ELLEN LUPTON

Ellen Lupton discovered her love for expressive typography during her studies at Cooper Union in 1981. As a self proclaimed “art girl,” the visual art of writing was an inspiration her. “Graphic design was a revelation to me,” said Lupton. “Design really wasn't in the mainstream back then. It was esoteric. It was the thing you did if you were very 'neat,' which I wasn't.”

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After graduating in 1985, Lupton landed a role to run the newly founded Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at the Cooper Union. Here, she was able to combine her talents for writing and designing to visually construct the principles of graphic design history and theory on a limited budget. In the mid-1980s Lupton founded the Design Writing Research lab with her partner J. Abbott Miller. The studio provided the ideal environment for the generation of ideas that would eventually form the basis for Design/Writing/Research: Writing on Graphic Design, co-authored and designed by Lupton and Miller in 1996.

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Lupton was able to reach broader audiences in 1992 when she accepted the role as the contemporary design curator at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, one of the few existing design curatorships in the country. Lupton has organized numerous exhibitions and major publications that showcase design for the general public without sacrificing conceptual depth such as her Mechanical Brides and Mixing Messages exhibitions in the late 1990s. In 2006's Design Life Now, Lupton included populist forms of new social media such as blogs, open-source software and D.I.Y. magazines. These platforms work towards making design literacy part of mainstream culture and reflect Luptons personal desire to make design a less exclusive club. In 2006, she and her grad students produced D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself, a manual for empowering non-designers with how-to skills. 

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Katherine Feo, a writer at AIGIA said the following about Lupton: “Ellen Lupton makes this industry smarter. If graphic design has a sense of its own history, an understanding of the theory that drives it and a voice for its continuing discourse, it's largely because Lupton wrote it, thought it or spoke it.” Lupton inspires designers around the world and encourages people, especially young girls, to become contributors to the design world while challenging them to also be intellectuals. Today, Lupton focuses on writing texts for young designer to develop their skills rather than producing her own designs. Examples of these texts can be seen in the gallery below.