Aaron Marcus (born 22 May 1943) is an American user-interface and information-visualization designer, as well as a computer graphics artist.

Biography

Marcus was always interested in both science and technology as well as visual communication. He grew up in

Omaha, Nebraska Omaha ( ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Nebraska and the county seat of Douglas County. Omaha is in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, about north of the mouth of the Platte River. The nation's 39th-largest cit ...

, in the 1950s, he was interested in astronomy and paleontology, and drawing cartoons. He learned painting, and calligraphy. In secondary school, he studied science and art, and was editor of his high-school newspaper. He graduated with an A.B. in physics from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

in 1965 after completing a senior thesis, titled "Determination of the (1,0,0) electronic effective mass in a

gallium phosphide Gallium phosphide (GaP), a phosphide of gallium, is a compound semiconductor material with an indirect band gap of 2.24 eV at room temperature. Impure polycrystalline material has the appearance of pale orange or grayish pieces. Undoped single cry ...

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical resistivity and conductivity, electrical conductivity value falling between that of a electrical conductor, conductor, such as copper, and an insulator (electricity), insulator, such as glas ...

by means of

Raman scattering Raman scattering or the Raman effect () is the inelastic scattering of photons by matter, meaning that there is both an exchange of energy and a change in the light's direction. Typically this effect involves vibrational energy being gained by a ...

", under the supervision of

John Hopfield John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network. Biography Hopfield was born in 1933 to Pol ...

. He obtained his BFA and MFA in 1968 at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

’s School of Art and Architecture. He learned about painting, drawing, printmaking, and letterpress printing workshops informally, photography, and art history. He also learned about book design, calligraphy, color,

graphic design Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdiscipli ...

, drawing, film making, printing, printmaking, painting, typography, and photography. At Yale, while a design graduate student, he also began the study of

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

, taking a course in basic functioning of computers, and he learned FORTRAN programming at the Yale Computer Center in the summer of 1966.

Work

In 1967, Marcus spent a summer making

ASCII art ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant chara ...

as a researcher at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in

Murray Hill, New Jersey Murray Hill is an unincorporated community located within portions of both Berkeley Heights and New Providence, located in Union County in northern New Jersey, United States. It is the longtime central location of Bell Labs (part of Nokia si ...

. From 1968 to 1977, in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning and in the Visual Arts Program, he taught at Princeton University: color, computer art,

, concrete/visual poetry, environmental graphics, exhibit design,

, history/philosophy of design/visual communication,

information design Information design is the practice of presenting information in a way that fosters an efficient and effective understanding of the information. The term has come to be used for a specific area of graphic design related to displaying information ...

information visualization Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, ...

, layout, publication design, systematic design, semiotics/semiologie, typography, and

visual design Communication design is a mixed discipline between design and information-development which is concerned with how media communicate with people. A communication design approach is not only concerned with developing the message in addition to the ...

. In 1969-1971, he programmed a prototype desktop publishing page-layout application for AT&T Bell Labs. In 1971-1973, he claims to have programmed some of the first virtual reality art/design spaces ever created while a faculty member at Princeton University. In the early 1980s, he was a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, as well as a faculty member of the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

’s College of Environmental Design. In 1982, he founded Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A), a user-interface design and consulting company, one of the first such independent, computer-based design firms in the world.

Articles and papers

Marcus has written over 250 articles, some of which have been published in trade journals. A selection of his published papers follows: * Marcus, Aaron. "Playing with Type: The Work of Chang Sik Kim." Forward, in Typogram: Visual Pun, Exhibition Book, "Doo Sung Design Gallery Publishers, Seoul, South Korea, 26 March-6 April 2011, (in English, Korean, and Chinese), pp. 31-35. * Marcus, Aaron. "Diagrams: Past, Present, and Future," An Introduction, in, Gauguin, Jan, Designing Diagrams: Making Information Accessible through Design. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers, , 2011, pp. 6–7. * Marcus, Aaron. "Branding the User Experience." On the Edge Column, User Experience Magazine. 10:3, 3rd Quarter, 2011, p. 30. * Marcus, Aaron, and Gould, Emilie. "Conducting a Culture Audit for Saudi Arabia" Multilingual, Issue 120, 22:4, June 2011, pp. 42–46. * Marcus, Aaron, and Jean, Jérémie. "Green Machine: Designing Mobile Information Displays to Encourage Energy Conservation." Information Design Journal, 17:3, 2010, pp. 233–243. * Marcus, Aaron. "Branding the User Experience." On the Edge Column, User Experience Magazine. 10:3, 3rd Quarter, 2011, p. 30. * Marcus, Aaron. "UX Storytelling." Book Review, User Experience Magazine. 10:1, 1st Quarter, 2011, p. 30. * Marcus, Aaron, ''My Journey: From Physics to Graphic Design, to User-Interface / Information-Visualization Design,'' in Alexberg, Mel, (Ed.), Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, Spring 2008, 192 pp. * ''Global/Intercultural User-Interface Design,'' in Jacko, J. and Spears, A. (Eds.), Chapter 18, Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, Third Edition. New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, 2007, pp. 355–380. * ''The Sun Rises in the East,'' Fast Forward Column, Interactions, 14: 6, November–December 2007, pp. 44–45

Books

Marcus has written/co-written six books. Here is a selection: * Baecker, Ron, and Marcus, Aaron. ''Human Factors and Typography for More Readable Programs''. Reading: Addison-Wesley Longman, 1990. * Marcus, Aaron. ''Graphic Design for Electronic Documents and User Interfaces''. Reading: Addison-Wesley Longman, 1992. * Marcus, Aaron, Smilonich, Nick, and Thompson, Lynne. ''The Cross-GUI Handbook for Multiplatform User-Interface Design.'' Reading: Addison-Wesley Longman, 1994. * Marcus, Aaron, Anxo Cereijo Roba, and Riccardo Sala. ''Mobile TV: Customizing Content and Experience.'' London: Springer, 2010.

Honors

*The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) elected Aaron Marcus in 2008 to its highest honor, the CHI Academy. He has also been named a Distinguished Engineer by the ACM (2011) *The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) through its Center for Cross-Cultural Design named Aaron Marcus an AIGA Fellow beginning June 2007. *The International Council of Graphic Design Associations (ICOGRADA) included Aaron Marcus in its publication Masters of the 20th Century published in 2000.

Notes

External links

Aaron Marcus and Associates (AM+A) home pageInformation Design Special Aaron Marcus InterviewWeb2 ExpoAIGAHCI International 2011
{{DEFAULTSORT:Marcus, Aaron 1943 births Yale University alumni Princeton University alumni Human–computer interaction Living people American businesspeople American graphic designers Visualization (research) User interfaces