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Supergraphics pioneer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon dies at 95

2024-05-13T19:06:00-04:00

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, the influential California-based graphic designer and landscape architect, passed away on May 7th in San Francisco at the age of 95.

Stauffacher Solomon died a prominent member of the design community whose career advanced aside an unusual synthesis of modern art, design, and architecture with many noted collaborators in all three channels and will be particularly remembered for the Supergraphics paintings she made in the late 1960s while in residence at the Sea Ranch utopian community.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon's Land(e)scape, 2018. Image courtesy Rob Corder/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0 Deed)

“It took a lot of verve for Bobbie to survive in a hostile environment, let alone blaze a trail,” biographer Joseph Becker recalled to the New York Times’ obituary section. “But she had the ability to create these amazing works that reflect her attitude that there should be something fun about the spaces we inhabit. In graphic design, landscape architecture, and her boo...

Environmental graphic design and its history with architecture highlights the value of cross-disciplinary expertise

2022-03-16T10:05:00-04:00

Architecture as a practice lends itself to fruitful collaborations with adjacent disciplines such as graphic design. When married in a project, the results often exude an exciting blend of color, style, scale, and unique aesthetics. There are plenty of examples to reference from if we look back at architecture's history with graphic design and its sub-disciplines like wayfinding, signage design, and environmental graphic design.

Take the iconic works of graphic designer Deborah Sussman and her collaborations with many architects like Frank Gehry or Barabara Stauffer Solomon and her work at Sea Ranch in the 1960s. While these are merely two of my favorite examples of the relationship between architecture and graphic design, we can see this marriage of disciplines used by architecture firms around the globe. So why discuss such a topic that has become commonplace within design industries?

Design consultancies like Pentagram and other independently run design practices like Isometric S...

New documentary short film shows off the groundbreaking design work of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

2018-05-07T14:32:00-04:00

"To design is to see as in foresee; to draw visions not previously seen," says the groundbreaking designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon in a new short documentary film about her work and life. A dancer-turned-graphic designer, Solomon was born in San Francisco but trained in Switzerland at the Basel Art Institute. Combining hard-edge Swiss graphics with California Abstract Expressionism, she defined California cool in the '60s.

Sea Ranch Tennis Club supergraphics by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. Photo © Jim Alinder/Princeton Architectural Press

An enduring visionary, the style Solomon pioneered came to be known as supergraphics: large graphics applied with vibrant colors, usually in geometric shapes, to walls or floors and ceilings to make the illusion of altered space. She is best known for her interior of Lawrence Halprin's 1960s Sea Ranch and her 1991 Ribbon of Light installation at the Embarcadero Promenade in San Francisco.

Kaiser Channel 44, KBHT T.V. Studio by Barbara Stauffache...

Tom Wiscombe redesigns the L.A. billboard (and is chosen over Zaha Hadid's proposal)

2016-10-20T12:39:00-04:00

Although Los Angeles has had its battles over supergraphics—those painted on advertisements that often stretch multiple stories on a building's facade—the billboard as a concept has received substantially less attention, unless the provocative imagery on it causes fender benders. However, Tom Wiscombe's proposal for digital, vertically aligned, two-sided billboards that allow people to walk inside of them injects new life into an otherwise sleepy structure, making them less car-centric and more about public space.

The proposed billboards, which were chosen via a West Hollywood RFP over designs submitted by Zaha Hadid, Gensler, and the MAK Center, will be placed in public plazas along West Hollywood's section of Sunset Boulevard.

For more on Tom Wiscombe:

More is more: the gaudy genius of the late Deborah Sussman

2014-08-27T13:57:00-04:00

“More is more,” was the motto of Deborah Sussman, the graphic designer behind this brilliant visual riot, who died last week at the age of 82. Trained in the office of Charles and Ray Eames, she took their love of colour and pattern to new heights, establishing a studio with her husband, Paul Prejza, that would tackle everything from shop fit-outs to city wayfinding, sprinkling her distinctive brand, like sugary confetti, from Philadelphia to Santa Monica.

One week ago: Deborah Sussman, designer, has died at age 83