire issue overnight. And that’s not unusual.” When Prince died in 2016, they pushed out a 138-page special issue with no ads, in just three-and-a-half days. A designer at the time reportedly commented, “I’ve never worked anywhere where I’ve seen people work this quickly and efficiently.” Dunham pauses to recall the 2012 year-end issue, one of the most popular franchise issues, which requires a huge time investment from the
Image above: You know People takes a cover seriously when they keep cover lines to a minimum and bring out the shiny gold effect. The minimal color palette lets this portrait of Robin Williams take center stage. August 25, 2014.
GOSSIP
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1. People puts out a notable number of special issues around celebrity deaths, which are consistently top sellers. See John Lennon (1980 special issue), Princess Grace Kelly ('82), Karen Carpenter ('83), Rock Hudson ('85), Lucille Ball ('89), Paul Newman ('08), Michael Jackson ('09), and Carrie Fisher ('16), to name just a handful.
Image above: Elliot Stokes, deputy art director (third from left).
entire team starting about six months out. “It was the day before we were about to ship,” she says. “We had Sandra Bullock on the cover, and then the Sandy Hook shooting happened. We were here in the office watching all those children dying in real time, and calling in photographs of them. My job was to put together a cover that represented all of the deaths, and we had to do that amidst tears and exhaustion and frustration. It was a brutal night, but we put together a beautiful tribute to the loss 1 of all those children and teachers.” Originally, breaking news didn’t make the cover of People without a celebrity connection, but that changed in 1979 when the nuclear nearcalamity of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania was too big not to talk about. It was swapped in as the cover story just before the issue went to print. “I always believed the heart of People was ordinary people going through extraordinary things, not vice versa,” said Jim Gaines, the assistant managing editor at the time. Local and international crime and human interest news stories are now a staple. Some readers have admitted to skipping over those sections; they tune into People to tune out, not to be “reminded of current events.” Still, the mix of local acts of kindness, national news coverage, and celebrity interest is the billion-dollar recipe that’s resonating with too many readers to tinker with. Designing for an audience that puts equal weight on the breaking news of celebrity breakups, celebrity deaths, and school shootings is its own challenge. The added time constraints creates a pressure-cooker environment that does breed some innovative design solutions, but it also makes more significant design updates near impossible. Sections are updated incrementally, in fits and starts. Bigger, more visible changes don’t see the light of day without significant market testing. The logo, which was designed by one of the magazine’s early design directors, Elton Robinson, has undergone only minor changes since it was
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first created in 1974. But after four years into her role, Dunham grew tired of “the tyranny of the strip,” the block of cover lines running down the left rail of the cover as dictated by the logo lockup. “Then one day,” she recalls, “I made it across the page and I was like, ‘Why don’t we do it large?’ And they resisted and resisted.” Until the market test results proved her right. For the past six months, she and Weekes have undertaken a rigorous postmortem of every issue. “We’ve been working very hard on trying to bring the magazine into a more modern era. But we just don’t have the luxury to stop and take a deep breath and spend a few months doing a redesign.” From week to week, they’re just trying to get the magazine out the door. There are benefits to that. “If you don’t like something you’ve done, you have no time to grieve over it,” says Markadakis. “They’re reading it on the toilet,” nods Dunham. “So you just move on. You plug away, you have a thick skin.” “You have to compromise a lot,” says Weekes, “but you’re never bored. You’re always challenged. Your skills skyrocket. Designing for a monthly magazine has a certain prestige, but you don’t understand how hard it is to work at a weekly—and then how fulfilling that becomes. I don’t know if I could ever go back to a monthly.” “I came from a monthly magazine,” says Markadakis, who was the creative director of Fast Company for almost eight years. “The purpose of every feature that we designed was to win a design award, so you’re constantly pushing yourself. When I came here, it’s not that that drive went away, but I realized that the stories we’re doing here affect people. Readers really, really, really have a connection to this magazine.” I can’t help but wonder what they’d change if they didn’t have the feedback of editors and publishers and readers to contend with, or if they had a little more time to work through some of their design ideas. What would a “more modern” People look like? As soon as I ask, their defenses drop and they reply eagerly.
"And if the paper was better, it really
would be white!” n “More space to ru !” the photos bigger
“Less buttons!”
“More white .” space—period
“Mo re Ken ne d ys! ”
e
“More spac e to run the photos bigger!”
r, pe !” pa ay r gr te o et to “B ’s it
enn s K s e “L
!” dys
e typ he t get ” ’s . t e tos “L p ho e th
off
GOSSIP
2. A button is any graphic element that makes text stand out (i.e. a circle, a starburst)
Images above: Sexiest Man Alive Covers 1. Mel Gibson February 4, 1985. 2. Denzel Washington July 29, 1996. 3. Dwyane 'The Rock' Johnson November 28, 2016.
