Readymag Stories: Dan Friedman

it is a profession which involves a great deal of drudgery and concern about minutiae that can only be measured in quarter points and millimetres. graphic design has always defined its focus in narrow terms—in ways that may stimulate graphic designers into a frenzy but mean nothing to the rest of society.
—dan friedman

Cover for the book of solutions to the Grid Project at Yale. Black grid on a white background

Cover for the book of solutions to the Grid Project at Yale 1993–94.

basel + wolfgang weingart

The Basel School of Design became Friedman’s second attempt to study in Europe, and the difference was mind-blowing: the school was already taken over by rebels and revolutionaries like Wolfgang Weingart who advocated for intuitive, against-the-grid teaching. There Dan Friedman learned all kinds of professional radicalism and was ready to bring it back home.

Dan Friedman, Wolfgang Weingart Speaks to America, poster for a college lecture tour, 1972.

Poster for a college lecture tour. A calendar with a picture of Wolfgang Weingart

Cover, Typograpfishe Monatsblatter. Letters flying in space combined with a night city photo

Magazine cover. Multiple letters N on a white background

Cover, Typograpfishe Monatsblatter, 19717.

Yale Symphony poster, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner. A letter B

Yale Symphony poster, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, 1973. Collection of Tom Strong.

what appealed to me was making things with my own hands, getting dirty, raw and messy. it was the antithesis of working in a clean graphic design environment. —dan friedman

A red, green, yellow, grey and black armchair with one arm and a drawer under the seat

teaching

Upon returning to States, Dan Friedman started teaching at Yale University. For him personally, New Wave wasn’t just a edgy, punky style but more about developing a new methodology for teaching design. From legibility, Friedman shifted focus to the “unpredictability” of typography, its expressive ability to captivate and move a viewer. A typical exercise Friedman gave to his students was to match a phrase against three pictures in order to expose its alternative meanings.