 and welcome. My name is Kirsten McNally. I'm an educator here at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Welcome to our virtual talk, April Griman, Objects in Space. This program has been made possible by the Smithsonian American Women's History. Oh, my apologies everyone. This program has been made possible by the American Women's History Initiative, and you can learn more at womenshistory.si.edu. This program features real-time closed captioning, so please hit the CC button on your Zoom toolbar if captioning would support your experience today, and we'll be together for about an hour, so until six o'clock or 3 p.m. Pacific. Take breaks when you need. We'll be recording this conversation. We're streaming live on YouTube, hi to all the YouTube people, and we'll link it tomorrow for you to access. And of course we are so lucky to have Transmedia designer April Griman with us tonight. She will be sharing work, spanning her career, take us on a tour of her design studio in Los Angeles, Made in Space, and we'll end tonight's conversation with an audience Q&A. So as we move through the program, we welcome everyone to participate in the chat and add your questions in the Q&A box. And facilitating our conversation today is Cooper Hewitt, Senior Curator of Contemporary Design, Ellen Lupton. So Ellen, I'd love to have you take it away. What a thrill. Thank you. There is only one April Griman, and today you will meet her in person. We're going to dive under the skin of her legendary work and experience it in three or even four dimensions. I want to start with just a few words of introduction for this amazing creator. April Griman is a Transmedia designer. After studying design at the Kansas City Art Institute, she enrolled at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland. In 1976, she moved to Los Angeles and established her multidisciplinary firm Made in Space. Since then, April has left a blazing trail of pixels in her wake. An early user of the Macintosh computer, she embraced the glitches and goblins of digital media. She shocked the patriarchy in 1986 with her life-size self-portrait and designed quarterly. April has designed practically everything, postage stamps, public murals, environmental graphics, the occasional logo and letterhead, and architectural systems from the inside out. She has a new book coming out this summer, White Space, featuring her original photography and written work from 25 women contributors. Like many of you here today, I have been awestruck by April for my entire life as a designer. She has earned four honorary doctorates. She has participated in countless exhibitions. She holds the AIGA Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement. She has taught and lectured around the world. She's a consummate educator. Yes, all that, but never has she delivered a talk quite like this one. Today, we will meet April Griman, where she is, live, up close, in person in her legendary studio in LA. I just can't wait. I'm so excited to be along for the ride. Welcome, April Griman. There I am. We made it. We made it. One of our big computers. You made it. I don't know if I made it. As usual, the electrons are winning the war over here because we had our main computer die on Monday, and then I had to switch. They're just afraid of you, April. That's all. I know. Oh, well. They've been winning, so I guess I don't know who's more afraid, but thank you for that introduction. I'm humbled and embarrassed. Show us your work. What's up? Let's go. All right. Everybody just make sure that the 3D parts of this are very short and sweet, I hope. Just go on and have them handy. I very often will say put on your 3D glasses, but I forget to tell you to take them off. Yes, if anyone has 3D glasses, there are some truly 3D moments in here for you to experience. Grab them if you have them. All right. I guess I'll share a screen time. I don't want to miss. Okay, here we go. We're rolling. I forget when you have to click, but okay, put them on. So this is one of the posters in our collection, April. Good. Cooper, it's very proud to have lots of your work. So what is it? 38 years ago, approximately. I hate to count that far back, but yes, I think you're right. So tell us what's happening in the poster. Very simple assignment, particularly the way I solved it, but this is a poster for the Pacific Design Center, and it was for all the showrooms that were on the second floor, so the organization of them, their little bunch of them, I don't know how many were called PDC2. And I started looking at the obvious thing is looking at their furnishings and lighting and fabric and all the things that would be in the Pacific Design Center. And as much as I like some of the really, really high end names, brand names, there was a lot of furniture and lighting and fabric I didn't care for. So rather than start, you know, haggling really with everybody, I just decided I would go much more abstract or much more symbolic. So I have a piece of fabric and a piece of marble and a line drawing of a chair, and I just escaped, you know, the fate of having like a month of argument over which piece of fine or ugly furniture would go in this. And since I just was very curious about, this obviously precedes the big rage of 3D some years ago with