April Greiman

April Greiman, born in New York in 1948, is an American designer, multidisciplinary artist, educator, and pioneer of digital design. She studied graphic design, photography, and ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute before continuing her design studies at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland. She worked as a freelance designer and associate professor at the Philadelphia College of Art before establishing her Los Angeles studio Made in Space in 1976. Greiman later directed the Visual Communications Program at the California Institute of the Arts and taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Woodbury University, and the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design.

Greiman became one of the first designers to integrate computer technology into graphic design through layered imagery, experimental typography, photography, video, and compositions that emphasized depth and movement. Influenced by Swiss modernism and New Wave typography, she created works that brought together typography, photography, video imagery, color, and digital elements in ways that challenged the rigid layouts dominating graphic design at the time. As one of the first designers to work extensively with computers, she incorporated pixelation, low resolution imagery, video stills, and other visible traces of emerging technologies directly into her work. Working with early Macintosh computers, video technologies, the Quantel Paintbox, MacVision systems, photography, and print processes, Greiman developed posters, publications, motion graphics, exhibition designs, public artworks, architectural collaborations, identity systems, and multimedia environments centered on ideas of technology, communication, and physical space. In the 1980s, after feeling that the term “graphic designer” no longer reflected the scope of her practice, she began describing her work as “trans media,” a term that reflected her movement between art, design, technology, architecture, and physical space.

Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in the collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution. Greiman received the AIGA Gold Medal and the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation in 1998, along with four honorary doctorates and the Society of Typographic Arts Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. In 2014, she was featured in Apple’s Mac @ 30 documentary, which recognized influential figures working with digital technology.