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

Biography

Marcus grew up in

Omaha, Nebraska Omaha ( ) is the List of cities in Nebraska, most populous city in the U.S. state of Nebraska. It is located in the Midwestern United States along the Missouri River, about north of the mouth of the Platte River. The nation's List of United S ...

, in the 1950s. In secondary school he studied both 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 Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

in 1965 after completing a senior thesis. He obtained BFA and MFA in 1968 at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

School of Art and Architecture. At Yale he also began the study of

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

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

Career

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) character (computing), characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCI ...

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 the northern portion of the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is the longtime central location of Bell ...

. From 1968 to 1977, Marcus taught at

in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning and in the Visual Arts Program. In 1969-1971, he programmed a prototype desktop publishing page-layout application for AT&T Bell Labs, and in 1971-1973, while a faculty member at Princeton, he claims to have programmed some of the first virtual reality art/design spaces. 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, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

’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.

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." Foreword, 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. "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 Roibas, 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 Interview

Web2 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 (graphics) Interface designers