television and all that and movies. But I just thought, you know, all of these are objects in space. And so I did this 3D poster. And I have no idea how I found a consultant or any of this, it just, I can't remember, but it was a lucky thing that I was able to find these fabricators and printers that could help me, including the custom glasses. So you ready? Great. Yeah, fantastic. Most of my stories or answers or responses will be pretty silly, Ellen, but you already know me from, you know, from other things. So Pacific Wave exhibition at the Fortuna Museum in Venice, Italy, also in the 80s. Is this going to jump back? Okay. So it all really began with that, you can see that little black rectangle that has about a dozen pixels. So obviously the concept Pacific Wave, but I addressed it, the poster for the show as Pacific Wave, obviously the Wave literally, you know, surfs up kind of stuff. And, but I also, the electronic wave, the digital wave that was coming from California. So it's really, again, another simple idea. It's that little black rectangle enlarges a little group of pixels. And then like Eames power of 10, I don't know, this is, I'm not very good with certain powers of or exponential kind of mathematics. So this is my constantly enlarging those to have, you know, like you're almost catching the wave or you're in the wave. Very simple. How did you do the type? How did you create the type on a curve and the type moving in space? I guess that was very early Photoshop. Because very early. This was 87. So maybe it wasn't, I actually, I think Photoshop came out in about 89 because I took the first workshop with one of the designers of it. So this 87. So maybe I use the my, you know, my war horse, always my collection of emigres, pre postscript type fonts. And then I probably did this photographically then I'm thinking. And I, the nice thing was that I sent all the artwork off to Italy. And that was printed in Venice, if you can believe that. And yeah, so that's how I must have done that kind of crazy, huh? Yeah, it's amazing. Objects in space where it's almost entirely abstract. Kind of. Yeah. So anyway, and then this is AIGA was the annual competition communication graphics and I was the chair of this committee. Had Sheila and Nancy and Lucille and Paula and Julie. And then so all of our names are of course in pink. And then there was the token male Massimo and he's in blue up the side there. And why did you do first names to make it more like girls getting together to judge some more? I'm also, I like informal and casual to kind of offset serious and traditional and and more formal things. And so I also use very often I use all lowercase when I'm typing, doing typography, I mean, not in everything, but so yeah. But this, yeah, so this is all caps and lower, but nonetheless. So this, this again, it's just a carry was a curiosity for me because I thought, well, there's some pretty interesting things regarding communication, you know, so first of all, there's my spiritual side. And so the all the brains going from the root chakra just above the flame on the lower left. And so there are seven brains for the seven chakras. And so that's a way that our body communicates or receives communication through those energy centers. So it goes. Yeah, I tried to color them a little bit the way the chakras would be known for color. But at the same time on the top, nearly middle is Scotty from Scotty's Castle in Death Valley. Scotty's Castle has been closed for quite a few years, it got flooded in one of the recent floods. And, and, and so it's closed. But I don't know why is Scotty, but he was on my mind in Death Valley. And so I also found it curious that we don't think about it, but everything we see through our eyes is upside down. And it's our brain that actually flips it right reading. Don't ask me why I just said I'm kind of curious about all this stuff. And I'm always curious about kind of science and technology and, and obviously some spirituality thrown in. So yeah, and so I use x rays and different things. There's the fish. How's that fantastic, beautiful. So this was the poster for obviously the modern poster at Museum of Modern Art. And I won the competition, which came as a big shock. I don't usually win things too well. But this was a lucky, lucky day. And so for me, the modern poster was television at the time that that's really how we were getting our information, our events about culture. And, you know, in addition to news, but you know, public broadcast and different kinds of programming. So and then working with my incredible collaborator, but really kind of my creative director and advisor and techno guru, Dale Hergstad. This goes back some years ago where we started to explore some preliminary things with augmented reality. Wow. So you took the pieces of that poster and put them in actual space. Yeah. And, and Dale is just, you know, the genius amongst us. It's really amazing to see that implicit architecture where you collapse, you know, space and typography into that, the surface of the poster and just pulling it apart and letting it become real space. I've always thought, I mean, there's been nothing two dimensional for me. I've even thought of a business card as being a space. And, and so Dale recognized that and just said, we