April Greiman became known for introducing the “New Wave” as a design style in the USA and was one of the first to see great potential in computer technology and use it as a design tool. She is reluctant to call herself a graphic designer, but considers herself an artist, teacher, thinker, and desert explorer.

Greiman grew up with great role models. These included, by her own description, her calm, grounded mother, her curious, wandering, and easily distracted father, and her great-aunt Kitty, a strong and independent woman who had danced with the Ziegfeld Follies and made excellence a top priority in her career.

At the Kansas City Art Institute, April Greiman became familiar with modernist principles, which became her first serious design impression. This led her to Basel, where she was accepted to the Basel School of Design in 1970 and was a student of Armin Hoffmann and Wolfgang Weingart. In addition to her intensive studies, Greiman was also strongly influenced by the New Wave experiments in Wolfgang Weingart’s studio.

In 1976, she moved back to America, but this time to LA. There, April Greiman initially worked freelance and developed her own style during this time: layers of lettering, exaggerated spacing, random collages, and geometric shapes formed her work. She became less and less an echo of Weingart’s Swiss-Punk and more of her own contribution to postmodernism on the West Coast. In this year she also founded her studio “Made in Space.” She also met Jayme Odgers, who took her to the desert. These impressions changed her way of thinking and being forever.

The two formed a partnership that lasted 4 years, working for the California Institute of the Arts in 1979, which Odgers staged and photographed art, the China Club Restaurant and Lounge advertisements of 1980, and a poster produced in 1982 for the 1984 Olympics.

In 1982, April Greiman was invited to direct the design program at the California Institute of the Arts. This committed her to exploring design education, but also gave her access to state-of-the-art video and digitization equipment.

April Greiman’s first experiments in digital design were on analog computers and video equipment from CalArts, and despite their limitations, she was excited and recognized their potential. Greiman is said to have bought her first Macintosh in 1984 on her way home after attending a TED Talk by Alan Kay. Designing with digital devices was still laughed at at the time, but Greiman wanted to convince her colleagues.

A great opportunity for her came in 1986 when she was invited to design the 133rd issue of “Design Quarterly.” Greiman’s design no longer resembled a magazine but consisted of an approx. 91 cm (3 feet) long poster. It depicted her naked body accompanied by many graphic symbols and the title “Does it make sense?”

When she read Wittgenstein on the subject, she identified with his conclusion: “It makes sense if you give it sense.” She says: “I love this idea that also exists in physics—that the observer is the observed and the observed is the observer. The tools and technologies start to dictate what and how you see something or how the outcome is predictable. These ideas bring back the child in me, that pure curiosity.”

In 1998, she received the AIGA medal, published her first book “Hybrid Imagery” in 1990, and completed her physically largest work, “Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice,” in 2007. April Greiman is currently an art lecturer at Woodbury University, School of Architecture, and also teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She is also a member of the AGI. (kl)