Buttons? Dunham clarifies: “It’s about real estate. I feel like we’re forced to share the real estate with the photography in ways that compromise the integrity of the shot,” she says. “We have to get a hed, a dek, a button,2 the beginning of the story, an exclusive, a this, a that, and by that time you’ve covered three-quarters of the fucking image, and you’re like really? Some real estate would be lovely.” She pauses, laughing, “So, if you can take all those notes and bring them to Meredith, that’d be great.” Apparently, it’s not something they can bring up themselves. Don’t they ever feel like working someplace where they can make basic design requests, ones that might ultimately improve the quality and the storytelling? Don’t they ever want to do anything more expressive, or dare I say it, more experimental? “Do we want to be more experimental, or do we want to work for the most successful magazine in the world?” Markadakis fires back. “I think we all want to be paid,” says Dunham. “Not just be paid, but also have the most influence and the most reach.” Ninety million is, indeed, a lot of reach. It’s a lot of buttons and bright fonts and compromises. It’s a lot of creative energy, too; it’s palpable. There’s an excitement in the room generated just by talking about ideas for the next issue. Our photographer who shot this article left wanting to know how he could get a job there. People does seem like a good place to work. The staff is as friendly as the magazine they slave over each week. Good is relative, of course. Does more money, more staff, and more standards mean good? If that’s the winning business equation, does that also add up to good design? Whether or not you care about celebrities, or think People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” is really the sexiest man living right now (FYI it’s Blake Shelton) is beside the point. By their own admission, the designers don’t care about everything they design. How could they? (Who can really, truly give a shit about the Kardashians?) But it’s undeniably powerful to create a magazine that everyone in the world knows and reads. Even if you don’t count yourself as a reader, trust me, you are a reader—in line at CVS, at your dentist’s office, at the hair stylist. You absorb the stories, the message, and the tone of voice immediately, don’t you? Like through osmosis. And the ability to communicate clearly and effectively—and fast—well, that’s just good design.
A guide to the visual clues of fake news Fake news is designed to mimic the elements of credible outlets, deceiving readers in order to maximize traffic and profit. In an era of false information and deliberate trickery, being able to scan a considered design eye over news sources has become an increasingly valuable skill. Here, we present you with our web design hacks for detecting the hoaxes.
In the 1980s, April Greiman reasoned that the computer would become an integral tool for graphic design, but many didn’t want to hear it
Words by Meg Miller
Photos by Nolwen Cifuentes
GOSSIP
This is my favorite line ever uttered in one of those flipping-through-the-portfolio presentations that designers love to give: “Only a spiral galaxy can bring forth new stars perpetually.” It was said by April Greiman during a 1996 talk at SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where she was introduced by three male architects who all claimed to be her boyfriend (including her husband, architect and SCI-Arc co-founder Michael Rotondi). It was a reference to the spiral galaxy in her famed poster “Does It Make Sense?,” a five foot, four inch visual timeline of creativity and creation, starting with the Big Bang and ending with the designer herself. Situated among the images of supernovas, ancient symbols, and lunar landings is a life-sized portrait of Greiman, two-headed 1 and completely nude. Foregoing clean lines and Swiss grids, “Does It Make Sense?” is populated with floating low-res video images and bitmapped type. In response to the piece’s titular question, Greiman has been known to paraphrase Wittgenstein: “It makes sense if you give it sense.” The Modernists were shook. It’s the kind of image that might have broken the internet if the internet was a thing in 1986. Instead, the giant fold-out poster arrived to Design Quarterly subscribers by mail and proceeded to crack the graphic design community wide open. Some critics found it to be thoughtless, self-indulgent, and lewd. Others hailed it as a radical advancement in the then-nascent field of digital design. Greiman used an early Macintosh computer to compose her opus, way before the Mac was the default design tool, and was instead considered by many as a potential assault on the fine craft of graphic design.
SENSE & SENSIBILIT Y
By the mid-’80s, Greiman was used to the heated debates and spirited industry chatter that her designs tended to incite. Studying at Kansas City Art Institute and later under Armin Hofmann at Basel School of Design in Switzerland, Greiman possessed the skills of the Modernist tradition, but always had an itch for experimentation. Moving to Los Angeles further inspired her use of bright colors, drop shadow, diagonal type, mixed media, and penchant for DayGlo orange. With designer and photographer Jayme Odgers, she ushered in the California New Wave movement, ran a functional art company called Visual Energy, and designed issues of Wet, the infamous late ’70s/ early ’80s “magazine of gourmet bathing.” By the time she became the director of the graphic design program at CalArts in 1982, she was already enough of a threat that, by Greiman’s account, many of the predominantly male faculty were openly disparaging her work and discouraging students from taking her seriously. She left in 1984 to return to a full-time design practice. Behind the divisive aesthetics of New Wave typography and postmodern style, the driving force for many of Greiman’s best-known works has been a genuine curiosity towards and fervent belief in new technology as a way to push design forward. She moved from photography to video-based imagery, from early computer graphics workstations to the Macintosh. When computers were just at the cusp of accessibility, she was merging handset type with digital elements in her “hybrid imagery” pieces. She got a lot of flack for being an early adopter, but design is undeniably better off for it. It takes a certain amount of fearlessness to stay perpetually ahead of the curve.
