Louise Sandhaus Uplifts the Stories of Graphic Designs Unsung Makers

Table Of Content

• In the Late ’70s in the Bronx, PHASE 2’s Party Flyers Created a Visual Language for Hip-Hop
• Meet the Community
• Lance Wyman, Tea Uglow, Beth Pickens + Others on Developing a Sense of Self Over the Course of a Career
• Related Articles
• “Books Aren’t Going Anywhere”: A Roundtable Discussion on Publishing and Branding in the Age of Bookstagram
• Unconventional Sleep Aids Are in Vogue, and They’re Designed To Chill You Out

For Louise Sandhaus, her role as a design educator and mentor reaches back nearly twenty-five years. She’s inspired countless young designers through her courses at CalArts, while also serving as co-director of the school’s Graphic Design Program, an AIGA board member, and Chair of the AIGA Design Educators Community steering committee. Her research and authorship challenges the traditional design canon by uplifting the stories and work of unsung makers, and her design practice pushes forward new ways of thinking in exhibition design and the curatorial process. I’ve heard variations of these calls for more criticism time and again when talking to designers for Scratching the Surface, my podcast about design practice and criticism.

In the Late ’70s in the Bronx, PHASE 2’s Party Flyers Created a Visual Language for Hip-Hop

“The French magazine in the film obviously is not The New Yorker—but I was, I think, totally inspired by it,” said Anderson in a recent interview with the actual New Yorker. While even the characters of the film were based on New Yorker journalists and moments from the periodical’s storied history, the magazine in the film itself had to have a very distinct identity. For a fictional magazine that actually doesn’t even exist, The French Dispatch feels impossibly real. To create the publication, Anderson and co-producer Octavia Peissel brought designer Erica Dorn on board, who had previously worked with Anderson on Isle of Dogs, creating the graphics and props for the sets in close collaboration with Annie Atkins. “It was actually my first time working on a movie, but I think I did okay because I was asked to join The French Dispatch as the lead graphic designer a few months after the Isle of Dogs released,” says Dorn. This is the question writer Rick Poynor asked designer Michael Rock in the now-seminal dialog published in Eye Magazine in 1995, “What Is This Thing Called Graphic Design Criticism?

Meet the Community

She has covered the intersection of design, culture, and business for publications including WIRED, Fast Company, Architectural Digest, and more. For Julie Zhuo, design is about creating an environment that empowers people to make connections and build community. To effectively empathize with the individuals you're designing for, abandon the notion of the “average user” and invest in research into the people you’re serving. This talk looks at the fundamental considerations needed for designing to become a part of people’s everyday lives. Like New York, I often hear people say of LA that everyone is from somewhere else.

Lance Wyman, Tea Uglow, Beth Pickens + Others on Developing a Sense of Self Over the Course of a Career

Join AIGA today and become part of an exclusive network of design professionals with access to vital learning and career-building benefits on a local and national level. AIGA Membership offers a dynamic community through the virtual AIGA Community platform and local events. Network with peers, share insights, and tackle career challenges together while building a professional network to help you excel in your career.

A Frank Conversation About Chronic Illness and Creativity

The training of my mentors changed the trajectory of my work, strengthening my conceptual thinking to allow me to bring writing as well as visual design into my practice. AIGA LA announces a partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Career Technical Education – Arts, Media & Entertainment (AME) program. Through this partnership, AIGA LA aims to work with LAUSD to inspire the next generation of designers and be a supportive resource for their students, programs, and teachers. The 2021 Design Point of View (POV) research initiative is an in-depth analysis of the design profession.

The Graphic Design Work of Pablo Picasso - PRINT Magazine

The Graphic Design Work of Pablo Picasso.

Posted: Thu, 20 Oct 2016 07:00:00 GMT [source]

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It helped to have a small and intimate community of fellow LA-based designers. As Sandhaus recalls, after meeting Sister Corita Kent and Sister Magdalen Mary at a barbeque in Memphis, the Sisters offered Kavanaugh a place to stay when she arrived in Los Angeles. In addition to Kent, she has worked alongside rising stars Frank Gehry, Greg Walsh, and Deborah Sussman in their shared office space. Their time working together spawned a kind of kaleidoscopic entanglement of influence.

There are more people talking about graphic design today than ever before in history. “While we might not recognize it as such, design criticism is everywhere, underpinning all institutional activity—design education, history, publishing, and professional associations,” Rock responded to Poynor back in 1994. “The selection, description, and reproduction of designed artifacts in books and magazines, for instance, is the work of theory.” If we accept this definition of design criticism, then the type of criticism Rock was thinking about is, indeed, everywhere. There are graduate programs around the world devoted to design writing and criticism.

