Not a Muse

Silva Baum, Claudia Scheer and Lea Sievertsen speak with female graphic designers about the issues they face. Essential reading!

www.notamuse.de

Typequality

Role models are very important if young women are to dare to enter the world of typography.
Typequality is a platform for discovering and sharing typefaces designed by women, a tool to recognize and get the word out about female typographers and their typefaces. Here, together, we can gather the many skilled female type designers and their designs.
Typequality is the subject of Kimberly Ihres graduation project for Beckmans College of Design. The project consist of this website and a typeface of Kimberlys own design, Typequality font.

http://typequality.com/

TDC Beatrice Warde Scholarship

While going through their archives, the Type Directors Club discovered that Beatrice Warde was its first female member. To honor her memory, the Type Directors Club has named a scholarship after her.

Beatrice Warde (1900-1969) was a typographer, a writer (sometimes under the pseudonym Paul Beaujon) and expert of typography, a teacher, and the editor of the Recorder and the Monotype Newsletter. She is famous for her essay on typography “The Crystal Goblet”, first delivered as the speech “Printing Should Be Invisible ” in 1930.

The criteria for the scholarship extends across disciplines from design criticism to type design and graphic design, since Beatrice Warde was a writer and educator who helped promote Monotype products. Just as Beatrice encouraged the best use of technology, the candidate’s work should demonstrate the application of typography to current media, not only print.

The deadline for students to submit their application and samples is February 23, 2018.

https://www.tdc.org/beatrice-warde-scholarship/

See also this older post: http://feminismandgraphicdesign.blogspot.be/2012/03/beatrice-warde-and-crystal-goblet.html

depatriarchise design

This blog depatriarchise design is a space examines the condition of the contemporary design through a feminist perspective. The feminist voice is nearly unheard within the field and has been systematically silenced and marginalised. The imbalanced power relation between the genders in the industry,  strongly encouraged by the main stakeholders, created a distorted reality in which the chauvinist, heteronormative, ego-tripped, white, male “star designer” model had been successfully introduced and has been maintained ever since.

https://depatriarchisedesign.wordpress.com/

BEYOND CHANGE

Beyond Change is a conference questioning the role of design in times of global transformations.

22 sessions and workshops addressing topics such as: sustainability, commons, indigenous knowledges, artisanal design, the politics of objects, design and gender, and much more.

+ Building Platforms: An intersectional space for decolonising, depatriarchalising, and deprecarising the conference from within.

During the three days of the conference, the foyer of the HGK FHNW will be inhabited by three design platforms that each problematise the role of design from within the discipline itself: Decolonising Design Group, Depatriarchise Design, and Precarity Pilot. With the aim of fostering an intersectional debate on the politics of design within practice, theory, and academic research – with particular focus on race, ethnicity, gender, and class – the three platforms will collectively activate a given space – a single two-storey scaffold of the kind used in civil construction.

+ Screening: Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, a film by Fabrizio Terranova.

March 8–10, 2018
FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel

Visit the website for more information.

MMS

MMS is a group of graphic designers (Maryam Fanni, Matilda Flodmark, Sara Kaaman) collaborating since 2012 on investigations and writings on visual culture with a feminist ground.

Visit their website www.mms-arkiv.se

Exhibition: 'I Don't Know Her Name, But I Know Her Work'

'I Don't Know Her Name, But I Know Her Work' is a display of graphic design by current students of Central Saint Martins along with work from alumni and staff of one of its predecessor colleges, the Central School of Arts and Crafts.

This display coincides with The London Transport Museum exhibition Poster Girls: A Century of Art and Design, which features many female designers who studied or taught at the Central School. Current graphic design students have each selected a piece of work from the Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection designed by one of the Central school designers featured in Poster Girls, and made new work in response.

This new work is influenced by the methods and materials used in the designs selected from the Museum, as well as the wider context surrounding these designs. As with the Poster Girls exhibition, a particular concern is the lack of representation of women in graphic design history. Students taking part in this project are questioning the lack of diversity in graphic design history and calling for a more inclusive approach.

