CAA News Today

April Greiman, an innovative designer whose work with digital technology freed graphic design and typography from its reliance on the modernist grid, helping push an analogue profession into the digital realm, will speak at CAA’s upcoming Annual Members’ Business Meeting.

Born and raised in New York, Greiman attended the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. She completed graduate studies with the designers Armin Hoffman and Wolfgang Weingart at the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule (General Arts Trade School) in Basel, Switzerland, an early 1970s hotbed for the emerging “new wave” aesthetic. Greiman’s early visual identity and publication projects—especially her experimental issue of Design Quarterly in 1986—were notable for their pioneering use of early Apple Macintosh computers and software, and for their radical combination of video and print technologies.

As head of the design studio Made in Space, Greiman consults in transmedia identity and architectural branding, and with color, surfaces, and materials. In the academic sphere, she has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the California Institute of the Arts, where she led the design program in the 1980s and served as chair of Visual Communications in the 1990s. She is the author of several books on design, including Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design (1990) and Something from Nothing: Design Process (2001).

As a practicing fine artist, Greiman has produced work encompassing digital photography, video, installation design, and architecture. Her public projects in Los Angeles, where she has lived since 1976, include Poet’s Walk for Citicorp Plaza and the seven-story mural Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice at the entrance to the Wilshire Vermont Metro Station in Koreatown. Greiman’s digital photography and transmedia work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Pasadena Museum of California Art. Most recently, her work was included in the exhibition elles@centrepompidou at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Greiman has received numerous local, state, and national design awards, including a Hall Chair Fellowship from the Hallmark Corporation, a Gold Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, a Chrysler Award for Innovation from the Chrysler Corporation, an AIGA Fellowship, and an American Institute of Architects Award.

CAA’s Annual Members’ Business Meeting will take place during the 100th Annual Conference on Friday, February 24, 2012, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM at Los Angeles Convention Center.