April Greiman

Following Wolfgang Weingart with his ‘creation ‘of New Wave design,  Grieman made a lot of progress with digital design being one of the first designer to take a dive into the medium. Greiman was a leading figure in New Wave design and branched out into a style of her own, even after studying under Wolfgang Weingart. This was possible because Weingart tried not to push his own style on to his students and instead let them carve their own way. 

Greimans is very notably known for her work in early digital design and for her unique style that she brings to publications like ‘Wet’.

This first example by April Greiman highlights some of the characteristics she brought over from her time studying with Weingart. Particularly in this piece and some of her other works, she makes use of ‘rectilinear stepped blocks’, a design that Weingart had originally begun using. We can see examples of this near the title text of this poster. Another interesting thing about this piece is the optical illusion happening with the type. We can see that some of the type seems to be shadowed by a copy of itself that is laid inaccurately behind it to give this interesting sense of implied three-dimensionality.  Some other things in this poster that are typical New Wave characteristics is the use of layering. In this poster we can see that elements and assets have been placed over each other and this gives an implication of shallow depth in the piece. We can also note a similar use of juxtaposition as we saw in my previous blog post about wolfgang weingart.  We can see that the text seems to be very structured and makes use of a grid based on a shifted axis while the background seems to have many elements going in different opposing directions that is in vast comparison to the structured nature of the type, this creates juxtaposition between them.

This next poster by April Greiman highlights some of the other characteristics of her work. Greiman was also known for her unique use of colour. She was known for using warm tones that resembled the Californian climate and those colours are evident in this poster. This poster also shows her use of gradients and textures which she uses to decorate her background. Upon closer inspection of this piece we can see her interesting use of shape and how it creates and interesting sense of dynamism in the overall aesthetic. We have the repeated use of rectilinear stepped blocks that give this sense of rigidity and order juxtaposed by these repeated diagonal and pointed lines that seem to cut into and frame the other aspects of the design like the photomontage used.

While Weingart could be considered the father of New Wave, I believe that Greiman could easily have been the gateway to the digital age of design as her works were one of the first works done using the newly introduced personal computers. 

References:

Designishistory-designishistory.com-2015 [http://www.designishistory.com/1980/april-greiman/][last accessed on 28/01/2015]

 April Greiman-aprilgreiman.com-2015 [http://aprilgreiman.com/][last accessed on 28/01/2015]