“The more uninteresting the letter, the more useful it is to the typographer.” This provocative statement is from Piet Zwart, the Dutch pioneer of modern typography who was influenced by Russian Constructivism and De Stijl, and was simultaneously a designer, photographer and industrial designer. Lucille Tenazas, Filipino-American educator and National Design Award winner, has consistently applied this idea to her work. Her lecture will reflect on what makes a thoughtful and critical designer, and how a disciplined and constrained process can help a designer invent their own typographic approach.

Lucille Tenazas is an educator and graphic designer based in New York and San Francisco. She is the Henry Wolf Professor of Communication Design at Parsons School of Design and was recently the Associate Dean in the School of Art, Media and Technology (AMT), a position she held from 2013–2020. Previously, she taught at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her work is at the intersection of typography and linguistics, with design that reflects complex and poetic means of visual expression. Tenazas was awarded the AIGA Medal for lifetime achievement in design in 2013. She received the National Design Award for Communication Design by the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in 2002. Originally from Manila, the Philippines, she has taught and practiced in the United States since 1979, a trajectory that included living in San Francisco, Rome, Italy and New York.

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