The Master of Arts in Strategic Design graduate program is a collaborative endeavour between Furman University and The Miami Art School’s Portfolio Center in Atlanta. Pooling graduates from Art, Communications, Graphic Design, English, Marketing & Advertising and Business, this hybrid program is a mixture of academic foundational studies and professional networking with advanced skill enhancement. Truly an amazing new opportunity as I was lucky enough to be instructing the first ever class as this uniquely blended new cohort embarked on their graduate journey. The challenge for any instructor is student engagement and instilling knowledge, however with this budding program other factors were required. Group cohesion was important to cultivate peer support strong enough to span 18 months and two cities. Below are some of the incredible outcomes from the Typography I projects and activities.
CALENDAR
For this immersive four week concentrated daily class in the history of typography the last project was a two-week calendar challenge. Calendars by nature are a traditional occurrence marking time all the way back to the Aztec Empire and while the layout has to be routine to be functional there are gaps where you can fill in creativity and personality to brand it new and different. While the content for every student was the same, 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, the vehicle, media, and audience were all their own. The creativity ranged from typography Post-It Notes to astrological wine pairing, and spanned daily mental health mood diaries to fuzzy dice.
CLASSY TYPOGRAPHY
While typography is simply a ten-letter word, these letters were posed a challenge in classification and gestalt principles. Each letter had to be a different classification: san serif, slab serif, script, serif, etc., from every other letter and additionally the letters had to alternate between black and white. This quandary between a display of typographic knowledge and figure ground orientation created dynamic range in legibility and readability in whimsical t-shirt creations. Each student was able to style their classy typography t-shirt to their personality with a large 14″ print and a small 4″ pocket print and some creative cutting. This visual outcome also came with a typography classification menu as a side and several fun Instagram images!
EAR, THROAT, EYE… YOU AND LETTERS HAVE A LOT IN COMMON
To understand typography, you have to know the anatomy of letters. For this project, each student was randomly assigned a font to which they had to hand trace each letterform: uppercase, lowercase, and numerals. After getting tactile with their forms, they were tasked with identifying every anatomical part of each letter which with 62 forms they gained a deeper understanding of mark/stroke identification classifications as well as spatial anomalies. Again, similar to the typography classification activity to evolve the project beyond just a learning experience the visual outcomes this time were tasked with a creative vehicle. This step was to showcase the student’s artistic personality and create a strong visual for a portfolio and keep student engagement across the broad skill spectrum of the class. Each vellum-traced letterform was fit to an identical card forming a deck with the back and case graphics being a creative display of their font. Additional history cards were added outlining interesting facts about the type designer, brand usage, scandals (yes!), and innovative quality.
OUR VISUAL LANGUAGE FROM CAVE WALLS TO iPHONES
After an intensive first week of lectures, essays, and discussions through the history of visual language, the cohort was prime for a group bonding project that got them in touch with their primal side. Each team was given a Cradle of Civilization and an animal that represented that cultural area. The teams had a large multifaceted design dilemma. First, each team member had to create a set of 5 symbols following their areas historic cultural character creation with an understanding defended by tool development, vehicle media, and reason for form. Secondly, each team had to create an origami structure of their cultural animal with no less than a 30ft square of banner paper. Because of the size, this forced all three members to work together as a team to fold and create the animal which is key as many group efforts become solo endeavors. Using elements from all of the symbols from each team member, they had to craft a historic narrative that would be artistically displayed on the animal in a culturally appropriate way. With the animal origami vehicle and the cultural primitive visual communication forms for content in place, the evolution worked in reverse as the visual outcome spun into a civilization based story telling similar to cave paintings found all over the world.
