Influential Designers: Day 1

Wednesday, May 6 was the first day of our influential designer presentations. The class heard about April Grieman, Milton Glaser, and Seymour Chwast.

April Grieman went to school at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she learned about modernism, and attended graduate school at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland. At Basel, she discovered New Wave design with the help of Wolfgang Weinhart, one of her professors, and began to design in that style. New Wave had mostly to do with the way the typography was designed, which was unconventional and innovative. She later became involved with photograpy and digital imaging. April inspired the beginning of digital design with the images she was creating, especially with the Design Quartery #133 image. It wasn't like what anyone else had done before or even seen and she became very influential to this way of designing.

Milton Glaser attended an art and music high school and Cooper Union with Seymour Chwast and the other members of the Push Pin Studio, which they formed in 1954. Both have a similar cartoonish way of designing and drawing, using thin black lines and art nouveau influences. Milton had a more simplistic and direct style and tended to leave out details, allowing the viewer to fill them in, while Seymour explored typography more and had a very distinct sense of humor in his pieces. After Milton left the Push Pin studio he worked on several different projects. He had a couple of his own companies, one of which was Milton Glaser Inc, where he worked with many periodicals or did his own print graphics. Seymour stuck with the Studio and expanded it and published the Studio's own periodical that lasted for about 5 years. He became well known for his poster designs and wrote and illustrated around 20 of his own children's books.