Laurie Haycock Makela

Last updated

Laurie Haycock Makela (born 1956) is an American graphic designer and educator. She co-chaired the design program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 1990s along with her husband, P. Scott Makela. Both were honored with the AIGA medal in 2000. [1]

Contents

Early life

Haycock was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. After earning a bachelor's degree in English and visual communications at the University of California at Berkeley, she attended the graduate program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). [2]  

Career

After studying at RISD for a year, Haycock Makela returned to Los Angeles. She began teaching at the Otis College of Art and Design where she met her future husband, P. Scott Makela. [2] The encounter resulted in a 14-year partnership that “produced—much as when you mix water with gelatin and fruit flavors—more than the sum of its parts.” [1] The couple brought their talents together to form their first of several design studios, Combine, along with partner Paul Knickelbine. Clients for Combine included a range of southern California cultural institutions from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to the Getty and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). [2] In addition to running Combine, the couple taught at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). At CalArts, Haycock Makela and her husband fostered an innovative and exploratory classroom environment where the "Swiss Grid was discarded in pieces on the floor.” [2] In 1990, the Makelas closed their Los Angeles studio and headed to Michigan to study in the graduate program at Cranbrook Academy of Art. At the time, Cranbrook's design program, headed by Katherine McCoy, was a hot bed of design experimentation focused on theories of post-structuralism. [3]

Walker Art Center

After completing her studies at Cranbrook, Haycock Makela accepted a position as design director at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In addition to designing artists catalogues and exhibition materials, she revamped the museum's institutional identity. In 1994, Haycock Makela commissioned type designer Matthew Carter to create a radically new display typeface for the museum, appropriately named Walker. The typeface was intended to break with modernist aesthetics to create an instantly recognizable identity for the museum, independent of a traditional logo. The font featured flexible ‘snap-on’ serifs that offered multiple typographic variations while maintaining a consistent visual image. [4] [5] During this period, Haycock Makela collaborated with Ellen Lupton to pen “Underground Matriarchy,” [6] a fax discussion published in Eye Magazine. The article was important in defining the roles of women in design and forwarding a case for a feminist canon in design. [7] [8] Haycock Makela is noted for applying her talent as a visual communicator to raise awareness about issues related to women in design and to mentor other women designers. [8] [9]

Cranbrook Academy of Art

In 1996, the Makelas were invited to co-chair the 2-D graduate design program at Cranbrook after Katherine McCoy left the school. As co-chairs, the Makelas continued McCoy's legacy of innovation by focusing on visual and technological explorations that examined the roles of new media and digital print design. In a statement to prospective students they promised to create “new interplays between reader, writer, and text,” [10] The couple also jointly ran their design studio, Words + Pictures for Business + Culture. [2] [11] Around this time, Haycock Makela experienced—and recovered—from a brain hemorrhage. In 1998, the Makelas, along with co-author Lewis Blackwell, published Whereishere, a print-website publication that upended traditional understanding of 2-D design. [12] In 1999, P. Scott Makela suddenly died as a result of a rare infection. [11]

Post Cranbrook

Haycock Makela continued to teach at Cranbrook until 2001 when she moved to Los Angeles to accept a position as chair the graphic design program at the Art Center College of Design. In 2003, Haycock Makela experienced her second brain hemorrhage. [13] In 2019, she participated in and designed the catalogue for the Dallas Museum of Art’s exhibition, Speechless: Different by Design. [14]

Publications and exhibits

Awards and honors

In 2000, Laurie Haycock and P. Scott Makela were awarded the AIGA medal. While the couple was recognized for their contributions to design education, Haycock Makela was called out specifically for “her thoughtful experimentalism and refined typography.” [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emigre Fonts</span> American type foundry

Emigre, Inc., doing business as Emigre Fonts, is a digital type foundry based in Berkeley, California, that was founded in 1985 by husband-and-wife team Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko. The type foundry grew out of Emigre magazine, a publication founded by VanderLans and two Dutch friends who met in San Francisco, CA in 1984. Note that unlike the word émigré, Emigre is officially spelled without accents.

Zuzana Licko is a Slovak-born American type designer and visual artist known for co-founding Emigre Fonts, a digital type foundry in Berkeley, CA. She has designed and produced numerous digital typefaces including the popular Mrs Eaves, Modula, Filosofia, and Matrix. As a corresponding interest she also creates ceramic sculptures, textile prints and jacquard weavings.

Rudy VanderLans is a Dutch graphic designer, photographer, and the co-founder of Emigre Fonts with his wife Zuzana Licko. Emigre Fonts is an independent type foundry in Berkeley, CA. He was also the art director and editor of Emigre magazine, the legendary journal devoted to visual communications from 1984 to 2005. Since arriving in California in 1981, he has been photographing his adoptive Golden State as an ongoing side project. He has authored a total of 11 photo books on the topic, and staged two solo exhibits at Gallery 16 in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">April Greiman</span> American designer

April Greiman 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.

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville is an American graphic designer, artist and educator whose work reflects her belief in the importance of feminist principles and user participation in graphic design. In 1990 she became the director of the Yale University Graduate Program in Graphic Design and the first woman to receive tenure at the Yale University School of Art. In 2010 she was named the Caroline M. Street Professor of Graphic Design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebeca Méndez</span> Mexican-American artist and graphic designer

Rebeca Méndez is a Mexican-American artist and graphic designer. She is professor at UCLA Design Media Arts in Los Angeles, California, and since July 2020 is chair of the department, as well as founder and director of the Counterforce Lab. Her Vice-chair Peter Lunenfeld wrote about her: "Rebeca has won the three most significant awards in the field of design: The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Communication Design, 2012, the AIGA Medal in 2017, and induction to the One Club Hall of Fame in 2017. This triple crown would be worthy enough on its own, more than worthy, absolutely exceptional, but when you add in that Rebeca is the first and only Latina to win each one of these, much less all three, the achievement is towering." In fact, she is the only woman ever to have received all these three awards, while Bob Greenberg from R/GA is the only man to have received all of them.

