 |
Lorraine Wild | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1953 (age 69–70) Ontario, Canada |
| Alma mater | Cranbrook Academy of Art |
Lorraine Wild (born 1953, Ontario, Canada) [1] 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.
In 1973, Wild entered the Cranbrook Academy of Art program which was, at the time, under the leadership of Michael and Katherine McCoy. In 1975, she received her B.F.A. degree in Graphic Design. [2]
Two years later, she moved to New York to work for Vignelli Associates from 1977 to 1978. [2] During this time, she was researching the history of American graphic design post World War II. This personal interest of research led her to further studying at Yale University where she earned an M.F.A. degree in 1982. [3] While at Yale University, she designed Perspecta 19, which was Yale's architectural journal. Along with Perspecta 19, she also designed the Chamber Works and Theatrum Mundi portfolios for the architect Daniel Libeskind, and the book of architect John Hejduk entitled Mask of Medusa in 1985. Her work on the designs of these books helped launch her fast-growing reputation for thoughtful and distinctive design in books on architecture, art, and design. Her MFA thesis entitled "Trends in American Graphic Design: 1930-1955" was recognized as an important contribution to design scholarship and led to many commissions for essays. From here on, her reputation continued to soar and her work earned national recognition. [4]
While teaching in the University of Houston's architecture school during the early 1980s, Wild wrote the influential essay "More Than A Few Questions about Graphic Design Education" (1983), first published in The Design Journal. In the article, she gives a provocative analysis which became the driving force for recharacterizing graphic design education in the United States. This led to her being hired as graphic design program director at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1985. [5] During her time as director, she developed and implemented a new model for graphic design education that emphasized the process of conveying meaning through experimental, conceptual, and formal development. The program challenged modernist graphic design methodology by encouraging students to use personal and emotional experiences to their work. In 1988, Liz McQuiston selected Lorraine Wild as one of forty-three women in six countries whose work is innovative or has had significant impact in their chosen fields of design. The other American graphic designers included Jacqueline Casey, Muriel Cooper, June Fraser, April Greiman, Katherine McCoy. [6] She continued to stay on the Cal Arts faculty after she stepped down as program director in 1991.
From 1991 to 1998, she served as project tutor at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, Netherlands. Lorraine Wild was one of the founders of the design office ReVerb, which was the recipient of the 1995 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. She left ReVerb in 1996 to start her own company- Lorraine Wild Design. As a side project, she partnered with Roman Alonso and Lisa Eisner in 1999 to establish Greybull Press. Greybull Press was an imprint specializing in the publication of photographic archives and collections that were considered potentially influential to tastemakers. Lorraine Wild Design was later renamed the Green Dragon Office [7] in 2004. The Green Dragon Office focused on collaborations with architects, artists, curators, and publishers in the United States and abroad and has designed catalogs for exhibitions at museums including MOCA, UCLA's Hammer Museum, the Getty Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. [8] In 1998, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held the exhibition "Lorraine Wild: Selections from the Permanent Collection," a display of work that the museum regards as their collection of significant design produced in California. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Wild sporadically contributed to Emigre, publishing a variety of critical essays such as the influential "That was Then, and This is Now: But What is Next?".
In 2005, she became a regular contributor to Design Observer, the leading website on design commentary and criticism. She has also served on the National Board of the AIGA and on the design advisory board for the international Design Conference at Aspen, Colorado. She loves the works of designers W.A. Dwiggins, who reinvented American typography by bringing arts-and-crafts values to design for machine production; Alvin Lustig, an architect, printer, educator, who refused to specialize; Imre Reiner, an anti-Modernist typographer in Switzerland who rebelled against "objectivity"; Sister Corita Kent, a Southern California nun and printmaker who, in the 1960s, seized upon the idea of using the language of pop culture to speak to her local audience about spirituality, subverting, and appropriating to communicate; and Edward Fella, who mutated out of "commercial art" by working on problems only as he defined them and his commitment to anti-mastery. [9]
"Her thoroughly informed and deeply sympathetic understanding of the nature of art and design has brought her commissions for monographs on artists and architects as far-ranging as Mike Kelley and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well as books and exhibition catalogues for institutions such as Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Getty Museum, UCLA's Hammer Museum, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal." [10] Her visual work has been formed around a passion for typographic detail and formal invention and analysis.
