Michael Manwaring (born March 21, 1942) is an American designer and artist, he was the Principal at The Office of Michael Manwaring design firm. He was based in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

for more than 40 years and was one of the founders of the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

postmodern Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...

movement in

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 ...

, that later became known as the "Pacific Wave". He is currently located in

Portland Portland most commonly refers to: * Portland, Oregon, the largest city in the state of Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States * Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state of Maine, in the New England region of the northeas ...

Oregon Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...

Biography

Manwaring was born and grew up in

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was estab ...

, near

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

where his father taught. He attended

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

(SFAI) and studied design with Jim Robertson, of the Robertson Montgomery design firm as well as Gordon Ashby,

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Barbara "Bobbie" Stauffacher Solomon (born 1928) is an American landscape architect and graphic designer. She is well known for the large scale interior Supergraphics that were highly influential in the 1960s and 70s and exterior signage at Sea ...

, and

Jack Stauffacher Jack Werner Stauffacher (December 19, 1920 – November 16, 2017) was an American printer, typographer, educator, and fine book publisher. He owned and operated Greenwood Press, a small book printing press based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He ...

. He was inspired in his early career by the Swiss designer

Josef Muller-Brockmann Josef may refer to *Josef (given name) *Josef (surname) Josef is the surname of the following people: * Jens Josef (born 1967), German composer of classical music, a flutist and academic teacher * Michelle Josef (born 1954), Canadian musician and tr ...

and his 'Beethoven poster'. While in college he started freelance work for the Surf Theater on Irving Street and 48th Street, designing film posters. While still in school he worked with designer Gordon Ashby, together they worked on the IBM-sponsored Astronomia exhibition (1964) at the

Hayden Planetarium The Rose Center for Earth and Space is a part of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The Center's complete name is The Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space. The main entrance is located on the no ...

in New York. Manwarning designed public signage for a number of cities in the Bay Area during the 1970s though 1990s, often inspired by large scale Supergraphics. In the 1970s, Manwaring designed an iconic public art sign in the Bayview neighborhood that reads, "India Basin Industrial Park" in

Helvetica Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...

font, each letter was made of concrete. In 1996, he designed alongside historian Nancy Leigh Olmstead the Embarcadero Interpretive Signage, a 2.5 mile long walk along San Francisco's Embarcadero neighborhood with 22 signs sharing historical relevance of a location. In the 1980s a few San Francisco–based designers were nicknamed “The Michaels” because they all had the same name (Manwaring, alongside Mabry, Cronan, Vanderbyl, Schwab), and later they were known as the "Pacific Wave" according to historian Steven Heller. Manwaring was known to design the

environmental design Environmental design is the process of addressing surrounding environmental parameters when devising plans, programs, policies, buildings, or products. It seeks to create spaces that will enhance the natural, social, cultural and physical environm ...

for projects (such as interior design, logos, signage, packaging, and marketing design), not only the graphic design. In 2006, he moved to Portland, Oregon. His work is in various public museum collections including

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

(SFMoMA),

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...

(LACMA), among others.

Biography

Publications

References

Further reading