J. Abbott Miller or Abbott Miller is an American graphic designer and writer, and a partner at Pentagram, which he joined in 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ellen Lupton</span> American graphic designer

Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, curator, writer, critic, and educator. Known for her love of typography, Lupton is the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at Maryland Institute College of Art. Previously she was the Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City and was named Curator Emerita after 30 years of service. She is the founding director of the Graphic Design M.F.A. degree program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. She has written numerous books on graphic design for a variety of audiences. She has contributed to several publications, including Print, Eye, I.D., Metropolis, and The New York Times.

Paul Scott Makela was a graphic designer, multimedia designer and type designer. Among other work, he was especially noted for the design of Dead History, a postmodern typeface that combined features of a rounded sans serif typeface and a crisp neo-classical serif typeface. With the emergence of the personal computer in the mid-1980s, Makela was among the first to explore digital programs such as Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. As a result, he created an idiosyncratic, original and highly controversial design aesthetic. In particular, his disregard for clean, modernist, problem-solving design agendas—synonymous with contemporary corporate graphic design—caused much debate among powerful, old-guard designers such as Massimo Vignelli, Paul Rand, and Henry Wolf.

Lorraine Wild is a Canadian-born American graphic designer, writer, art historian, and teacher. She is an AIGA Medalist and principal of Green Dragon Office, a design firm that focuses on collaborative work with artists, architects, curators, editors and publishers. Wild is based in Los Angeles, California.

Edward Fella is an American graphic designer, artist and educator. He created the OutWest typeface in 1993. His work is held in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the Brauer Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. He was the recipient of the 2007 AIGA Medal. He was also the recipient of a Chrysler Award in 1997. Curt Cloninger called Fella "the contemporary master of hand-drawn typography."

Katherine McCoy is an American graphic designer and educator, best known for her work as the co-chair of the graduate Design program for Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Elaine Lustig Cohen was an American graphic designer, artist and archivist. She is best known for her work as a graphic designer during the 1950s and 60s, having created over 150 designs for book covers and museum catalogs. Her work has played a significant role in the evolution of American modernist graphic design, integrating European avant-garde with experimentation to create a distinct visual vocabulary. Cohen later continued her career as a fine artist working in a variety of media. In 2011, she was named an AIGA Medalist for her achievements in graphic design.

Louise Sandhaus is an American graphic designer and design educator. She is a professor at California Institute of the Arts and is principal of Louise Sandhaus Design.

Nancy Skolos is an American graphic designer, author, educator and co-founder of Skolos-Wedell studio. Skolos is best known for her work at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where she has served as the graphic design department head.

Lucille Tenazas is a graphic designer, educator, and the founder of Tenazas Design. Her work consists of layered imagery and typography, focusing on the importance of language. She was born in Manila, Philippines, yet has spent a large portion of her life practicing in the United States.

Anne Quito is a design reporter and architecture critic based in New York City. A former reporter at Quartz, she is also the founding director of Design Lab, the in-house design team for Family Health International (FHI). In 2017, Quito won the inaugural Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). In 2018, a story she co-authored received a silver medal in the Malofiej Infographic Awards.

Noreen Morioka is an American graphic designer and co-founder of AdamsMorioka. She is recognized for her distinct California-influenced approach to visual communications. In 2014, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) awarded the AIGA Medal to Morioka and her business partner Sean Adams for their contributions to graphic design. At present, she is Chief Creative Officer at The New Computer Corporation and frequently serves as competition juror and lecturer.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Home | AIGA". www.aiga.org. Retrieved 2022-06-22.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Noble, Mike (1996). "Playing with Creative Fire". Graphis (303): 28–37.
  3. ↑ "Eye Magazine | Feature | The academy of deconstructed design". Eye Magazine. Retrieved 2022-06-22.
  4. ↑ Blauvelt, Andrew; Lupton, Ellen (2011). Graphic design: Now in production. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. pp. 194, 202. ISBN   978-0-935640-98-4.
  5. ↑ Re, Margaret; Drucker, Johanna; Carter, Matthew; Mosley, James (2003). Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter. Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 24–26.
  6. ↑ "Eye Magazine | Feature | Underground matriarchy". Eye Magazine. Retrieved 2022-06-23.
  7. ↑ "Gentlemen Prefer Blogs". Design Observer. Retrieved 2022-06-23.
  8. 1 2 Triggs, Teal (2016). "Graphic Design". In Carson, Fiona; Pajaczkowska, Claire (eds.). Feminist Visual Culture. Routledge. ISBN   9781315023663.
  9. ↑ "California Girls". Design Observer. Retrieved 2022-06-23.
  10. ↑ Wright, Bruce (1996). "The McCoy Generation". Print (Nov.–Dec).
  11. 1 2 Heller, Steven (1999-05-15). "P. Scott Makela, 39, Pioneering Graphic Designer, Dies". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-06-23.
  12. ↑ Makela, P. Scott; Haycock, Laurie; Blackwell, Lewis (1998). Whereishere. Ginko. ISBN   978-3927258877.
  13. ↑ "Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Laurie Haycock Makela". Design Observer. Retrieved 2022-06-23.
  14. ↑ "speechless: different by design | Dallas Museum of Art". dma.org. Retrieved 2022-06-23.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.