Image left: Greiman, April, ‘Does It Make Sense’, Design Quarterly #133, 1986. Image courtesy of the artist.
1. In a video interview with AIGA/ LA, Greiman explains how the two heads came about: "When I started the process of layering the imagery, I had long hair. When I finished it, just about the time that it was going to go to the printer, I cut my hair. So I had to put that in, too; it's a two-headed dragon."
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GOSSIP Image below: Greiman, April, ‘Does It Make Sense’, Design Quarterly #133, 1986. Image courtesy of the artist.
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
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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 to 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.2 I got so tired of some of the famous men who were also on the board saying things like, “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 co-creator, 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.
2. A decade later, Greiman was awarded the 1998 AIGA Medal, one of the highest honors for graphic designers. In an essay that accompanied the award, she’s called “a pioneer of digital communications design.”
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other programming languages, the best known of which is BASIC.
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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.
3. In 1968, Armin Hofmann invited Weingart, then only 27 years old, to teach the typography class at Basel. Through his students over the decades, Weingart introduced a more experimental and expressive approach to typography that was massively influential throughout the design world.
4. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s, Fortran is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to scientific and engineering applications. It was a dominant programming language in the early days of computing, and became the basis for many
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,3 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. 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,4 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.
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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 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. I could understand how they think and how they work. 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”5—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 or publication design. I always wanted to do all of it. I just didn’t have any particular track I wanted to focus on. 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 anyway 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. 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. 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:
5. Greiman also considers her work with architects on spaces and environments to be an aspect of "hybridizing."
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One, your work is so well-developed 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 was not hireable. I did get offered a job by a friend who started a corporate design planning firm in Century City. He said he liked me and my work, so he hired me to work for half a year. 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 things that I identify with. But then, you know, that’s
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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. Even at Basel, I was always thinking of things as objects in space. Why people didn’t put typography on the diagonal, I could never figure out. When Jayme and I started collaborating, the only cover of Wet we did together was that cover with Ricky Nelson. Prior to that, we started a company called Visual Energy and we made what were known as space mats. 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.
Image on previous page: Left: Greiman, April, poster for an exhibition of graphic design, 'Pacific Wave, Museo Fortuny’ Venice. 1987. Color offset lithograph. Image courtesy of the artist. Right: Greiman, April, ‘Iris Light’ poster. 1984. Silkscreen. Image courtesy of the artist. Image below: Greiman, April and Odgers, Jayme, creative director, admission poster / folder mailer for CalArts, 1978. Image courtesy of the artist.
6. Up until this year, Greiman owned a Palm Springs resort called Miracle Manor, which was completely designed in her style.
7. Annual meeting for AIGA members and national board.
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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.6 I was completely knocked out by this natural 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. I also did the piece for Design Quarterly in that period. Right, called “Does It Make Sense?” Can you talk about how it came about?
One of my biggest allies and supporters was Mickey Friedman [the design curator who put Walker Art Center on the map, along with her husband Martin Friedman]. We met at an AIGA Leadership Retreat,7 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,
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but good for my ego. Instead I said, “I’m going to tackle something new and learn a new piece of software, use my video equipment, and just try some things.” 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. Image left: Greiman, April, ‘Does It Make Sense’ back, videography, Design Quarterly #133. 1986. Image courtesy of the artist.
GOSSIP Image below: Greiman, April, ‘Graphic Design in America’ poster. 1989. Color offset Lithograph. Image courtesy of the artist.
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 pre-Renaissance, 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 it. 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
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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
GOSSIP Images opposite: Top left: Greiman, April, Made in Space, branding material for Nicola Restaurant, Los Angeles, CA. 1993. Image courtesy of the artist.
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. And I got the job.
Top right: Greiman, April, Made in Space, with Ken Smith Landscape Architect, Orange County Great Park color consultant, branding and wayfinding, City of Irvine, CA. 2008. Image courtesy of the artist.
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.
Greiman, April, ‘Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice’.public art 8,200 sq. ft. mural, Wilshire Vermont Station, Los Angeles, CA. 2007. Image courtesy of the artist. Greiman, April, Made in Space, branding system for Coop Himmelb(l)au Architects, seen on company’s construction vests. 1990-2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
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 impossible to cross creative lines; it’s a misnomer, these schools that call themselves multidisciplinary. When Lorraine Wild came in a year or so after I stepped down at CalArts, she immediately turned the name back to Graphic Design. 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.
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BRUTALIST DESIGN AND THE RAW WEB The stripped-down style is a rejection of web design that’s too clean and an internet that’s increasingly corporate
Words by Orit Gat