Ellen Lupton

Curator; Writer; Lecturer; Designer; Educator / Graphic Design / United States / Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; Maryland Institute College of Art

elupton.com

Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. As curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions, accompanied by catalogues, including “Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office” (1993), “Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture” (1996), “Letters from the Avant-Garde” (1996), and “Skin: Surface, Substance, and Design” (2002), as well as the National Design Triennial series (2000, 2003, 2006, 2010).

Her book Thinking with Type (2004, revised and expanded 2010) is used by students, designers, and educators worldwide. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), co-authored with her graduate students at MICA, explains design processes to a general audience. D.I.Y. Kids (2007), co-authored with her twin sister, Julia Lupton, is a design book for children illustrated with children’s art. The Lupton twins’ latest book is Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009).

Other books include Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips, 2008) and Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008). She is the co-author with J. Abbott Miller of several books, including The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (1992), Design Writing Research (1996), and Swarm (2005). Her most recent book is Graphic Design Thinking: Beyond Brainstorming (2011).

Ellen Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design educator in the U.S. She is a member of the Skillshare teaching community and offers a free class called “Typography That Works: Redesign Your Business Card” for those who want to “understand how to recognize and exploit the features of a great typeface and how to create intriguing, seaworthy compositions.”

She has contributed to various publications, including Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis, and has published essays and illustrations in the New York Times. A frequent lecturer around the U.S. and around the world, Lupton will speak about design to anyone who will listen.

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Understanding Understanding: New from Richard Saul Wurman

Understanding Understanding
by Richard Saul Wurman
Publisher: Richard Saul Wurman and Jack Dangermond
Published July 30, 2017

From the author of Information Architecture, who says about his newest book: “This is a book for people to dip into, as they would walk in and out of the room of a dinner party and embrace their interests. . . Before the rules on how to organize information, before you learn grammar, before you work hard at expanding your vocabulary and go through the exercises of parallel meanings of things as using a Thesaurus and as one writes papers in class, before any learning one must understand.”

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The Hard Life by Jasper Morrison

The Hard Life
by Jasper Morrison
Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
Published in US: May 22, 2017

Photographs taken by designer Jasper Morrison of objects in the collection of the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon, Portugal. “The objects photographed and described may be appreciated both for their beauty and for the example they set of design at its purest. The Hard Life is a continuation of Morrison’s celebration of the ordinary and offers a new perspective on his design philosophy.”

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Paula Scher: Works - Order from Unit Editions

Paula Scher: Works
Editors: Tony Brook & Adrian Shaughnessy
Design: Spin
Publisher: Unit Editions
Published April 2017

New book covering the career of of master designer Paula Scher, called “the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet.” (Ellen Lupton), This definitive, chronological visual record spans Paula’s early days in the music industry as an art director with CBS and Atlantic records; the launch of her first studio, Koppel & Scher; and her 25-year engagement with Pentagram.

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Type Tells Tales: New from Steven Heller and Gail Anderson

Type Tells Tales
by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published May 30, 2017

Reveals how type can become both content and illustration, as letters take the form of people, animals, cars, or planes. With numerous illustrations by F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Munari, and Francis Picabia, among others, as well as by contemporary designers such as Richard Eckersley, John Hendrix, Maira Kalman, and Corita Kent.

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The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design: New from Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio

The Moderns
by Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio
Publisher: Abrams
Published September 19, 2017

Featuring more than 60 designers whose magazine, book, and record covers; advertisements and package designs; posters; and other projects created the visual aesthetics of postwar modernity in America. Some were émigrés from Europe; others were homegrown; all were intoxicated by elemental typography, primary colors, photography, and geometric or biomorphic forms. Some are well-known, others are honored in this volume for the first time, and together they comprised a movement that changed our design world.