Until 5 February 2018

Central Saint Martins
Granary Building
1 Granary Square
King's Cross, London N1C 4AA

Visit the website for more information

Talk: A Room of One's Own

An illustrated journey through the exhibition Poster Girls by co-curator David Bownes together with author Susannah Walker and Central Saint Martins Lecturer Ruth Sykes, revealing the historical and social context of the times in which key female designers were producing their work.

Thursday 25 January 2018, 7pm
London Transport Museum

Book tickets

Exhibition: Poster Girls – A century of art and design

Exhibition of female artists who have worked for London Transport and Transport for London including well-known designers, such as Mabel Lucie Attwell, Laura Knight, Enid Marx and Zandra Rhodes, alongside lesser known individuals who nonetheless changed the way Londoners viewed their city.

Until January 2019 at London Transport Museum
www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/exhibitions

Read a review here

100 Years

Exhibition

100 YEARS OF GRAPHIC COMMUNICATION BY WOMEN AT CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS

16 February - 23 March 2016

Central Saint Martins, 1 Granary Square
London NC1 4AA

Astrid Stavro / Cath Caldwell / Clare Skeats / Eleanor Crow / Heather 'Herry' Perry / Helen Ingham / Morag Myerscough / Sunny Park / Rebecca Ross / Valeria Hedman / Nina Chakrabarti / Kat Garner / Scarlet Evans / Bianca Wendt / Sroop Sunar / Rachel ‘Ray’ Marshall / Muriel Jackson / Dora Batty / Freda Lingstrom / Margaret Calkin James / Pearl Binder / Kathleen Hale / Nicolete Gray / Peggy Fortnum / Enid Marx / Judith Kerr / Jo Brocklehurst / Margaret Calvert / Helen Oxenbury / Stefanie Posavec / Katy Hepburn / Su Huntley & Donna Muir / Claire Leighton / Alexandra Epps / Debbie Cook / Sheena Calvert / Sian Cook / Lucienne Roberts / Rebecca Wright / Catherine Dixon / Rose Epple / Amelia Noble / Rathna Ramanathan / Lizzie Finn / Catherine Anyango / Rebecca & Mike / Lydia Blagden / Emma Woodland & Jess Kohl / Jayne Alexander and Violetta Boxill / Rachita Saraogi, Marina Viktorsson & Rebecca Thompson / Sara De Bondt / Julia Woollams / Kath Tudball / Tina Tsang / Syd Hausman / Carla Matoses / Lizzie Oxby / Alessia Mazzarella / See Red Women's Workshop / Jenny Maizels / Posy Simmonds / Sophie Thomas / Miho Aishima / Sinem Erkas / May Safwat / Ruth Sykes & Emily Wood

http://graphicsukwomen.com/

Women's Action Coalition (WAC)

Beautiful posters for Women's Action Coalition by Bethany Johns.
Visit her website here, here or here

 

 

http://www.bethanyjohns.com/Women-s-Action-Coalition-WAC-1

http://www.bethanyjohns.com/Women-s-Action-Coalition-WAC

Beatrice Warde in Her Own Voice

Listen to Beatrice Warde as she speaks on Australian radio.
http://www.typeradio.org/#/519

The First Female Typographer

Read this wonderful article by John Boardley on the beginnings of typography at ‘I Love Typography’

http://goo.gl/C1qX6T

Mildred Friedman

Known to many as Mickey, Mildred Friedman served as the editor of Design Quarterly and was the Walker Art Center design curator for much of the ’70s and ’80s. She organized a series of groundbreaking exhibitions, sometimes in collaboration with Martin Friedman, such as Sottsass/Superstudio: Mindscapes (1973); New Learning Spaces and Places (1974); Nelson/Eames/Girard/Propst: The Design Process at Herman Miller (1975); De Stijl, 1917–1931: Visions of Utopia (1982); The Architecture of Frank Gehry (1986), the architect’s first major museum exhibition; Tokyo: Form and Spirit (1986), featuring the work of Japanese designers such as Arata Isozaki, Tadanori Yokoo, Toyo Ito, Tadao Ando, and Eiko Ishioka; Architecture Tomorrow (1988–1991), a series of installations undertaken by Frank Israel, Morphosis, Todd Williams/Billie Tsien, Stanley Saitowitz, Diller+Scofidio, and Steven Holl; and Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History (1989), the first large-scale museum survey of the field in the United States.

