Four women leadesr in comtempoary graphic design

There are four graphic designers whom developed important bodies of work in contemporary graphics design.  These four designers Paula Scher, Louise Fili, April Greiman, and Zuzana Lico, are briefly discussed in the following paragraphs.

Paula Scher is a graphic designer whom led the revival of combining old graphics styles from the ealy twentieth century back into main stream design.  The form she used is now as retro and was an eclectic mix of old graphic design and eccentric use of typographic font. Her style employed post-modern art styles and she credits the work for Seymour Chwast for important inspiration in developing Scher’s style. As they discovered early styles from the Vienna Secession to modernist approaches to design and typographic layout and fonts, Scher also applied originality in application of lettering, font mixing, and coloring.   Scher was innovative and sought out inspiration form Art Deco, Russian constructivism, and old fonts.  The work by Scher was not accepted by the mainstream designers at the time she started her creative approach – the 1970s. But as time progressed many other designers bought into her retro style and the retro style became contemporary style employed today.

Loiuse Fili applied the Retro stlye in book jacket design. In her career, she worked at her college type shop where she developed her typographic interest and later at Pantheon Books.  Her time in Europe while at Pantheon Books, from 1978 to 1989, was influenced by her time exposure to varied typographic styles she encountered in old books and graphical styles and she employed them into contemporary book design.  The new jackets incorporated these older and often revived handset metal type sets from old specimens and commissioning designers to handletter missing parts.  After Pantheon, Fili started her own design studio and continued her work.

April Greiman was in school and the 1970s and experienced a change in culture and adversiging dueing that time.  An early influencer, Wolfgang Weingart, who early 1960s work with typography and visual effects form film set and offset printing influenced his work.  The work by Greiman continued in this area of as she applied techniques to bring depth and dimension to her graphic design by overlapping shapes, gestured and illusionistic application of type and the use of color and geometric shape. Greiman continued her style in the early digital area of graphic design. She employed the Apple Macintosh computer, a revolutionary tool to the graphic design industry, to achieve her success.  The practiced the integration of the font, image and layout into a computer file and led in the development of ways to use these tool influencing the need for software.

Zuzana Lico is a a prioneer in through programming digital type face and used the new technology of bitmapped fonts, printing of font and images into design layouts for the Macintosh Computer from Apple.  She partnered with VanderLans and founded Émigré Graphics.  There she employed her programming background to develop fonts for the Apple Macintosh computer, a revolutionary tool to the graphic design industry, to achieve her success. 

These four women heavily influenced modern graphic design with their open minded approach developed and carried on the maturation of graphic design and employed techniques like retro and were at the forefront of digital graphic design tools for fonts and lettering and the application in these types and usage with images and offset printing. They revolutionized graphic design and helped bring it to the masses to use in their personal lifes.