No less influential was April Greiman’s Does it make sense?, one of the earliest examples of computer-generated art, created for a 1986 issue of Design Quarterly magazine. The title comes from a quote by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If you give it a sense, it makes sense.” Greiman’s illustration is both a personal response and a rhetorical question about her creative and technical process. At the time, many in the design community decided that the work did not make sense; although it’s now considered a seminal work, Greiman says that she “was pushed out of the mainstream intelligentsia and dismissed as a graphic designer.”

While the production method for Does it make sense? is archaic today, the process Greiman used at the time represented a truly advanced pragmatic design, and a precursor to much that followed. Greiman started the design on a Macintosh 128K, Apple’s first computer, then completed the work on the 512K model. The computer had a nine-inch, 512-by-384 monochrome display, with 72ppi resolution and a single megabyte of RAM. By today’s standards, it was prehistoric. The defining image in Does it make sense? is a nude of Greiman captured as a live video still from her Sony Beta camera with MacVision, a device that digitized stills from composite video. Once all the images where captured, she designed the layout with MacDraw. There were no digital files (no floppy disks), no paste-up. Instead, using her ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer, Greiman printed individual pages comprising the magazine on letter-size sheets of bond paper. She took them to the printer, who then tiled the pages and shot reflective film (blue replaced the black ink) to create a single source for printing, which produced a 76-by-26-inch poster. Once printed, the poster was folded and placed in a slipcase for mailing. The results, according to Stern, “confirm that design is not some discretionary luxury divorced from our daily lives, but rather an integral part of our everyday lives.”