Ellen Lupton‘s name might be a legend among all contemporary designers. She carries various titles & identities: writer, curator, educator, and designer. As the director of the Cooper-Hewitt Paul Warwick Thompson described as “a true polymath.” She has authored well-known books such as Thinking with Type, Graphic Design Thinking, Graphic Design: The New Basics, and Type on Screen. Many of her publications are listed as “essential reads” by colleges and her contributions to design-related education are being highly recognized by the industry.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1963, Ellen Lupton attended school at the Cooper Union between 1981-1985 as a design and fine art student. Right after her graduation, she accepted the offer as a curator for the school’s newly established Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography, a job that she then devoted passion for almost 7 years. The center was founded in the honor of the innovative type & graphic designer Herb Lubalin, aiming to provide the design community an unprecedented resource of Lubalin’s work. With no previous experience at all, Lupton started this job as a D.I.Y. curator, showing her talents as a creative writer and designer with strong written and verbal communication skills.
Her career as a curator continued to bloom as she became the curator of contemporary design in 1992 at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the only museum in the nation that devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. The position that she is still keeping today for 28 years has become a major accomplishment in her career, gaining her a good reputation in the industry. This job gives her access to a broader audience and larger-scale projects where she organizes exhibitions and contributes to the museum’s publications and public programs. As she describes her work in an interview: “It involves constant research—staying aware of what’s going on in the world of design—as well as the ability to stop and synthesize the flood of information into coherent stories about the process and practice of design.” During the 28 years, Lupton has executed numerous exhibitions and publications that showed her conceptual depth and breadth of her insights as a designer and a curator.
In 1997, she became the director of the Graphic Design MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art. At the time when graphic design was still highly commercial, instead of teaching students in the traditional way of responding to an existing problem, she let students frame their own problems for their thesis projects. Her approaches shaped students to think independently and comprehensively and fostered a lot of influential designers in the industry.
She did not limit her role as an educator to the students of MICA. Starting from 1991, she has published more than 25 books, broadened her influence over to the whole industry, from newbies to seniors. One of her most famous book “Thinking with Type” was released in 2004 and has impacted the design industry. It was not just about fonts and types, but a critical guide for designers, writers, editors & students. The book subjects typographic practice that is contemporary and relates to a variety of media and contexts that the type works in today. Her introduction to the 3 basic elements of typography: letter, text, and grid set up a standard for a lot of web design works and had influenced the whole web design industry.
In 2007, Ellen Lupton received the AIGA Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement – the most distinguished honor in the profession of communication design. As Katherine Feo put down in her biography for the AIGA medalists, “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.”
References:
Doyle, Alison. “Examples of the Top Skills Museum Curators Need.” The Balance Careers, Sept. 2019, www.thebalancecareers.com/museum-curator-skills-2062439.
Feo, Katherine. “Ellen Lupton.” AIGA, Sept. 2007, www.aiga.org/medalist-ellenlupton/.
Kennedy, Matthew. “Meet the Staff: Ellen Lupton: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.” Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 June 2014, www.cooperhewitt.org/2012/11/02/meet-the-staff-ellen-lupton/.
Mindset, Warrior. “Ellen Lupton (Full Interview) – Episode 55.” Vimeo, 1 Nov. 2018, vimeo.com/17560301.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellenlupton/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Lupton
