April Greiman

April Greiman was born in New York in 1948. She took her B.F.A. at the Kansas City Art Institute and then in 1970 enrolled at the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule Basel (Basel School of Design), where she studied for a year under Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart. Weingart was in the process of breaking open the strict Swiss grid from inside; Greiman was there for the breaking.

She returned to the United States in 1971 and settled in Los Angeles in 1976, founding her own studio almost immediately. Through the late 1970s her work with Leonard Koren’s WET magazine became the first major American argument for a New Wave graphic-design idiom — layered, diagonal, colour- saturated, anti-grid — adapted from Weingart’s Basel experiments but sharpened by Los Angeles print production and pop culture.

In 1982 she became director of the Graphic Design programme at the California Institute of the Arts — the youngest person, and the first woman, to hold that post. Her two-year tenure cemented CalArts’s reputation as the American postmodern- design counterweight to Yale. The 1984 CalArts identity is the studio’s clearest surviving artefact of the period.

Greiman acquired a Macintosh in early 1984, months after its January launch. She was among the first American graphic designers to treat the computer as a primary design tool rather than a production device. The 1986 Design Quarterly #133 foldout — a life-size self-portrait composited from MacPaint, Aldus PageMaker and video digitising — is both the first sustained argument for digital graphic design and the work that made Greiman internationally famous.

From 1985 her studio renamed itself Made in Space and moved from commercial identity work into environmental graphics, architectural typography and public art. Commissions through the 1990s and 2000s included the Los Angeles Wilshire/Vermont Station public-art installation (2007), the US Census 2000 identity, and long-running work with Los Angeles cultural institutions. She received the AIGA Medal in 1998 and has taught at SCI-Arc for over two decades.

Greiman’s working position is that the computer is a collaborator, not a tool. Where most 1980s design culture treated the Macintosh as a cheaper way to make the same products, Greiman argued that the machine produced its own aesthetic — bitmapped edges, colour palettes, compositing accidents — and that serious practice meant working with what the machine actually did.

“The computer is another mind. I’m working with it, not against it.” — April Greiman

Three commitments organise the work. First, hybridity. Greiman’s Hybrid Imagery (1990) argued that contemporary practice would be a fusion of hand, photograph, video still and computer render — not a replacement of analog by digital. The position proved substantially correct over the following three decades.

Second, colour as a structural element. Greiman’s Los Angeles-inflected palette — hot pinks, acid yellows, stadium cyans — rejected the Swiss monochrome her Basel training had been built on. She argued colour was typographically functional, not decorative.

Third, the page as architectural space. Her movement from publication design into environmental graphics was consistent with a long-held position that graphic design and spatial design operate on a continuum. The Wilshire/Vermont installation is the clearest demonstration.