Profile

Denise Gonzales Crisp is Professor of Graphic Design, in the College of Design at North Carolina State University, where she served as Department Chair from 2002 to 2006.

Prior to arriving at the college in Fall 2002, Gonzales Crisp was senior designer for Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and principal of the studio SuperStove! designing projects such as Artext magazine, Southern California Institute of Architecture lecture series, and books for independent presses. Denise Gonzales Crisp’s current research areas include defining the DecoRational (a term she coined), which is the basis for the exhibition Deep Surface: Contemporary Ornament and Pattern at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, co-curated with Susan Yelavich, Director of the Masters in Design Studies Program at Parsons The New School for Design, New York. Gonzales Crisp also defends, writes, and lectures on alternative design writing. An ongoing speculative body of work, “Tools That Make Type,” looks at the nature and culture of the tools people use to give form to written language. Gonzales Crisp is also the author of the textbook Graphic Design in Context: Typography (September 2012), one in a new series edited by Meredith Davis and published by Thames & Hudson UK.