got to let's get this into space. So, you know, he's just been pioneering and crusading to get this to to where it is now. I can't show you everything we're doing now, but I will show you a little bit with his stellar team and people from my studio too. But for me, this is thrilling, like you're immersed in the in the space and in the information and in the communication. So yeah, so I think it's that time again, put on your glasses. I will try to do the same. Now I can't seem. I like better with these glasses. I know. We all do. Oh, oh, you guys are missing it at Cooper you it. Let's face it. So these are the same elements from the same poster. Particularly the typography. I mean, the letters, the modern poster that spiral in and out are just flying over your head. So okay, you can take your glasses off. It's kind of sad, but the rest of it makes my type with pink, which is good. And so again, my fascination with learning more about science and space, this is that's the sound of that's been recorded from solar flares. It's a real authentic sound. So design quarterly. Pretty much everybody knows about my my boldness. Some say courage. And this is the amazing poster from 1986 in design quarterly. Yeah, that is life size and a life size centerfold. I always saw it as a joke on the playboy centerfold. This one you just fold it and unfold it. And there it is. It's as big as April. It's really amazing. So what people don't know and why it's been in exhibitions really all over the world is that it's really it's a you know, it's a video image. And I I've had my own professional video equipment since the early 80s when I was at Cal Arts. And so it's actually a videographic and then computer graphic. And it happens to be offset lithograph. But it really is more for me about video and computer. And so in the early late 70s, but mostly early 80s, I was already being slammed pretty hard for not being a graphic designer that I was an artist kind of mucking around in the design field. And some encouraged me to leave. I won't share names, but I hate to think who April. So this is the latest for a from all DQ the team. I think I talked right through their credits, but Dale Herrick Stad, Jackie Turbin, David, David, the Getzy, and then my people Hector Torres and Jay, and Jay Shang and sorry, Jay, I always say your name wrong, but and David Pentland. And so can you play it again? I can try. I hope it doesn't, you know, sometimes it chokes the eye. Let me go back and see if we can. I do want to, I think, okay, we'll see what happens. So I was struggling with that those kinds of remarks as an early kind of pup in design. And so I was trying to think what makes sense. Maybe I should just continue on my path with photography and art. And I was fortunate to be head of design program at Cal Arts, and which I started exploring other media that I was really interested in, including video. And I got the bug for video, bought video equipment. And but I was I was asking myself a question of what made sense for me. And then I found in reading something from Wittgenstein, the Austrian Viennese architect. In so many words, if you give something a sense, it makes sense. There's another parallel for me with theoretical physics, but I won't go into that now. But so I started just thinking, you know, well, what would make sense? And Mickey Friedman invited me to do an issue of design quarterly. And so this was my homage to, I won't say the word I'm thinking to those predominantly men who told me to get the hell out of the industry. But so my response was not only saying, you know, if you're sick of me already, then here's another version of me. And so so there's the crew for, we call it Alt DQ for alternate design quarterly, that's in now the AR realm. Incredible. And what's incredible to me is that it's all there in the original. Yes. But you're just pulling apart the elements that you had put there to begin with, and creating a new experience. And I should say that on the left is a really old interview from Archie Boston, who when I he just happened to interview me right after that came out. So that would have been in 86 or 87, when I did this piece. And so I do like his video because on the piece, I don't call it a poster, but sometimes I have to because it behaves like one when you finally get it. I mean, it folds down and goes in a slipcase. But there is also was a special edition printing I did with myself flat. But when I started the project, I had, I do have curly hair. And I, when I started, I had my big, big curly hair. And by the time I finished working on design quarterly, I cut my hair, kind of going unisex there for a while. And so you'll see me with like this giant short hair. So you'll see it again. So the backside is all pure video and color. And was all video imagery, not generated through Macintosh, except maybe some of the fonts on the left. Oh, see if it's still working. Ellen, I love my little astronaut. He's always just, he just keeps flying through this and, and just is tireless. There I am. See big, big short hair. This is hysterical. Right. And seeing the video moving is so cool. Ghostly, right? It's like, there he goes. One of the many me's, many, many me's. Uh-oh, word stuck. Just click on the screen itself on the image and you probably get