April Greiman (born March 22, 1948) is an American designer widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s." According to design historian Steven Heller, "April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital." "She is a pivotal proponent of the 'new typography' and new wave that defined late twentieth-century graphic design." Her art combines her Swiss design training with West Coast postmodernism.
Greiman finds the title graphic designer too limiting and prefers to call herself a "transmedia artist". Her work has inspired designers to develop the computer as a tool of design and to be curious and exploratory in their design approach. Her process includes typelayering, where words and letters are sandwiched and layered, but also appear to float along with other 'objects in space' such as: color swatches, illustrations, lines, mapping, photographs, shapes, among other visual assets. She creates a sense of depth and dynamism, in particular, by combining graphic elements through making extensive use of Apple Macintosh technology. Los Angeles Times called her graphic style "an experiment in creating hybrid imagery." She has been called the "Queen of New Wave" within the movement, although she has said that she resents that title.
Early life and education Born on March 22, 1948, and New Jersey, metropolitan New York, April Greiman grew up in Wantagh, Long Island and later Woodcliff Lake, NJ. Her father was an early computer programmer, systems analyst at Lightolier where he introduced the first main-frame computer into Lightolier's business, and later, founder and president of The Ventura Institute of Technology. Her mother, Renee, was a dancer and dance teacher in collaboration with the Fred Astaire Dance Studio. Her only sibling, Paul, became a meteorologist and specialist in climatic and atmospheric interplanetary modeling.
From 1966-70 Greiman was an undergraduate at the Kansas City Art Institute, and studied graphic design, photography and ceramics. In 1970-71 Greiman continued her postgraduate studies at the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule Basel, now known as the Basel School of Design (Schule für Gestaltung Basel) in Basel, Switzerland (1970–1971). As a student of Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart, and she was influenced by the International Style and by Weingarts' introduction to the style later known as New Wave, an aesthetic that moved away from a Modernist heritage.
Career During the 1970s, she rejected the belief, among many contemporary designers, that computers and digitalization would compromise the International Typographic Style; instead, she exploited emergent technologies and the Basic Chance Principle as integral parts of digital art, a position she has held throughout her career.
After completing her postgraduate studies in Switzerland, Greiman moved to Philadelphia and became an associate professor at the Philadelphia College of Art, (now known as University of the Arts) and worked as a freelance designer in Philadelphia and New York City. Utilizing her aesthetic that "...blends technology, science, word and image with color and space...". Greiman worked on projects with Emilio Ambasz, Curator of Design at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1976 Greiman moved to Los Angeles, after a brief stint as a freelancer with a corporate design agency in Century City, and established the studio, April Greiman, Inc. and became a leading figure of the emergent California New Wave.
Upon Greiman's relocation from New York City to Los Angeles, she met designer-photographer Jayme Odgers, who became a significant collaborator. In 1978 they designed a famous Cal Arts poster that became a seminal design of the California New Wave. They also collaborated on a poster design for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. In 1981 they created an iconic poster of running legs silhouetted against a square of bright blue sky that was published in 1982 in advance of the 1984 Olympics.
In 1982, Greiman was appointed Director of the design department at the California Institute of the Arts, also known as Cal Arts. In 1984, she lobbied successfully to change the department name to Visual Communications, as she felt the term "graphic design" would prove too limiting to future designers. At Cal Arts she had the opportunity to experiment with new technology where she had access to an analog computer, synthesizer and video equipment set up by the instructor and famed artist, Nam June Paik, and investigated in greater depth the effects of technology in her own work.
Greiman began acquiring her own equipment beginning with a first generation half-inch video camera. This led to working with the Quantel Paintbox. By observing this new and innovative equipment, Greiman applied this knowledge to early low-resolution tools, such as Amiga and Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer Inc.).
An early adopter of computer technology, as noted in Apple's Mac @ 30 video, in February 1984 in Monterey, California, Greiman attended the first TED Conference, or Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference that featured several notable speakers including demos of the compact disc, co-developed by Philips and Sony, and one of the first demonstrations of the Apple Macintosh computer by Alan Kay which inspired her to acquire her first computer, the Macintosh computer.
In 1986, Greiman was invited by The Walker Art Center to produce Issue 133 of Design Quarterly entitled: Does It Make Sense? The edition was edited by Mildred Friedman and published by the MIT Press & Walker Art Center. Using MacVision, a combination hardware/software interface to digitize still frames from a video camera or VCR, Greiman re-imagined the magazine as a fold-out artwork. The nearly three-by-six foot print carefully unfolds three times across and nine times down revealing a life-sized image of Greiman's outstretched naked body adorned with symbolic images and text. Does It Make Sense? was a provocative gesture, which "emphatically countered the objective, rational and masculine tendencies of modernist design", Greiman has said about the artwork's unusual format and title, "the sense it has for me is that it's new and yet old,... it's a magazine, which is an artwork, which is an object, which is... crazy." Does It Make sense? also launched the Walker Art Center's new Everyday Art Gallery and part of many institution and museum collections.
