Briar Levit – Graphic Means
This event is in partnership with Portland Design Month. Advance tickets are required for admission and will need to be reserved ahead of time on their site. The event is still free, but we are doing an RSVP system so that we don’t run out of space.
Reserve tickets through EventBrite at this link
Briar Levit is a Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University. Her professional graphic design practice consists primarily of publication design, identity, and packaging. She cut her teeth as an Art Director at Bitch magazine, and still maintains a close relationship with the organization. In addition to this, she makes self-initiated work that is centered around visual representations of nature and place. She currently collaborates with Louise Sandhaus, Brockett Horne, and Morgan Searcy on The People’s Graphic Design Archive. She recently edited a book of essays for Princeton Architectural Press called Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History.
Levit’s feature-length documentary, Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production, explores graphic design production of the 1950s through the 1990s – from linecaster to photocomposition, and from paste-up to PDF. It’s been roughly 40 years since the desktop computer revolutionized the way the graphic design industry works. For decades before that, it was the hands of industrious workers, and various ingenious machines and tools that brought type and image together on meticulously prepared paste-up boards, before they were sent to the printer. For Levit, directing and producing the film established an obsession with design history—particularly aspects not in the canon.