it back. Thank you, Ellen. Oh, this is a laptop I've never even used. So the reason I included this project was, again, thank you, Mickey Friedman for doing so very much for me and my career and being so understanding and supportive. But this is, what happened here? I think when I went back, so to do the poster and billboard for the Graphic Design America show, it was a traveling show that was inaugurated at the Walker and go back. Hope it works again. So again, the idea is to use the American flag, an obvious symbol for America. It's kind of probably problematic right now, but the image really takes the whole history of graphic design, which goes the left, you'll see on the flag, you'll see the steel engraved stars, which I got from a stamp or something. Then the next group of stars enlarged is offset lithography. Then the next part of the stripes is videography. And then finally, the last pixelized version of the stripes on the flag is computer graphic. And so in a way, graphic design equals technology. And then it's a very simple idea that it shows the evolution of graphic design from its first incarnation and technology to current present time. I remember seeing it in Minneapolis in 1989. I think that was very early. A lot of designer days, huh? Yeah, I was involved in that show too, doing research and writing. I know. And then I thought, in a way, that was the first kind of the first time I had the opportunity to work with scale change, which I think was really important and objects that change scale, or the really objects that are transmedia in nature, which means you can start off with one thing and you can scale it up, change materials, change means of fabrication. So this is my 8200 square foot mural, which is at the metro station at Wilshire, Vermont, Los Angeles. And this was, I rented a webcam and I documented the 28 days that it took to, as the fire department decided in the last moment, the digital video image couldn't be digitally printed. And don't ask me why, what the saga was about, but we ended up having to oil paint it. So it took two men that I hired on a lift to paint this for 28 days. So I'm a big fan of this video. It's very low res because it's a webcam. But it's pretty remarkable watching the light change. They work from sunrise to sundown pretty much every day and painted this. And now it's up for, it's going to be refurbished. And I think I'm going to be able to, because vinyl and the adhesive and all of that isn't an issue so much anymore with fire department and also with cultural affairs. So I think it's going to be printed digitally as it should have been and adhered to the building. At least that's what I'm praying for, but that's what's in discussion right now. So you're going to show us some of your architectural work? I'm going to show the work I've done in color materials for architects and buildings. So this was a project, the Orange County Great Park, working with Ken Smith, the master landscape architect and Mia Lair from Studio MLA and IDA that they've changed their name, but that was their name. They did a great amount of design and all of the drawings and some of the technical things for us in collaboration. The brand and so we pioneered some materials. We pioneered some integral color acrylics and for the signage. And we presented many other things that have never have been built on the 1400 acre park, but a great amount of our collaborative team got implemented. That's Ken Smith's walk way there. And this is very subtle right here. There we go. I'm having to click a couple times. So this is a project done in Nagasaki Harbor in Japan with Roto Architects and this is incredible. I actually did pretty much every project I've done now, regardless of scale, I visited the site. And this is in Nagasaki Harbor and it's a Mitsubishi building and it takes up a huge amount of space in the harbor. And so the context and the concept really was to find a color palette that merged with the natural environment there. And it was very simple. So what is that sphere made out of? It's all made out of steel like the ship because Mitsubishi builds ships and so it's all shipbuilding technologies. Is there something inside or is it purely an object? It's a four-story observatory that you can go into. And so the residents of Nagasaki Harbor who have lost a great deal of their harbor due to shipbuilding and industry have regained some places. And you might have remembered seeing the kids reaching up to the sphere, orange sphere. And that's like a dry roof garden but kids are up there and the public is allowed to actually enter what would normally just be a dead warehouse. And so that space really was programmed by Roto-Architects to have more than one purpose. And it's a very popular building in Nagasaki Harbor. And this is not a heavy concept but it's again Roto-Architects, Madame Tussaud on Hollywood Boulevard. And I mean it was kind of a difficult thing trying to find a palette but I was responding, the main color, this kind of tinted zinc panel that responds to the, what do you call it, it's not the spire of the Chinese theater. So it's a complimentary palette, very simple but it's a really pretty beautiful facade of a building that Roto-Architects did for this museum. And I'm showing this because I work with different