ellen lupton
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Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. Her most recent books are D.I.Y: Design
It Yourself (2006) and Thinking with Type (2004). She is director of the graphic design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. She also is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, where she has organized numerous exhibitions, each accompanied by a major publication, including the National Design Triennial series (2000, 2003, 2006), Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the
Table, 1500–2005 (2006), Solos: New Design from Israel (2006), Skin: Surface, Substance + Design
(2002), Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age (1999), Mixing Messages (1996), and Mechanical
Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office.
Books in the works include D.I.Y. Kids (with Julia Lupton) and Graphic Design: Structure and
Experiment (with Jennifer Cole Phillips and MICA students and faculty). She is the co-author with Abbott Miller of several books, including Design Writing Research (1996) and The Kitchen,
The Bathroom, and the Aesethetics of Waste (1992).
Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, the highest honor given to graphic designers in the U.S.
Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research
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*** What makes a typeface “good”?Currently, most fonts created in the open source spirit are produced for small or underserved linguistic populations. Such fonts are “good” in the moral sense. In the future, designers may choose to make free fonts in the service of other social needs as well. For example, in develop-ing countries graphic designers who seek to build a typographic culture in their home regions require more than a bare-minimum typographic vocabulary, and they often rely on pirated typefaces to do so. A richer selection of legitimate free fonts, clearly labelled and promoted as such in an educational way, might help to build respect for the larger commercial ecology of typeface design.
****Is a typeface a meaningful gift to humanity?In the scheme of things, a typeface may seem like a small gift, so maybe designers and software companies should devote their charitable efforts to more urgent causes. However, I believe that typefaces are valuable, powerful, and beautiful cultural tools, worthy of legal protection and deserving of the price they bring in the Western marketplace. Moreover, a gift of typography makes good on a unique body of skill, knowledge, and passion.
Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research
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Skin: Surface, Substance, and DesignInside Design NowThinking With TypeDesign Writing Research
Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research
The organization of letters on a blank sheet -- or screen -- is the most basic challenge facing anyone who practices design. What type of font to use? How big? How should those letters, words, and paragraphs be aligned, spaced, ordered, shaped, and otherwise manipulated? In this groundbreaking new primer, leading design educator and historian Ellen Lupton provides clear and concise guidance for anyone learning or brushing up on their typographic skills.
Thinking with Type is divided into three sections: letter, text, and grid. Each section begins with an easy-to-grasp essay that reviews historical, technological, and theoretical concepts, and is then followed by a set of practical exercises that bring the material covered to life. Sections conclude with examples of work by leading practitioners that demonstrate creative possibilities (along with some classic no-no's to avoid).
This critical study of graphic design and typography is a source for anyone interested in the art and history of books, letterforms, symbols, advertising, and theories of visual and verbal com-munication. A section on theory considers the centrality of the written and printed word to post-structuralism and deconstruction. A wide range of design practices are discussed, from the history of punctuation and the origins of international pictograms to the structure of modern typography. A section on media looks at the role of design in mass communications with essays on stock photography, visual journalism, illustration, advertising and vernacular design cultures. The book closes with history, a section organised as a time line spanning 200 years of design in America. These historical case studies show how the modern profession of graphic design emerged in response to cultural, political and economic developments in the US.
Thinking With Type
Design Writing Research
Every object has a skin. Thick or thin, smooth or rough, porous or impermeable, the skin is the line between the hidden inside and the outside we experience. Skin: Surface, Substance, and Design presents products, furniture, fashion, architecture, and media that are expanding the limits of what we understand as surface. Reflecting the convergence of natural and artificial life, this provocative and stimulating book shows how enhanced and simulated skins appear every-where in our contemporary world. Designers today manipulate the relationship between the inside and outside of objects, garments, and buildings, creating skins that both reveal and conceal, skins that have depth and complexity as well as their own behaviors and identities. This book accompanies a major exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.
