Briar Levit, a Historian of Forgotten Figures of Design Past
Briar Levit is a book designer, filmmaker, and former art director of Bitch magazine. She has taught graphic design for years, and is an associate professor of graphic design at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. She directed the film Graphic Means about the phototype and paste-up period that acted as a transition between metal and digital production processes. That movie also delved into the way in which printing shops acted as gatekeepers to communication, and how women were severely underpaid during this period as they entered a previously nearly all-male industry.
With founder Louise Sandhaus, she and Brockett Horne are collaborating on fostering an amazing online gathering place, The People's Graphic Design Archive. And she's at work on Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, a collection of essays due out later this year (not yet available for pre-order). We talk about all that and much more in this episode.
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Links to what we discussed in this episode:
- Graphic Means can be purchased and streamed digitally and as a DVD; see its Purchase page. (It’s also included in every Tiny Type Museum.)
- The People's Graphic Design Archive
- Linotype: The Film, directed and produced by Doug Wilson (also included in the Tiny Type Museum)
- Pressing On, directed by Erin Beckloff and Andrew P. Quinn (also included in the TTM!)
- Frank Romano, a founder of The Museum of Printing in Massachusetts. Frank and the museum are invaluable resources of type and printing history
- Bogus type, my accounting of an old and now obsolete practice of union negotiating advantages; it led to this 1955 Supreme Court decision that found resetting type, even if it were to be thrown away, was actual work and thus not “featherbedding,” an illegal idling practice
- Tuskegee Institute printing shop
- Compugraphic and other early phototypesetters
- Letterform Archive
- The New York Times article about pioneering user-interface designer Loretta Staples
- Yulia Popva’s book How many female type designers do you know? I know many and talked to some!