size objects in space but also because none of the color palette work I've done since 1989 has ever been published in the context of design, the new design magazines or journals or anything actually. So and it's been a fairly sizable but also important part of my career. So this is probably the richest of the research I could do to develop a color palette. It was with the at Sintagalesca University in South Dakota and so learning a lot by research and also narratives from Native Americans, they have a rich tradition of obviously symbology, cosmology, numerology and so I took some of that, the four directions, a little one metaphor from one of the kinds of winds and colored this building interior and exterior based on that research. Incredible photography too. So again when I work on color palettes I tend to not use you know Martha Stewart's trending colors but to try to not all of my projects have I been so fortunate as to work with the Lakota Sioux but you know I always work from a concept base and that drives it and and it's always influenced for me by the natural site and so like I said to date I've been lucky to go to visit all the natural sites or the sites of where these buildings will be. This is a little arts colony off the grid in Temecula, California and sadly the cabin it was all the whole there were I think six cabins, a musician's cabin, an artist's cabin, a writer's cabin and they were the one artist's cabin sadly burnt down and and so Roto architects with some interns did a design build for this cabin and it is sacred land and so I based palette on the myth of the phoenix so exterior had the warmer color fire colors and the interior had some of the that incredible blue that you see in the middle of a really hot fire sadly in one of the fires in southern California some years later that whole the all six cabins in the whole arts colony burnt to the ground oh yeah so April we should start touring your studio oh my gosh really can you take us around yeah can I we're so intoxicated by the color behind you five more minutes how about two more minutes okay we're just about done Ellen honestly it's all amazing so this would bring us to the end of the show uh the keynote presentation which has to do with the photography and oh my god I might have been there the whole time so this will be printed in about two weeks and no me shipping this book hopefully uh in a month and go to aprilgriman.com to see to see a little bit more about it and these are the 25 women contributors who without knowing who each other were I don't know if that's proper English or what any of my photographs look like were so generous in contributing 350 words or less with the with the theme or the topic or the words white space one word and a collaborator and uh inspirational figure for me is Laurie hey cock macula macula macula that works it works I know I'm going fast Ellen everybody wants you to just keep going but I want to see your studio and share that so oh it's really beautiful this is a little appetizer of what the 118 page book is and keresin has put a link in the chat so people can check it out oh it's nice yeah an instant design history classic and collector's item Ellen you're hired I just I want it I want it thanks April is he gonna take us around I may be if you stop asking I'm starting to learn how to get you to do stuff I can turn my camera off and April is going to show us her world and you gotta turn the sound off on your um laptop over here it's the pan across here not that way it's supposed to be here without me wow I can't believe this we're there with you but this way so these are can you hear me oh yes okay so um my husband who's an architect Michael we devised this track system so when I I have a 50-inch color printer and we do our own large-scale prints right here and when when I'm printing and testing them then we we mount them and on these sliding panels so this is an example of those and um this is a a rug from a an exhibition in the UK in London with a group called Auto Italia and I was one of four artist groups that had an opportunity to show the show is called misinformation and mine had to do with atomic atoms and internet and other misinformation so that's a printed rug you're showing this this is from the great park the acrylics that we worked with to use on the signage and there's the paint palette this is the tile from the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts which I did in it started in 1989 with Bart Meyers Architect and then uh it's a huge theater in Cerritos uh we worked with them for four years let's see yeah it's too much junk in the back here let's go towards the this is our um conference room and um come over this way and more sliding panels for test prints one of them is trying to jump off the wall it's very old and I want you we have a great view out the windows of the eastern building looks like Gotham up there and the Orpheum theater right next to us oh the guys are supposed to how do you go about picking the paint colors and then in two minutes um whatever's on sale no I this is our lunch room and uh this is a surfboard that I commissioned from Sean Fell who's in Florida that does custom surfboards so I actually sent him a gradation and um the colors are resin that I wanted him to use for