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title: "April Greiman | New Wave Design & Early Digital Typography | TGDS"
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# April Greiman | New Wave Design & Early Digital Typography | TGDS

April Greiman
Design history · 1980s New Wave + early digital
The designer who proved the Mac could be a serious design tool.
April Greiman (born 1948) is the American designer whose Los Angeles studio Made in Space produced the earliest convincing argument that the personal computer was a legitimate graphic-design medium. Her 1986 foldout for Design Quarterly #133 — a life-size self-portrait composited entirely in Aldus and MacPaint — set the template for a decade of digital typography.
Biography
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.
Design philosophy
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.
Key works
Design Quarterly #133 — “Does It Make Sense?” (1986) — 2-foot-by-6-foot foldout for Walker Art Center. Digital self-portrait with annotation, composited across MacPaint, Aldus PageMaker, and video digitising. The single most-cited piece of first-generation digital graphic design. WET magazine (1977–1981) — Leonard Koren’s Los Angeles alternative-lifestyle magazine. Greiman’s layouts and covers established the New Wave typographic language that dominated 1980s American graphic design. CalArts identity (1984) — identity and publication system for the California Institute of the Arts, produced during and after Greiman’s two-year directorship of the graphic-design programme. The identity outlived her tenure. Lifetime Learning Systems (1986) — complete publication system produced end-to-end on Macintosh. One of the first sustained commercial engagements that demonstrated “designed on a Mac” was now viable for serial publication. Wilshire/Vermont Station public art (2007) — large-scale tile and signage installation for the LA Metro Purple Line station. Translated Made in Space’s typographic and colour practice into architecture. Your Turn, My Turn book (1983, with Eric Martin) — early argument for video stills as graphic-design material, made two years before Greiman had a Macintosh.
Influence & legacy
Greiman’s most direct legacy is the American New Wave typographic idiom of the 1980s. Together with Dan Friedman, Katherine McCoy and the Emigre cohort, she helped translate Weingart’s Basel experiments into a distinctly American postmodern graphic-design language. Every layered, diagonal, colour-saturated publication of the late 1980s is downstream of WET and the CalArts work. Her Macintosh advocacy reshaped how the profession related to the computer. Before Design Quarterly #133, “designed on a computer” was a mild pejorative; after it, digital practice became a legitimate and eventually default mode. Greiman was among the first practitioners to argue — from inside the studio, with finished work — that the machine was a partner. The Basel-to-Los Angeles lineage she carried has since become a recognised strand of American design education. CalArts, Cranbrook and SCI-Arc have all, in different ways, extended the position that postmodern formal experimentation and serious formal training are compatible practices.
Learn at TGDS
Greiman’s practice connects to several modules of our curriculum. If her approach interests you, the most direct next steps are: Certificate IV in Design (CUA40720) — covers typography, grid systems, and the postmodern grid- breaking tradition Greiman extended from her Basel training. Intensive Foundation Course — 11 modules in typography, layout and image-making. The same craft Greiman pushed through the Macintosh into early digital editorial work. Certificate of completion, not the Cert IV. Wolfgang Weingart — Greiman’s Basel tutor. Armin Hofmann — Greiman’s other Basel tutor; the counter-example against whose work hers is usefully compared.
Further reading
April Greiman, Hybrid Imagery — The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design (Watson-Guptill, 1990). April Greiman, It’s Not What You Think It Is (Artemis, 1994). April Greiman, Something from Nothing (Rotovision, 2002). April Greiman & Philip Meggs, Floating Ideas into Time and Space (L’Arca, 1998). Andrew Blauvelt, “Design Quarterly 133: A Backstory” (Walker Art Center, 2019). madeinspace.la — current Made in Space studio site. Cooper Hewitt Museum, April Greiman exhibition history.