& BIOGRAPHIES NOTES

Beatrice Warde

As a publicist for the Monotype Corporation, one of the leading typeface manufacturers, Beatrice Warde filled lecture halls from the 1930s to the 1950s, speaking to printers, typesetters, teachers, and students. Quite literally, she brought art to the masses. Through her prolific lectures and essays, she rose to meet the towering issue of the day— functionalism—with an approach based on tradition. In her mind, classical approaches to typography were not shackles to be cast aside but valuable history that should inform new work.

Josef Müller-Brockmann divided and ordered graphic design into the grid of Swiss typography. He took design elements that were subjective, irrational, and chaotic and brought them under tight, measured control. He delved deep into form and content, spending his life in Zurich paring down his work to the essentials necessary for what he considered an objective—even timeless method of communication. The grid was key to this pursuit. His intense quest to achieve a universal system of communication calls to contemporary designers seeking ideal global forms for the world of new media.

Ellen Lupton gave graphic design a new vocabulary. Through her seminal books and exhibitions, she took key theoretical ideas encompassing art, literature, and culture and applied them to our profession. When people want to understand design, they turn to Lupton. Beginning in 1992, she served as contemporary design curator for the Cooper- Hewitt, National Design Museum. In 2003 she launched a graphic design MFA program in Baltimore at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Through her work at these institutions and through her prolific writing, she has opened up the discourse of design to the general public.

Katherine McCoy galvanized the design community during the late 1970s and 1980s. Under her leadership, experimental work undertaken at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan transformed graphic design into provocation. Balking against the modern constraints of Swiss typographic systems, her students ushered in a period of complexity, ambiguity, and subjectivity. Moving beyond the more formal radical experimentation of Wolfgang Weingart, McCoy explored “new relationships between text and image.” The resulting multilayered, personal work consciously provoked interpretation from the audience. Modernism’s emphasis on form gave way to a highly individuated study of expression. Typography became discourse to be evaluated and discussed within the dense cultural context of philosophy, linguistics, and cultural theory.