NWI on the international design map

This may be old news to some, but whenever the name of an internationally-acclaimed designer is mentioned in the same sentence as Indiana, it’s cause to take notice. Abbott Miller and Ed Fella are two such individuals.

Abbott Miller
J. Abbott Miller is a NWI native who, together with his wife Ellen Lupton (a stellar designer, educator, author, and innovator in her own right), has had enormous impact on the practice of graphic design. During the late-eighties and nineties Abbott and Ellen were on the front lines of a movement that saw designers taking an increasingly active role in the authoring and shaping of content, as opposed to simply packaging it in pleasing visual form. In this model, research, writing, and critical theory were as much a part of the design process as form-making, hence the name of their design practice and the title of their landmark book: Design/Writing/Research.

In all, Abbott has co-authored four books on the practice, history, and cultural significance of design. His magazine design (for 2wice and Dance Ink) has earned numerous awards including 5 gold medals and ‘Magazine of the Year’ from the Society for Publication Designers. He has developed exhibitions for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, the Library of Congress, National Building Museum, Cooper Union School of Art, and created a traveling show for Harley-Davidson. In 1993, Abbott and Ellen were recipients of the first annual Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, an honor since bestowed on such notables such as Frank Gehry, Matthew Carter, Tibor Kalman, Bruce Mau, April Greiman, Paula Scher, Stefan Sagmeister, Ed Fella, and Steve Jobs.

I had the great fortune of learning directly from Abbott when he and Ellen became professors and design department co-chairs at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. To borrow a reference from Joe Gonzalez’s previous post on mentors, I’m grateful to look back and recognize Abbott as a pivotal “yoda” in my career.

Currently, Abbott is a partner at Pentagram New York and continues to live, work, and teach in Baltimore. He is one of the most influential designers working today – and he grew up right down the road.

Ed Fella
Anyone interested in type design and experimental typography should appreciate Ed Fella’s significant contributions to contemporary graphic design. Fella is an AIGA medalist and recipient of the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. His work is on view at the National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Recently, Fella donated a large collection of what could be considered his most influential work to the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University creating the largest museum collection of his work anywhere – larger than MOMA.

During the 1980s Fella created a series of flyers for Detroit’s Focus Gallery that employed hand-drawn, hand-cut typography assembled using paste-up techniques learned during his 30-year career as a commercial artist for Detroit ad agencies. Produced well before designers were hacking, splicing, and manipulating typefaces on the computer, these flyers are recognized today as a significant catalyst for the typographic experimentation and subversion of the 80s and90s.

Fella has donated a complete set of all 117 Focus Gallery flyers to the Brauer Museum of Art. According to the Brauer’s website an exhibition is in the works, but no specific plans have been made. If anyone has updated information on this, fill us in.

Lorraine Wild provides this great insight into Ed Fella’s work and his importance to the profession: “He introduced ambivalence and ambiguity, the multiple meanings of design as text and subtext, and that graphic designers are really artists.”

Indeed.

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Learn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.