Read more here.

The Riot Grrrl Collection

For the past two decades, young women (and men) have found their way to feminism through Riot Grrrl. Against the backdrop of the culture wars and before the rise of the Internet or desktop publishing, the zine and music culture of the Riot Grrrl movement empowered young women across the country to speak out against sexism and oppression, creating a powerful new force of liberation and unity within and outside of the women's movement. While feminist bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile fought for their place in a male-dominated punk scene, their members and fans developed an extensive DIY network of activism and support. The Riot Grrrl Collection reproduces a sampling of the original zines, posters, and printed matter for the first time since their initial distribution in the 1980s and '90s, and includes an original essay by Johanna Fateman and an introduction by Lisa Darms.

Order your copy here

Redressing the Balance: Women in the Art World

‘... of the 134 commercial galleries in London that were audited, which collectively represent 3,163 artists, 31 per cent of the represented artists were women.’

Read the full article by Louisa Elderton here
http://www.thewhitereview.org/art/redressing-the-balance-women-in-the-art-world/

Enid Marx

Designer and artist Enid Marx’s work can be viewed in the V&A collection. More biographical information can be found on her Wikipedia page or her obituary in The Independent.

Women Designers Conference

ENID MARX AND HER CONTEMPORARIES: 
Women designers and the popularisation of ‘folk arts’ in Britain 1920–1960.

One day symposium, Compton Verney, Warwickshire
Friday 13 September 2013

This event is a collaboration between Manchester School of Art and Compton Verney in Warwickshire, it examines the problematic relationship that objects of material culture associated with the terms ‘folk art’ and ‘vernacular design’ have within debates about artistic value in British visual culture. It concentrates on the re-emergence of an interest in ‘folk art’, especially amongst women designers, in Britain in the first half of the 20th century, and looks at the way that both 'folk art' and particular types of design activity practiced by women have been omitted from traditional historical narratives of art and design.

The curatorial work and collections of women designers and educators during the early half of the twentieth century is one example of what Ellen Lupton calls the 'intangible contribution' women have made to the field of design. Noteworthy names in this respect are; Enid Marx, Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher, Olive Cook, Peggy Angus, Pearl Binder and Barbara Jones. All were design practitioners and private collectors, who found little interest during their lifetimes from the art establishment in legitimising the work their collections centred around. They nevertheless mounted their own small exhibitions and published books and articles to publicise the works to a wider audience (see Myrone, 2009).

These collector/practitioners took creative and practical inspiration from the objects and images as aesthetic and culturally significant designs, but they also had a professional interest in the way that they had been made. Their collections were useful to the women in their profession as designers as well as ‘experts’ and educators. One of the aims of the event is to interrogate the relationship between the 'discerning eye' of the collector and creative practice.

Compton Verney houses the recently redisplayed Marx-Lambert Collection and a collection of Folk Art paintings and objects, which is the most significant single collection of the vernacular arts in Britain, see www.comptonverney.org.uk

How Many Women Does it Take to Change Wikipedia?

According to the last Wikimedia Foundation editors survey, only nine percent of Wikipedia editors are women, down from 13 percent in 2010.

On 30 March 2012, the Smithsonian Archives hosted “She Blinded Me With Science: Smithsonian Women in Science Edit-a-Thon.” Ten Wikipedians showed up, armed with laptops and ready to tackle the significant dearth of articles on notable female scientists. Smithsonian archivists stood by to help the Wikipedians sort through the Archives’ and Libraries’ resources, both online and offline. Each editor chose a name or two from a list compiled by the archivists and started digging through the records. Many articles had to be started from scratch.

This is a call to all designers out there to organise local Edit-a-Thons.

Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2012/04/how-many-women-does-it-take-to-change-wikipedia/#ixzz2VS1tnjjD or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/DC_30

Spare Rib is coming back

Hurray, we recently discovered that Spare Rib is coming back! Read our previous blog post here, or sign up for their newsletter to find out when and where the launch will be. An interview with the relaunch instigator Charlotte Raven can be found on The Guardian website.