Lorraine Wild - Design Career in The Millennium

Design Career in The Millennium

In 2005, she became a regular contributor to Design Observer, the leading website on design commentary and criticism. She has also served on the National Board of the AIGA and on the design advisory board for the international Design Conference at Aspen, Colorado. She loves the works of designers W.A. Dwiggins, who reinvented American typography by bringing arts-and-crafts values to design for machine production; Alvin Lustig, an architect, printer, educator, who refused to specialize; Imre Reiner, an anti-Modernist typographer in Switzerland who rebelled against “objectivity”; Sister Corita Ken, a Southern California nun and printmaker who, in the 1960s, seized upon the idea of using the language of pop culture to speak to her local audience about spirituality, subverting, and appropriating to communicate; and Edward Fella, who mutated out of “commercial art” by working on problems only as he defined them and his commitment to anti-mastery.

"Her thoroughly informed and deeply sympathetic understanding of the nature of art and design has brought her commissions for monographs on artists and architects as far-ranging as Mike Kelley and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well as books and exhibition catalogues for institutions such as Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Getty Museum, UCLA's Hammer Museum, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal." Her visual work has been formed around a passion for typographic detail and formal invention and anaysis.

In September 14, 2010, she wrote a very informative and critical article in the Design Observatory Group website about The Black Rule. According to Wild, the Black Rule is "intimately connected to a typographic grid, and the paper it's printed on." The color black symbolizes importance and, in the case of The Black Rule, formality. The Black Rule also defines the dimensions of a piece of paper and separates the hierarchy of heads and subheads. The text that is used for The Black Rule is, commonly, Helvetica. This is evident in our every day life whether we notice it or not is the question. The most noticeable signs of The Black Rule is on subway signs or on U.S. Park Service maps. Wild was not the founder or inventor of The Black Rule. Massimo Vignelli is credited for discovering The Black Rule. This became his own brand although it was not typical, at the time, for designers to have a certain icon to represent his or her own work. His most popular works is designing the American Airlines logo and the iconic New York City subway maps.