Forgotten superheroes of design: Denise Gonzales Crisp

The discrepancy is existing in between female and male designers in the industry. Denise Gonzales Crisp, Chair of Graphic Design at the College of Design, North Carolina State University, shared “salary discrepancy between males and females in education. Almost every institution I’ve looked at, the women earned on average anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 less in the same positions.”1 Although women contributed in the industry in various fields, such as graphic, fashion to industrial, they still not getting what they should have paid, not only about salary but fame as well.

Denise Gonzales Crisp, a professor of Grapher Design and Director of Graduate Programs for Graphic Design, was prior to arriving at the college in Fall 2002, she was a senior designer for Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena, CA, and principal of the studio SuperStove! designing projects such as Artext magazine, Southern California Institute of Architecture lecture series, and books for independent presses.

Gonzales Crisp’s designs and writings have been published internationally, some of her works were featured in the 2002 exhibition East Coast/West Coast Dreams, Paris, in the 2005 anthology All Access: The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers, and the 2009 exhibition Dimension Typography, Chicago. Besides designing, she has lectured widely as well as a featured speaker in many design schools such as RMIT in Melbourne.

Gonzales Crisp discovered her interested in hand-drawn letterforms, clip art and ancient calligraphic lettering through the early 1990s. Which has been reflected on her later work. Gonzales Crisp designed a poster ‘trans’ for a Canadian arts festival, there is when she starts to fall with letters with her illustrator background. She thinks that the ‘fancy lettering’ and painted signs are mixing together perfectly. As Gonzales Crisp is calling this kind of design as ‘Decoration’ which involves research and writing as well as practice, she has been working on this for the past few years. Gonzales Crisp engaged Modernism and functionalism in her works, and suggested that ‘function is competed by ornament’.2

Gonzales Crisp says that ‘The decorative is clearly undervalued, and not just canonically but culturally too.’ 3 The term ‘decorator is often used in a pejorative way today. As a fan of ‘decoration’, she started to think what makes something ‘decoration’- rather than, say, merely decorative. According to her, ‘The rational aspect of the decoration is its capacity to tell, not only in a story-like way, but also in a metonymic way in the same way that icons do,’4 she noticed the complexity in designs.

Not only the complexity in ‘decorative’ has been noticed by Gonzales Crisp, she also found out the complexity between gender in design, “Right now, my classroom is probably filled with 80% women. And yet when I go out into the world, or when you hear from business owners or from creative directors, it’s not the same percentage. What is that, why is that? We can only guess.”5 As playing different roles in the design industry, Gonzales Crisp may has the impact to change the situation.

Bibliography

1. Tori Hinn, Women in Graphic Design (and why we need to talk about them), 2014.
2. Alice Twemlow, Denise Gonzales Crisp: The decorational, 2005.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Tori Hinn, Women in Graphic Design (and why we need to talk about them), 2014.

Yu Chuang 27688550

Designed work by women, spanning in the years 1980 to 2018

3 o’clock is always the perfect time to visit the National Gallery Victoria since everybody else is leaving and you’ll have enough time to read the works. I verified my theory by entering the third floor, there are sparse people, one guard, fragmentary footstep sounds, no sounds from people. This peaceful and serenity vibe is finishing my tranquility touring.

First stepped into the exhibit, the simple mix of colors, black and white in the room are drawing people’s eyes focus on the design works. In addition, the lowkey lighting inside the room and the lights that are emphasising on the works draws my attention. What first attracted me in the exhibition was the statement printed on the wall, “Designing Women shares that female designers, often overlooked in a male dominated industry, are producing sophisticated, iconic, and thought provoking work of exceptional quality.”1 This statement made me rethink about a couple of questions through the exhibition. First, why is there an exhibition especially hold for women, a specific gender. Second, what lead the industry into a man dominated condition. Last but not least, in which situation that people have to emphasis women can make professional works as same as man. The exhibit highlights the active and significance female designers and their works in contemporary design practice and culture, which focusing on four key narratives, leadership, community, teamwork and research.2

“The design industry itself, then, perpetuates the passive female stereotypes–women designers do sedentary work on textiles, fashion and ‘pretty pictures’”3 as we could see, instead of limited in these areas of design, industrial like furniture and installation art have been presented in this exhibit. Excluding the the lighting which emphasising the works, the works themselves are very enthusiastic, filled with different colors. The giant work ‘bloom’ was sitting at the very back in the exhibit and waiting to amazed people who walked pass. This huge work was designed by Alisa Andrasek and Jose Sanchez from Bloom Games, London. The work is made with plastic, which is an ‘unusual’ material that a female designer would used. The pink/ purple color of the work is standing out from the black of the room, it just popped into the viewer’s eyes in a sudden, brings out the sense of fun. The dynamic and fluid movement gave the final heart strike as a perfect ending to the viewers just when they thought they are finishing the exhibit.

The range of the presented works are various, they worked in the industry from past to present,  “changes in women’s education, work opportunities, gender attitudes and a government rhetoric of equal opportunity saw women respond positively to these competitive pressures.”4 all these marvellous works are competing with other female designers and the designers from internationals, different ages and gender. But also the female designers themselves, how they break through the boundaries indesign, and create their own characteristic, to be sophisticated, iconic and thought-provoking.

Bibliography

1. Designing Women, NGV.
2. Ibid.
3. Margaret Bruce, Jenny Lewis, “Women designers—is there a gender trap?”, 1990.
4. Jenny Connory, Plotting the Historical Pipeline of Women in Graphic Design, 2017.
5. Designing Women, NGV.

Yu Chuang 27688550