Briar Levit
American graphic designer
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Briar Levit is an American design educator, art director and graphic designer. As of June 2025, she is a professor of graphic design at Portland State University.[1] Levit directed and produced Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production, a feature documentary about graphic design production methods before desktop publishing.[2][3][4] She is the editor of a book of essays Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History (2021)[5][6][7] and author of Briar Levit: On Design, Feminism, and Friendship (2024).[8]
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Briar Levit | |
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Levit speaking at TypeCon in Portland, Oregon in 2018 | |
| Alma mater | Saint Martin's School of Art |
| Occupation | Professor of graphic design |
| Notable work | Baseline Shift (book), Graphic Means (documentary film) |
Levit is a co-director and co-founder of The People’s Graphic Design Archive, a crowd-sourced digital collection of graphic design, with designers Louise Sandhaus[5][9][10] and Brockett Horne.
Levit grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.[5] She is a graduate of San Francisco State University[1] and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.[3] Levit came to prominence in graphic design as art director of Bitch,[11][12] a quarterly feminist magazine published between 1996 and 2022.
Levit's 2017 film Graphic Means focuses on “cold type” graphic production, spanning techniques like photosetting, strike-on, and rubdown lettering like Letraset.[13][12] It includes interviews with Steven Heller, Ellen Lupton, April Greiman,[3] Ken Garland, Adrian Shaughnessy, Tobias Frere-Jones, Dan Rhatigan and Art Chantry.[14] It was shown at the ByDesign film festival in Seattle,[14][15] Dundee Design Festival, Design Manchester festival, and Birmingham Design Festival.[13][16] An independent film funded through a Kickstarter campaign,[17][18][19] it was made with an all-female production team.[13]