Tune up your flux-capacitor and take a trip back to 1984. Macintosh computers are making their first appearance and causing waves across industries, especially the design market. Devoted to traditional methods, most designers are skeptical of integrating computers into design practices. They fear that the creative ability of the hand will be usurped by a plastic box full of wires and bytes… What is to become of design when these emerging technologies threaten the very survival of human imagination?
April Greiman was one of the inspired few to comprehend the immense potential of this new medium. She recognized that graphic design was rapidly evolving and that the introduction of new technologies would revolutionize the field. Greiman once said, “what the computer offers is the power to create new visual languages, hybrids of design… you spend a lot less time doing and a lot more time looking… it stretches our potential and allows us to encounter chance.” Harnessing this power, Greiman pioneered a visual strategy dubbed “hybrid imagery” that utilized her Macintosh computer to combine various elements produced in different media.
Greiman’s compositions often emphasize the production process of the piece itself, as seen in Your Turn My Turn. This poster for the International Contract Furniture Design Symposium (1983) highlights the halftone dot size such that the picture self-consciously displays its method of illusion. Greiman carries this illusion one step further by integrating the use of 3D glasses so that viewers experience the piece in (literally) another dimension.
3D Glasses: April Greiman - Reinhold, 1986. Gift of April Greiman, 1995-167-5.
Using the rhetoric of Wolfgang Weingart's New Wave aesthetic, Greiman manipulates the typography to transform the text into another tool for visual communication. To this she adds color, collage and pictorial imagery to create a complex composition that must be actively interpreted by the viewer.