Inside Design Now takes the pulse of American design in the new millennium, providing a fascinating tour of cutting-edge trends in architecture, interiors, landscape, fashion, graphics, and new media.
Featuring eighty emerging and established designers, Inside Design Now illustrates the most innovative and provocative thinking in design today. Each designer’s work is presented with a double-page spread and a series of full-color images. Essays explore the role of the designer in today’s culture, contemporary ideas of beauty and functionality, and what the future holds in the realm of design.
Sensuous materials, lush patterns, and exquisite details come together with new technologies, pop imagery, and fresh approaches to scale, color, and construction in the works reproduced in this volume.
Skin: Surface, Substance, and Design
Inside Design Now
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Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research
D.I.Y. KidsSections
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Princeton Architectural Press is proud to present D.I.Y. Kids, a book by Ellen and Julia Lupton forthcoming in Fall 2007. Illustrated with real artwork by real children, D.I.Y. Kids engages young people in making stuff, from binding their own books to sewing their own clothes. It’s packed with fun ideas for making stickers, logos, clothespin dolls, box buildings, graffiti furni-ture, ribbon accessories, and other cool projects. Each is explained with step-by-step instructions and colorful photographs of great designs and the kids who made them. The activities—rated by difficulty, time, mess, and cost—are intended for ages 7–12, but can easily be modified to suit all ages.
D.I.Y. Kids aims to trigger imaginative play, without requiring fees, teams, or a minivan. It’s for parents, teachers, aunts and uncles, friends and baby-sitters, neighbors and citizens—anyone who wants to create a better world not only for, but also with, the next generation. Most of all, it’s for kids who want to make their mark (and make a difference) by exercising the arts of design with wit, intelligence, and style.
Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research
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Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research
Design Your LifeSections
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Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research
Design-Your-Life.org is a blog hosted by Ellen and Julia Lupton. We invite visitors to apply ideas from design theory and practice to some of the basic problems of daily living, from organizing a household and thinking creatively in the workplace to achieving a relaxed and satisfying domestic life.
Design Your LifeSections
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Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research
Bathrooms and Kitchens
Birth of the User
Book Selling
Critical Wayfinding
Deconstruction
Design from Israel
Designer as Producer
Eccentric to Whom
Fluid Typography
Going Public
Gummy World
Intermediacy
Mechanical Age
Modern Design Theory
Powerpoint Do’s and Don’ts
Reskilling the Art Student
Savage Diary
Science of Typography
Skin
The Producers
Underground Matriarchy
Women Graphic Designers
Bierut, Michael
Bureau
Carson, Carol Devine
Cohen, Elaine Lustig
Cooper, Muriel
De Bretteville, Sheila
Drenttel Doyle Partners
Drucker, Johanna
Frere-Jones, Tobias
Friedman, Dan
Goldberg, Carin
Hoefler, Jonathan
Isley, Alex
Kunz, Willi
Lupton, Ellen (1998)
Lupton, Ellen (2006)
Lupton, Ellen (2007)
Rock, Michael
Scher, Paula
Tobias, Jennifer
Wild, Lorraine
Woodward, Fred
Zukin, Sharon
About
Books
Research/Projects
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Sections Essays Interviews
Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research
Design Life Now
http://www.peoplesdesignaward.org/designlifenow/
Design Your Life
http://www.design-your-life.org/
D.I.Y. Kids
http://www.diykids.org/
D.I.Y. Kids Blog Spot
http://d-i-y-kids.blogspot.com/
Ellen Lupton Essays
http://www.elupton.com/index.php?s=essays
Ellen Lupton Interviews
http://www.elupton.com/index.php?s=interviews
Free Font Manifesto
http://freefontmanifesto.blogspot.com/
Thinking With Shakespeare
http://www.thinkingwithshakespeare.org/
Thinking With Type
http://www.thinkingwithtype.com/
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Ellen Lupton: Design Writing Research