Remembering Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, who made graphic design bigger and bolder
Remembering Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, who made graphic design bigger and bolder
The famous designer brought her lively ‘supergraphics’ to the built environment. She died Tuesday at 95 years old.
“I wanted to mix life and design and art,” said the iconic graphic designer Barbara “Bobbie” Stauffacher Solomon in a 2018 short documentary film about her work. And for most of her life, that’s exactly what Stauffacher Solomon did.
Stauffacher Solomon died on Tuesday at the age of 95. During her career, she was known as a pioneer of “supergraphics,” the larger-than-life art form that combined mural art with graphic design. Her daughter, artist Nellie King Solomon, told KQED, “She had a huge life! There’s no tragedy.” According to Solomon, her mom died doing what she loved: creating.
“She died with Liquid Paper on her hands,” Solomon said. “She wrestled it with the nurses.”
A lifetime of art
Stauffacher Solomon was born in San Francisco. She married the filmmaker Frank Stauffacher when she was 20 and gave birth to her first daughter, Chloe, two years later. When Frank died in 1955, only seven years after they married, Stauffacher Solomon was left to care for her daughter by herself. She moved to Basel, Switzerland, to study graphic design and make her own career. During her training, she spent an entire year studying Helvetica. “You didn’t express yourself,” she said of her time studying in Switzerland. “You did what you were told.”
“I grew up in the Great Depression and was a single mother in the ’50’s,” Stauffacher Solomon said in an interview with the clothing brand Buck Mason. “You just work as much as possible and as hard as possible to keep things going. I was never thinking about blazing trails or having a legacy. I was just working my ass off to prove I wasn’t just a pretty girl.”
While Stauffacher Solomon might not have imagined herself a trailblazer in those early years, her bold style spoke for itself—eventually launching her to national recognition. After leaving Switzerland in the early ‘60s, she returned to San Francisco and set up her own design studio. That’s when she received what she called her first-ever “real job,” helping to design promotional materials for a seaside planned community called Sea Ranch, north of the city.
She created the community’s distinctive ram’s horn logo. Then, when designers at Sea Ranch were finalizing the athletic club’s interior, Stauffacher Solomon stepped in to upgrade the exposed plywood, decorating the space with huge blue, red, and white swirls, as well as her signature sans serif Helvetica letters.
“I combined California Abstract Expressionism with hard-edge Swiss graphics,” Stauffacher Solomon said in the documentary. “. . . [S]tretching, bending, reaching; the process was as much dancing as drawing.”
The look was totally novel for its time. Sea Ranch’s intrepid PR team helped to spread images of Stauffacher Solomon’s work, which eventually ended up on the cover of Progressive Architecture magazine. There, an editor coined the term “supergraphics” to describe the combination of typography and imagery with architecture and urban spaces. Since then, the genre has taken on a life of its own, expanding across locales.
After Sea Ranch, Stauffacher Solomon’s career took off in a number of different directions. In the late ‘60s and ‘70s, she designed music store posters and program guides for the San Francisco Museum of Art. Later, she received a master’s degree in landscape architecture and wrote a book called Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden. In the ‘90s, she made a striking series of paintings inspired by ping-pong tables.
Stauffacher Solomon retained her electric passion for design even in her last years. In a 2023 interview, she described waking up in predawn hours to sit at her drafting table, where she would begin ideating her next big project. And last September, she debuted her exhibition, Strips of Stripes, at SFMoMA; a collage of huge red and black graphics and the letters “OK” splashed across the museum lobby’s ceilings.
After a lifetime of work, Stauffacher Solomon began to create anthologies of her life and work. Her memoir-design book combo is titled, Why? Why Not? 80 Years of Art & Design in Pix & Prose, Juxtaposed.
“Writing the memoir I found very interesting,” Stauffacher Solomon said in the short film. “For me—somebody who was always having to be a mother or a wife or a daughter—I could be myself, instead of just spouting what my husband had taught me. All of a sudden, I could think, ‘What would I think? What would I say?’ I never had time to think about myself this way. It was finding my voice.”
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