Ellen Lupton

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.

Like so many other design legends that came of age in the era of “commercial art,” Lupton was not aware of design as a viable field of study before college. It wasn't until she began as a fine art student at Cooper Union in 1981 that she discovered the expressive potential of typography. The visual art of writing was an inspiration to a self-professed “art girl” who came from a family of English teachers. Realizing the potential for an expanded critical discourse in graphic design provoked a shift in her ambitions. “Graphic design was a revelation to me,” says Lupton. “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.”

Upon graduating in 1985, Lupton accepted an offer to run the newly founded Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at the Cooper Union. The future advocate of “do-it-yourself” started out as a D.I.Y. curator herself, fusing her talents as a writer and designer with an abiding interest in post-structuralism to visually construct the principles of graphic design history and theory on a shoestring budget. Curatorial work came naturally as an extension of writing and design. Exhibitions provided another arena in which objects, images and text functioned as both the method of communication and the subject of inquiry. Lupton's early work in this area brought the visual and the verbal together so playfully that she surprised her academic peers with her ability to make rigorous theory digestible and engaging. During this time Lupton also began publishing as a critic, establishing herself as a leading voice in the field in publications such as Blueprint, Eye, Design Review, I.D., Print, Emigre and Assemblage.