In 1988 in MacWorld'''sMacworld First Annual Mac Masters Art Competition, Greiman was awarded Fine Arts First Prize (A) for her Pacific Wave Sculpture, a project produced for the Fortuny Museum in Venice, Italy, for the museum's Pacific Wave Festival, an exhibition celebrating California graphic designers September 27 – December 27, 1987. Greiman also designed the official poster, Pacific Wave, for the festival, now in several museum collections including LACMA, and featured in The Getty's marketing for 2024 PST ART: Art & Science Collide, an initiative with arts institutions across Southern California.
In 1995, the US Postal Service issued a 32-cent Women's Suffrage commemorative stamp designed by Greiman to commemorate the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (Women's Voting Rights). The stamp went on sale nationwide on August 28, 1995. The stamp was printed by Ashton-Potter USA, Ltd. (established in 1925 in Canada by the Ashton and Potter families) in the offset printing / intaglio (printmaking) process and is included in the collection of the National Postal Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1997, Greiman and her husband, architect Michael Rotondi, purchased Miracle Manor, a 1940's motel in the Desert Hot Springs on top of Miracle Hill, with naturally hot and cold mineral springs discovered over 100 years ago. Innovatively restored and turned it into a retreat showcased their three-dimensional design as an oasis of the spirit with "pool and buildings with a purity equal to the desert's." Celebrating the subtle forms and textures of the desert, sky, and waters.
In 2005, Greiman established her current Los Angeles-based design consultancy Made In Space. Teaching In 1982, Greiman became the Director of the Visual Communications Program of the California Institute of the Arts' design department. In 1992, she was adjunct faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture until 2009 when she moved on to the Woodbury University School of Architecture until 2018. In Spring 2020, Greiman became a tenured professor of design at the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design.
With four honorary doctorates, April Greiman is seen as one of the "ultimate risktakers" for her approach to design by the use of new technologies.
Honors and awards Vesta Award for Outstanding Achievements of Women, Hearth and Home Magazine, Los Angeles, California, 1985 Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), Invited Board Member, 1986 Grand Prize Winner, Macintosh Masters in Art Competition, Macworld, San Francisco, California, 1988 Winner, Unesco International Poster Contest, 1987 Winner, The Modern Poster Competition, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, New York, 1988 Hall Chair Fellowship, Hallmark Corporation, Kansas City, Missouri, 1990 Frankfurt Book Fair Bronze Medal for From the Edge: Southern California Institute of Architecture, Der Stiftung Buchkunst Prâmiert (Best Books of the World), Los Angeles, California, 1994 50 Best Books of the Year, AIGA, New York City, New York, 1997 AIGA, Gold Medalist, New York City, New York, 1998 Chrysler Award for Design Innovation, Auburn Hill, Michigan, 1998 Finalist, Inaugural National Design Award in Communication Arts, Awarded at White House, Clinton Administration, Washington, DC, 2000 Kansas City Art Institute, honorary doctorate, Kansas City, Missouri, 2001 College of Art and Design, Lesley University, honorary doctorate, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002 Academy of Art University, honorary doctorate, San Francisco, California, 2003 Masters Series Award, School of Visual Arts, New York City, New York, 2008 Art Center College of Design, honorary doctorate, Pasadena, California, 2012 Honorary Member Award for Lifetime Achievement Award, Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago, Illinois, 2018
Notable works and accomplishments
Belmont Beach Aquatic Center, color palette, environmental graphics, and signage for 5-acre aquatic sports community recreation center with RoTo Architects, Long Beach, CA, in progress Indian Institute of Technology, Experimental Typography, Keynote Speech, Industrial Design Centre, Mumbai, India, March 2, 2019 – March 4, 2019 Architecture + Design Museum (A+D), Farbe/Color: Armin Hofmann, Exhibition Design and Curation with RoTo Architects, 2013, traveled to Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 15, 201 – March 1, 2015; Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 24 – October 7, 2016; and Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 28 – September 17, 2017. Apple Documentary Movie, MAC @ 30, Featured Designer, January 2014 Architecture + Design Museum (A+D), Drylands Design, Exhibition Environmental Graphics and Graphic Design with Laurie Haycock Makela, Office of Hadley and Peter Arnold and Chu-Gooding Architects, Los Angeles, California, 2012 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990, Exhibition and Publication with Essay, September 24, 2011– January 15, 2012 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), American Masters: The Architect and the Painter, Charles and Ray Eames, Video Contribution to Film, 2011