“Books Aren’t Going Anywhere”: A Roundtable Discussion on Publishing and Branding in the Age of Bookstagram

I asked Rock how he was feeling about design criticism today, seven years after his 2013 conversation. Rock specifically mentions the meme—literally just text and image—as the clearest example of graphic design in popular culture today. Much like the debates that fueled so much design writing in the 1990s, the meme also raises questions about authorship, aesthetics, and identity, but on a much larger scale. In many cases, when graphic design is written about culturally, we no longer even consider it design. During her trip, she connected with several local designers, including Lorraine Wild, a professor at CalArts in Valencia, 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. The campus, just a stone’s throw from Six Flags Magic Mountain, is situated between swaths of tract housing, fast food drive-thrus, and the freeway.

Unconventional Sleep Aids Are in Vogue, and They’re Designed To Chill You Out

Designers, design educators, and design students are in a more important and interesting field than we seem to recognize. “Keep your eyes peeled for a parade of covers that pops up in the main-on-ends,” she says. It’s a little treat tucked away for the ones who hang till the last credit rolls. While Aznarez worked on the covers, Dorn was busy creating posters for the sets of Ennui-sur-Blasé, which were later reused as back covers of the magazine. Originally conceived as posters for the streets and metro stations of the town, the artworks showcase fictional products, like a bottle of ‘Off-Black’ cognac, a refrigerator and a typewriter.

“Gere was of a moment where the drumbeat she heard was truly an American one—one coming from the Eameses, from Alexander Girard, Harley Earl, and GM, who were really starting to redefine an aesthetic for America,” says Sandhaus. The design and conceptual thinking skills she acquired in the short program helped her land a job back in Boston at East West Journal, an alternative lifestyle magazine. She moved up quickly in the company, beginning as a staff designer before transitioning to art director by 23.

Chimmy Kalu explores why is accessibility not the baseline at the moment, and how can we make it so. A scholarly journal of thought leadership, education and practice in the discipline of visual communication design. To be taken seriously is not to define graphic design as something separate, but to move it beyond the confines of the discipline. To ask why there isn’t more design criticism is to ask the wrong question.

One of the signature pieces in the show that encapsulates Pacific New Wave design is Greiman’s 1985 poster for AIGA. Because it was a collaborative piece to which Michael Cronan, Linda Hinrichs, Michael Manwaring, Michael Vanderbyl, and Eric Martin all contributed, it serves as a microcosm for the work produced throughout the state’s disparate yet connected design communities. “It really represents two strong streams of work in this period coming from Northern and Southern California, with designers like April Greiman and Deborah Sussman working in L.A., or studios like Emigre up north in San Francisco,” Steinberger says. She also designed interiors for Joseph Magnin stores, the offices of Hall & Levine, and the Neutrogena Corporate Offices, saturating them with cheerful color, pattern, and texture. Throughout her career, she injected her “radically upbeat” design aesthetic into a slew of other urban spaces outside of sunny California, like Detroit, Chicago, Austin, Rochester, Albuquerque, and Pittsburgh. “Just name it and Gere’s got a million ideas on how it can be done,” wrote Women’s Wear Daily in 1965.

Reaching people through her writing, in the pages of magazines like Eye, ID, and Metropolis, and books like The Women of Design and Information Design Handbook, allows her to continue to educate others outside of the classroom setting. Even before she studied design formally, Sandhaus had always been surrounded by it. Born in 1955 near Boston, MA to parents who were both creative professionals, Sandhaus grew up in the kind of design-filled home that had a printmaking workshop—which doubled as a ping pong table—in its basement. Her mother Harriet Sandhaus worked for a local paper, penning an illustrated column called “Notes of a Shopper by Julie,” and her father Norman Sandhaus was an art director, who produced things like aeronautics company manuals and tourist brochures. Creativity thrived in the Sandhaus home; however, when her family relocated to Orlando, Florida, the move left her feeling alienated by her new conservative surroundings. She’s always possessed a rebellious spirit—that innate desire to push back against convention and conformity—and it was that quality that helped her forge her own path into the world of design even in a city that was a world away from the traditional design education hubs.

Wild, who is a 2006 AIGA Medalist, worked with Steinberger to collect many of the pieces for the show. She moved to Los Angeles in 1985 to take the position as graphic design program director at CalArts. “For me, the feeling of working in California was that there were wider possibilities for form, that there wasn’t the allegiance to corporate, International Style Modernism as there was on the East Coast,” says Wild. Having developed a varied portfolio across practices in Cranbrook’s grad program, Kavanaugh secured a position at Detroit-based General Motors immediately upon graduation. There she joined a group of female designers within GM’s Styling Group dubbed the “Damsels of Design,” under the direction of Harley Earl, the department’s Vice President.

The educator realized the urgent need for a digital archive of lesser known design work after interviewing many local designers who had boxes of unarchived work stored out of sight. Maintaining a physical archive of design work demands space, time, and financial resources that not everyone has access to, and without an accessible way to document it, that history will disappear. They’re shaped by their environments and the people around them, and it’s through mentorship and collaboration that they grow within their creative communities.