this uh serves up table and this is a model that was built for the Wilshire Vermont when we were testing it we also worked to show the client um and the city the cultural affairs people we worked in Sketchup from modeling and um this is this this is the original art for the mural two still video images well it's one image that is painted on the two walls kind of like that you can see our great view out of downtown LA and you can rotate to just see this is uh one of the 19 images from my drive by shooting exhibition uh one one to show a photography at the Pasadena Museum of California art you guys are walking through and uh with the black myself nearly enough so this is uh this is going to see then you can come this way this area was um designed this little platform my veranda was supposed to be for my little table and chair that I could just read and uh have a quiet um but it's now filled up with a black file which I built for my large prints and then uh I collect children's chairs this is a tonette I think I got in the end of Berlin this is a stickly hall chair they're all children's size and the other famous chair is the Biedermeyer and that's Astro girl who's hogging it right there and then I also collect let's come over here and over here it is okay so a long time ago I collected this Astro boy in Japan like my first trip there in the early 80s and then found that there were Chinese knockoffs this is Wee Wee Boy and uh you put the water in here and then you pull it down his pants and Wee Wee comes out um and uh there's a lot of Chinese knockoffs of course of everything but simultaneously I started collecting uh virgin statuettes so if you look in there tons of virgins I have no good explanation of why that appealed to me but I collect them from all over the world here's another display of them there's some really beautiful ones and then there's some men like Michelin man Doe boy big boy of course and big old Ultraman and then there's some hybrids or I don't know what this what's going on here this one belches but I won't demonstrate that this is another belch boy that's a little creature and that's a belch coming out supposedly there's big boy there's a virgin there's a there everywhere there's belch boy a thing like I could go and get a belch boy halloween costume or uh in china I think so he's amazing I know he's very top heavy with his belch very often falls over and Doe boy of course his legs are pretty wasted weight uh useless no he's like no you know gamma yeah that guy's somewhere in the in the mix here and uh yeah okay go for it to work great well you want to sit down and we'll ask you some questions I heard you had a george churny chair it's norman norman ah it's norman churner and churner all right got it messed up what can you show us the chair and you want to sit in it and we'll ask you some questions where are you oh you want to see my picture I'm back hi April so that's a great spot so we're gonna have questions for about you know seven to ten minutes here so please add them to the q and a um I have to say April somebody has asked you the name names about who tried to get you out of the design world maybe just give initials it could be sort of a game um I'd rather not all right I I certainly appreciate that I have a question here about what tools are used in creating the AR experiences what what what tools I how is that created how do you feed in graphic design into AR truth be told and I'm pretty sure Dale Perkstad is watching but all of this is done by you know our providing individual images retouched from Photoshop you know and then sent with transparent backgrounds and all of this is done and what is it cinema 4d and unity and I think those are the main I think those I walk right and uh those are the main uh just keep going we're pretty busy here so anyway um yeah that's it I mean I I am so not the person that's working on this technology I'll be honest and I you know input to it and I provide things and then we talk about different uh ways that I'd like to see it and they're way more advanced versions of this Ellen which I didn't show because I didn't want to make it all about that but we're we're actually putting much more time into creating layers or spaces that have much more immersive and interesting deeper information that you know like the narrative for design quarterly would be part of that and then you could jump to original video and then you can also look at in terms of the technology part and then you can also look at it in terms of the science so those are the things that are what all pretty much all my works about and and so those things are being layered and kind of specialized but I could you know the AR thing could be a whole session in itself so I just showed you kind of the fun stuff great I see Hector in the comments has said that unity and Photoshop layers are used which is kind of interesting because you go back to the beginning of Photoshop you were one of the first people to use it and now you're using it in this completely different way so that's cool I have a question for you about your own education so in one of the interviews that I watched you mentioned that when you were a student of Armin Hoffman back in Basel he never once spoke to you you know that's I tried not to take it personally