Max Kisman (Netherlands, 1953).

After graduation from Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 1977, I started my own graphic design and illustration business, working for various publishers, institutes and museums. In the mid-1980s I pioneered with digital technology in magazine design, illustration and typography (Vinyl Music magazine and Language Technology), posters (Paradiso concert venue) and my Red Cross stamp designs for the Dutch postal service. In 1986, I initiated an cofounded typography and art magazine TYP/Typografisch Papier.

Between 1984 and 1988, have been teaching graphic design and typography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the Utrecht School of the Arts, and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In 1989 I received a grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture to explore aspects of my personal visual graphic symbolism and iconography.

From 1992 to 1997 I was chief graphic designer for VPRO television in the Netherlands and got involved in interactive media for the VPRO’s digital arm and the online magazine HotWired in San Francisco. In 1993 I was awarded with the Rotterdam Design Prize audience award and the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst’s H. N. Werkmanprijs for my TV graphics for VPRO television.

In 1997, San Francisco’s Wired Television hired me as art director; from 1998 I worked for various clients in the United States and the Netherlands and taught at the California College of Arts and UC Berkeley Extension in San Francisco until 2005. Since 2002 I am member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI).

<< back