Deborah Sussman
The American designer who carried Eames Office colour into public space, proving that a street corner or an Olympic venue could be as considered as a printed page.
Deborah Sussman turned the street into a designed surface. Working from an understanding of graphic design as an environmental rather than a printed discipline, she brought colour, pattern, and typographic system to architecture and public space — most visibly in the graphic identity of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, which painted a city in bold geometric colour.
The Eames formation
Sussman studied at the Institute of Design (Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago before joining the office of Charles and Ray Eames in Los Angeles, where she worked from 1953. The Eames Office was not a conventional design practice: it was a research operation, moving between film, exhibition design, furniture, and graphic work with a polymathic ease. Sussman absorbed the office's central conviction — that rigorous, joyful design was not a contradiction — and its sensibility for colour, pattern, and cross-disciplinary thinking. She remained at the Eames Office for several years, with an interlude in Paris, before returning to establish her own practice in Los Angeles.
Environmental graphic design
With her husband, architect Paul Prejza, she founded Sussman/Prejza & Co. in 1968. The firm operated at the intersection of graphic design and architecture, treating buildings, plazas, and transit systems as surfaces to be organised with the same care as a printed page. Environmental graphic design — the field in which signage, wayfinding, and identity cohere into a total spatial experience — had few practitioners working at this scale and with this ambition. Sussman was one of its primary architects.
Colour is a kind of music in space.
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics
The commission for which Sussman/Prejza is best known is the graphic environment for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Given a city spread across vast distances, connected by freeways rather than pedestrian routes, the challenge was to create an identity legible at speed and at scale. The solution was a palette of hot, saturated colours — magenta, aqua, chrome yellow, vermilion — applied to temporary structures, banners, and signage across venues. The geometry was bold: starburst patterns and confetti-like forms derived from California's popular visual culture. The effect was festive and graphic at once, recognisable without being monumental.
The 1984 Games are widely credited as the first modern Olympics to succeed financially, and their visual identity contributed directly to the Games' civic and commercial success.
