#women designers

[gentlyepigrams]

Summer dress by Lucile, 1915. Meadow Brook Hall.

[legendarytragedynacho]

Zelda Wynn Valdes , A well-known Cuban -American fashion designer and costumer who made outfits for leading performers through the decades, including Josephine Baker, Joyce Bryant, Marlene Dietrich, Ella Fitzgerald, Dorothy Dandridge, Mae West, Gladys Knight, Ruby Dee, Eartha Kitt and Jessye Norman to name a few. She also created the Playboy bunny outfit that stands as one of the most recognizable uniforms globally (and the first to be patented)

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

Women Type Designers: SANDRA GARCÍA & DAFNE MARTÍNEZ

Sandra García, born and raised in Colombia, and Dafne Martínez, born and raised in Mexico, are young designers based in Mexico City. As part of the 2021 Typographer-in-Residence program organized by the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography, they designed the typeface Achtli specifically to improve the experience of learning to read in young children. They write:

We conducted a field study with primary school students between the ages of five and seven who were in the process of learning to read. . . . We also interviewed teachers to understand what difficulties they encountered in teaching the reading process and the use of typography. . . . After analyzing the results, we reached the following conclusions: Typefaces with similar morphological forms make it difficult for early readers to distinguish some characters from others. A typeface with distinct qualities could assist their memory to identify and differentiate them more efficiently. . . . [The Achtli typefaces has] unique, distinctive properties, with moderate contrast, semi serif endings, and slightly flared stems to emphasize the weight on the endings. The warm, modern shapes with fractured, rounded ends give the typeface a bold yet friendly personality.

The name Achtli is the Nahuatl word for “seed,” a metaphor for reading, as learning to read is like a good seed that grows and flourishes. The examples shown here are from Achtli: A Typeface for Early Readers, one of four volumes in the set Mujeres Hispanas y Tipografía, a program highlighting the talent and creativity of Hispanic women designers, published in Pasadena, California by the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography in 2022.

Sandra García

Dafne Martínez

View posts on other Women Type Designers.

View more Women’s History Month posts.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

[design-is-fine]

Properzia de' Rossi, Enameled gold pendant in the form of a laurel wreath, 1520 - 1530. Pearl, gold, diamond, enamel, at the center is a cherry stone carved with minute heads. 40 x 20 mm, Palazzo Pitti, Via Uffizi

The 16th century was not a generous century towards women, who were mainly relegated to the domestic sphere. There was, however, one who deserved a biography among the 168 excellent artists told by Giorgio Vasari: "Properzia de' Rossi from Bologna, a virtuous young woman, not only in household matters, like the others, but in infinite sciences that not only women, but all men envied her. She was not ashamed to try her hand at sculpture” – thus becoming the first sculptress of whom we have news. 

[pagansphinx]

Celebrating International Women's Day

Women of the Bauhaus

Benita Koch-Otte (German, 1892-1976) • Woven Wall Hanging • 1923-24 • Manufactured by Bauhaus Weaving Workshops, Weimar. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, NY.

The Bauhaus school was founded in 1918 in Weimar, Germany by architect Walter Gropius. It was a progressive art school whose manifesto stated “any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex” was encouraged to apply. In spite of this stated goal, the male hiarchy demonstrated a pronounced sexual bias. Women were pushed into the textile and weaving program and disregarded in favor of their male peers to the male dominated specialties such as painting and architecture.

Mariann Brandt (German, 1893-1983) • Pendulum Light • 1925

Brandt joined the Bauhaus, Weimar in January of 1924, where she attended classes with Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, among others, before joining the metal workshop in summer of the same year. In 1927, she became the director of the Bauhaus metal workshop.

Alma Siedhoff-Buscher (German, 1899–1944) • Shipbuilding game • Designed in 1923; Constructed in 1988.

Siedhoff-Buscher was a designer, joiner, and photographer, especially known for her toy and children's furniture design. The construction game above is currently sold at Beamalevich, a company in Barcelona that creates and sells architectural and design items for all ages.

Margarete Heymann (German, 1899-1990) • Haël Werkstätten, Disk Handle Teacup and Saucer • 1930

Margarete Heymann refused to study and work in the textile workshop of the art school. Instead she convinced Gropius to open up a ceramics program she could work in. It wasn't long before she left the Bauhaus to establish her own company – Haël Werkstätten.

[bondworks]

Jonathan.

[jozefsquare]

Movie poster designed for Boris Dolin’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Ugly Duckling with wonderful typography collage by Czech fine artist, graphic and textile designer Věra Nováková, 1967.

[rebekahwdesign]

[skunk-kiddo]

'Cause Girly Things are not always nice and cute. ✨

Sometimes they're short horror stories where young girls and women go through hell, ask for help and get blamed for being the victim.

(Movie poster design concept)

Ig: @o_krisi

[feefal]

Eukaryotic cell gang!! We love women in STEM.

The organelles of the cells have been translated into human anatomy, so the nucleus is the brain, the vacuole function as the lungs, and the mitochondria is the heart since it’s the… you already know, I don’t have to say it ;)

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

things to ask yourself when designing a female character:

how much blood is she covered in

are her eyes filled with madness

can she rip things to shreds with her fingernails

[gentlyepigrams]

Ball gown by Madame Elise. British, ca. 1875.

[yujofficial]

DesignHer: Celebrating the Women in Design

DesignHer - Celebrating Women in Design was not just a typical campaign; it was a tribute to resilience, creativity, and empowerment. As a global ux design studio our aim was to celebrate the remarkable achievements and invaluable contributions of our design leads, thereby paving the way for a more equitable and diverse landscape. Let's ignite empowerment and inspire change together! Read the blog here

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

Women Type Designers: LAURA MESEGUER

This week we present examples from the Ella type family designed by Catalan freelance graphic and type designer Laura Meseguer from Ella: Between Stencil and Calligraphy, one of four volumes in the set Mujeres Hispanas y Tipografía, a program highlighting the talent and creativity of Hispanic women designers, published in Pasadena, California by the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography in 2022.

Ella began as a morphological type design study to explore how classic calligraphy models could be adapted inro a stencil-style typeface and perform as a contemporary digital typeface. Meseguer writes:

My interest in stencil type began when I was a graduate student in the Type and Media program at the Koninklijke van Beeldende Kunsten (KABK) in the Netherlands in 2003-2004. I wa introduced to Fred Smeijers’s research and practice on stencil type, whose typographic explorations profoundly influenced my work. . . . Ella. . .[is] a family of stencil fonts inspired by traditional calligraphic models that perform collectively as a humanist text and display typeface. It was developed in the spring of 2021 during my residency at the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography.

Ella currently consists of four styles: Roman, Uncial, Rustic, and Brutalist, in two weights, Normal and Negrita. We are only showing the first three. The uppercase Roman, Uncial, and Rustic styles share the Roman lowercase, while the Brutalist has its own lowercase set.

Laura Meseguer specializes in custom lettering and personalized type design for branding and publicationos. She also designs and produces typefaces for her digital type foundry, Type-Ø-Tones. She teaches typography at Elisava, Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, and at Tipo-g, School of Typography of Barcelona, which she founded and coordinates.

View posts on other Women Type Designers.

View more Women’s History Month posts.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

[bernard-the-rabbit]

Oh alice..you would have loved Tim pls don't end up like him <3

[bondworks]

Substance III