Ellen Lupton

Bored in 1963, Ellen Lupton presents herself as a curator of Contemporary Art.

In 1981, Lupton became a fine art student at Cooper Union in 1981 and discovered the expressive potential of typography. “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.” Said Lupton.

Lupton begun to work in Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at the Cooper Union after graduated in 1985, and started to create curatorial work, an extension of writing and design. Lupton focused on bring the visual and the verbal together. With her playful works that making rigorous theory digestible and engaging, she surprised her academic peers. 

In the mid-1980s, Lupton founded the Design Writing Research lab with partner J. Abbott Miller, who she married with and have two children later on. Their perfessional partnership helped them won the Chrysler Design Award in 1993.

In 1997, Lupton joined Maryland Institute College of Art as chair of the undergraduate design program, then she became the director of the graphic design MFA program in 2003. Lupton has continued to practice an inclusive ethos of design and communication. In 2006, she and her grad students produced D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself, a manual for empowering non-designers with how-to skills.

Lupton wrote rtextbooks by herself. You may have read the book called Beautiful Users: Designing for People, which explores the idea of “user” in product design. She published over a dozen books with Princeton Architectural Press and Thinking with Type in 2004 became one of the best-selling titles.

Feo, Katherine, September 19, 2007, Ellen Lupton, https://www.aiga.org/medalist-ellenlupton