April Greiman has worked for Esprit, XeroxCorp, and Benetton, but her defining design statement came in a revolutionary issue of Design Quarterly that personalized graphic design. After completing studies with Wolfgang Weingart at the Basel School of Design, Greiman moved first...
[more]April Greiman has worked for Esprit, XeroxCorp, and Benetton, but her defining design statement came in a revolutionary issue of Design Quarterly that personalized graphic design.
After completing studies with Wolfgang Weingart at the Basel School of Design, Greiman moved first to New York and then to Los Angeles. It was in the context of Los Angeles culture, with its access to cutting-edge science and technology, that Greiman developed a new design approach and, in 1985, produced her groundbreaking project for Design Quarterly. The magazine unfolded accordion-style into a single page that measured two feet by six feet. The central image was a life-size, digitized, nude self-portrait of Greiman. Her eyes were shut, her hair was loose, and floating around her were random images ranging from dinosaurs to weather symbols. A timetable ran the length of the poster, marking the dates of such events as the first man on the moon, Greiman's birthday, and the invention of electricity. The issue was the first of its kind to be composed and assembled as a single document on MacDraw. It was no conventional collage; many of the technological advances that followed in the graphic design community can be directly traced back to this daring issue.
Having pioneered a computerized blend of photography, airbrushing, and typesetting, Greiman is pushing design to the edge of computer technology. Considered the queen of techno-color, she combines every visual and electronic medium and is, according to New York designer Massimo Vignelli, by far the most daring and meaningfully experimental graphic designer in the world. Working with technology developed for advanced video production, Greiman mixes still photography with video imagery, artwork, calligraphy, and animation. The technique provides Greiman with an entirely different palette of patterns, colors, and forms including diagonals, lowercase type, and color bars. When assembled by Greiman, these graphemes often resemble a woven fabric or a Pointillist painting. Interestingly, her move from New York to Los Angeles saw her abandon the corporate grays and blues that had been prevalent in her work in favor of Japanese plums and maroons, Mexican peach and salmon, and brilliant turquoise.
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