and it was very but it was very clear that I wasn't doing anything particularly interesting to him but I found out you know there was this seminar for Hoffman when he turned 100 last year and I found out from other essay interviews and published pieces in the print work that came from that that like my teacher Inga Drakri she was in Hans Alamand where my teachers in undergrad school and I found out that he also never spoke to them so after like you know 50 years of sweating it you know why he never spoke to me I found out that was fairly common but you know if you read that then you probably read that I said it was my first experience as Zen and that was you know just learning to keep looking and learning to see by looking or learning to look by seeing or whatever and yeah but when I started finally working on color and the assignment that he gives to everybody and that assignment there's no deadline we could work on that for five years I think but when I finally just kind of propelled myself and working in color it was the first time he said something however it wasn't in Basel it was the summer after I left Basel and I was living in southern Switzerland the entire part Switzerland near the Hoffmans and he came and watched some things I was doing and he kind of had it on the shoulder and so that's very interesting wow but I was he'd never seen color before but he shocked them well I was working with Dayblood colors and that was pretty red you know particularly in Switzerland so anyway that's good so we have a lot of students here today welcome students and I have a question from Sophie what advice do you have for a student getting ready to enter the field an industry that's really client controlled how do you stay true to yourself well first of all I never give advice that's one of the smartest things about me so yeah that would be my answer I don't give advice I'm not that stupid you know sorry I'm not trying to be cheeky but I just yeah okay so no advice I'm going to try another one do you tell secrets because we have someone who wants to know the secret to continually embracing change and new media martinis no I'm just you know I'm just a very curious person I just I just I mean I have an insatiable appetite for questioning and trying things and technology has been a perfect vehicle literally for me to try things and explore things and look at things in a way that I haven't before and you know there is the artist in me that is always just trying media and trying and making a mess and trying to dig myself out of that clean up that mess and it's just it's just in my nature that's great and we have time for just one more question and it's a question about inspiration what inspires you are you interested in any contemporary design or do you look more to art and philosophy and the landscape what what inspires you April pretty much everything but design everything you said except I mean design of course you know there are so many good designers and so much good design and but I am more inspired by music and and art I think I think I like art more or music more because I think that it's a unique way to understand yourself by looking or hearing others work and other forms of art and and it's you know without a commercial agenda so and it's not that a lot of really good design doesn't embrace that and I feel like that's what my design is about as well like to just take it beyond the brief or beyond the budget or beyond the deadline to make sure that there's a deeper thing that I'm investigating as well that has a has a has a meaning to me that's beautiful and somebody pointed out that clearly nature is also so important to your work and seeing that the landscape I was going to say before you offered all those other things that you know if I if I'm really down in the dumps or I've just like exhausted that I mean I think I'm pretty well known for a zillion shots from Death Valley or from the desert in fact I owned a bed and breakfast spa motel in desert hot springs for 21 years with my husband Michael and it was a way to you know actually access the desert you know own the little chunk of the desert and also to have that hot mineral water and you know looking up to being able to see the milky way and that is probably one of the most rejuvenating for me the most re-invigorating place. Amazing thank you April Griman and thank you everyone for being here today it was really legendary it makes us see our collection in a new way through your eyes and to see you in your space we just feel so connected to you and we really appreciate your sharing so much of yourself today with the with your followers who just love you oh there's gotta be a couple for sure yeah you should see all the love in the chat it's really stunning do I get to see the chat are you just gonna yeah I think we can save the chat and share it with you it has names of people who are here and who have just been stunned and astonished by what you've where you've taken us through your work it's really cool so hi hi lori hi laria hi donatella those are the ones I know are part of this and have been so great to work with me on white space and many other incredible women uh frances and you know it goes on and on but I'm just saying hi hi okay I'm gonna sign off and just say goodbye to April