On September 14, 2010, she wrote a very informative and critical article in the Design Observatory Group website entitled "The Black Rule". [11] According to Wild, the Black Rule is "intimately connected to a typographic grid, and the paper it's printed on." [11] The color black symbolizes importance and, in the case of The Black Rule, formality. The Black Rule also defines the dimensions of a piece of paper and separates the hierarchy of heads and subheads. The text that is used for The Black Rule is, commonly, Helvetica. This is evident in our every day life whether we notice it or not is the question. The most noticeable signs of The Black Rule is on subway signs [12] or on U.S. Park Service maps. [11] Wild was not the founder or inventor of The Black Rule. Massimo Vignelli is credited for discovering The Black Rule. This became his own brand although it was not typical, at the time, for designers to have a certain icon to represent his or her own work. Vignelli's most popular works is designing the American Airlines logo and the iconic New York City Subway maps. [13]
Lorraine Wild was one of forty-three women in six countries whose work was selected by Liz McQuiston as innovative or had significant impact in their chosen fields of design. [14] She was one of three finalists for the 2001 Communication Award of the National Design Awards sponsored by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. She was awarded a gold medal by the New York Art Director's Club for the design of Height of Fashion. She has received a great number of awards from prestigious organizations such as the American Center for Design, the American Institute of Graphic Arts' (AIGA) highly selective "50 Best Books of the Year," the American Institute of Architects and the American Association of University Publishers. Her writing has appeared in many periodicals and books that include Émigré, ID, Print, Graphic Design in America, Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, Lift & Separate, Looking Closer, and The Education of a GraphicDesigner. [15]
Wild was the recipient of a 2006 AIGA medal. [16] The medal of AIGA—the most distinguished in the field—is awarded to individuals in recognition of their exceptional achievements, services or other contributions to the field of design and visual communication. [17]
She is currently the principal of Green Dragon Office in Los Angeles, a design firm that focuses on collaborative work with artists, architects, curators, editors and publishers which has been active since 1996; [18] she is also the creative director of design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Wild continues to be associated with the design program at the California Institute of the Arts. She is also a partner (along with Kristine McKenna and Donna Wingate) in Foggy Notion Books. Past collaborations include a partnership with Louise Sandhaus and Rick Valicenti in Wild LuV, and a co-editorship with Roman Alonso and Lisa Eisher in Greybull Press of Los Angeles. [19] She is married to John Kaliski, AIA, principal of the Los Angeles architectural and urban planning firm John Kaliski, architects.
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.
Massimo Vignelli was an Italian designer who worked in a number of areas including packaging, houseware, furniture, public signage, and showroom design. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella. His motto was, "If you can design one thing, you can design everything," which the broad range of his work reflects.
Michael Bierut is a graphic designer, design critic and educator, who has been a partner at design firm Pentagram since 1990. He designed the logo for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
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.
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.
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."
Alvin Lustig was an American book designer, graphic designer and typeface designer. Lustig has been honored by the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame for his significant contributions to American design.
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.
Tomoko Miho was a Japanese-American graphic designer and recipient of the 1993 AIGA Medal. She is known for her understanding of the relationship between space and object.
Lella Vignelli was an Italian architect, designer, and businesswomen. She collaborated closely throughout much of her life with her husband Massimo Vignelli, with whom she founded Vignelli Associates in 1971.
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.
Deborah Sussman was an American designer and a pioneer in the field of environmental graphic design. Her work incorporated graphic design into architectural and public spaces.
Gere Kavanaugh is an American textile, industrial, and interior designer. She is the principal of Gere Kavanaugh Designs.
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.
Gail Swanlund is a contemporary graphic designer and writer who describes her work as living "at the intersection of real world practice of graphic design and design as art form, with a deep respect for natural and supernatural systems." Swanlund was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1963. She lives and works in Los Angeles, moving within a community of graphic designers making "literate, intelligent work" such as Anne Burdick, Denise Gonzales Crisp, Jens Gehlhaar, Geoff Kaplan, Geoff McFetridge, Louise Sandhaus, Alexei Tylevich and Michael Worthington.
Louis Danziger is an American graphic designer and design educator. He is most strongly associated with the late modern movement in graphic design, and with a community of designers from various disciplines working in Southern California in the mid-twentieth century. He is noted for his iconoclastic approach to design, and for introducing the principles of European constructivism to the American advertising vernacular.
The Vignelli Center for Design Studies, established in 2010, is a college of design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Named after the New York City based Italian designers, Massimo and Lella Vignelli, this 15,500 square foot facility also holds the archives of their work as Vignelli Associates.
Vignelli Associates was a design firm co-founded and run by Massimo and Lella Vignelli in New York City, from 1971 to 2014. They worked firmly within the modernist tradition, stressing simplicity by using basic geometric shapes and a limited range of typefaces. Their design work, encompassing graphic design, branding and corporate identity, architecture and interiors, and industrial design is considered among the most influential of the 20th century.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
