Emma Gasko

|

Feburary, 11th 2020

|

Inpiration

Women Designers in History

Here are five women who have made lasting contributions in their creative fields, whose careers and work should serve as an inspiration to everyone.

• 1. Paula Scher

  "The goal of design is to raise the expectation of what design can be."

  Paula Scher’s work unleashes the hidden potential of typography. Through positioning, scaling, and space, she takes the tame lines of letters and makes them eclectic. This imaginative rendering of typography, combined with her bold yet tasteful use of color, makes her work instantly recognizable.

  Paula’s first major role was working in the music industry as a designer for CBS Records and she would later move on to Atlantic Records. During her tenure in the music business, she would create album covers for such artists as Charles Mingus, Boston, the Yardbirds, and other notable musicians.

  Her experience designing album covers would inform the widely recognized work she did for New York’s Public Theater. Where theater is often associated with a stuffy seriousness, she pioneered a branding identity for them that reflected the creative spirit of their productions. The posters she produced for them buzz with the energy of rock and roll and hip-hop.

• 2. Ray Eames

  "What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts."

  Ray Eames’ roots were in abstract painting, and she was an active member of the art scene in New York during the 1930s. A common criticism of abstract art is that it’s an amorphous mess, lacking any sort of cohesion. But looking at Ray’s paintings shows that, early on, she understood how shape, form, and color worked together.

  Her talents in creating visual harmony would serve her well with the work she did with her husband, Charles, in creating furniture and other industrial designs. Ray was a true polymath, whose work as a designer, painter, and filmmaker all display attention to detail as well a high level of artistry.

  There’s something timeless about all the work Ray was involved in. From the functional beauty of the chairs she produced to the abstract symbol patterns she crafted for textiles, even those with an untrained eye can recognize the talent behind her designs. She embraced a sense of modernism that has never gone out of style.

• 3. Louise Fili

  One of the things Louise Fili does best is synthesize classic typography in new and unique ways. We can see traces of where she draws her inspiration, but her sense of inventiveness and imagination takes typefaces to places that are uniquely hers.

  This flair for typography can be traced back to her time at Pantheon books. She was an art director there for 11 years and designed almost 2,000 book covers. That time spent on looking and arranging text gave her a chance to develop her own typographic sensibilities, as well as give her a keen eye for clean design.

  Louise is still designing today. She heads her own agency in NYC and is still creating book designs that have a classic elegance and a slick sense of modernism.

• 4. Elizabeth Friedländer

  Elizabeth Friedländer was born in Berlin, Germany in 1902. As someone of Jewish descent, hostility in Germany and the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws of 1935 forced her to flee from her home country. Though she only got to spend a short amount of her young adult life in Germany, she managed to become the first woman to create two typefaces — Elizabeth-Antigua and Elizabeth-Kursiv — for Bauer Types in 1927.

  After Elizabeth left Germany, she spent much of her time as a designer in England. She worked across various mediums including book covers, packaging, prints, and typography. She had a talent for patterns and texture, which can be seen in much of her work.

  From book design for Penguin to counterfeit Nazi documents and materials for the British black propaganda unit of the Political Intelligence Office — she did it all.

• 5. Zaha Hadid

  Born in Iraq in 1950, Zaha Hadid was one of the most prominent Iraqi-British architects in history.

  She studied mathematics and later went on to the Association School of Architecture in 1972. Though she was adept at the analytical skills that came from her education, she found something lacking in standard architectural illustrations. She developed an approach to loosen up these rigid lines and tapped into the expressiveness of painting to inform her work. We can see this duality — where formality meets artistry — in the curves and lines of her architectural works that can be seen worldwide.

  Her professional accomplishments are many. She was the first ever woman to land the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which she received in 2004. Her buildings are undulating waves of glass and concrete, melding into the landscape, instead of the unmoving straight lines of more conventional architecture. Some of her most famous creations include the Broad Art Museum, the Guangzhou Opera House, and Galaxy SOHO.