April Greiman

April Greiman
April Greiman 'blur-mode' self-portrait
Born	(1948-03-22) March 22, 1948 (age 68)
Nationality	American
Occupation	Designer
Known for	One of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool
Notable work	Ron Resek Poster, P.C. World Magazine Cover, Workspace '87 Poster

April Greiman (born 22 March 1948) is a designer. "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 establishing the ‘New Wave’ design style in the US during the late 70s and early 80s." Greiman heads Los Angeles-based design consultancy Made in Space. Her art combines her Swiss design training with West Coast postmodernism.

Born on September 10, 1948, April Greiman grew up in the New York City. Trained as an accountant, her father was an early computer programmer; her one sibling Paul is a meteorologist and specialist in climatic and atmospheric interplanetary modeling.

Greiman moved to Los Angeles in 1976, where she established the multi-disciplinary approach that extends into her current practice, Made in Space. During the 1970s, she rejected the belief among many contemporary designers that computers and digitalization would compromise the International Style; instead, she exploited pixelation and other digitization "errors" as integral parts of digital art, a position she has held throughout her career. Once she established herself in New York and Connecticut, she taught at the Philadelphia College of Art.

In 1982, Greiman became head of the design department at the California Institute of the Arts, also known as Cal Arts. She met photographer-artist Jayme Odgers at Cal Arts, who became a significant influence on Greimen. Together, they designed a famous Cal Arts poster in 1977 that became an icon of the California New Wave. In 1984, she lobbied successfully to change the department name to Visual Communications, as she felt the term “graphic design” would prove too limiting to future designers. In that year, she also became a student herself and investigated in greater depth the effects of technology on her own work.

She then returned to full-time practice and acquired her first Macintosh computer. She would later take the Grand Prize in Mac World's First Macintosh Masters in Art Competition. April also contributed to the design of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, by creating a memorable poster of running legs silhouetted against a square of bright blue sky. An early adopter of this computer, Greiman produced an issue of Design Quarterly in 1986, notable in its development of graphic design. Entitled Does it make sense?, the edition was edited by Mildred Friedman and published by the Walker Art Center. "She re-imagined the magazine as a poster that folded out to almost three-by-six feet. The poster must be carefully unfolded three times across, nine times down. It contained a life-size, MacVision-generated image of her outstretched naked body adorned with symbolic images and text— a provocative gesture, which emphatically countered the objective, rational and masculine tendencies of modernist design." Greiman has said about the poster’s unusual format and title “Hopefully, someone will make some sense out of this. . . The sense it has for me is that it’s new and yet old, . . . it’s a magazine, which is a poster, which is an object, which is . . . crazy.” The poster was also launched as a complement to the Walker Art Center’s new Everyday Art Gallery.