Design Camp: The starting point…

I was originally planning on framing a collaborative project around collages, texture, stop-animation photography and visual depth. Factors came into play that led me to re-structure the project, the most crucial: now I had to teach the program by myself. (Gretchen you were missed!)

[In retrospect though, it was a good that the project was re-thought because the animation studio also used the stop animation photography technique, and the original strategy may have felt repetitive to the students. Anyway…]

In this rethinking process, Santiago Piedrafita gave me some advice. He suggested I provide the students visual content from the start, and not have them start from scratch. This strategy, he explained, would lead to more elaborate work. With this advice, as you can imagine, also came a solution. He loaned me copies of the Neubau Welt and Neubau Modul books, which are visual compendiums of type, icons and patterns that I could use on my exercise.

[If you read the post about the project I did while in Nice with Massimo Vignelli and Armando Milani, you have already been exposed to some of these silhouettes.]

Well, it turned out (and to my luck for that matter) that probably the same advice was given to Marty and Rebecca, who ended up creating contact sheets and print-outs for the students to work with. I inherited such sheets which saved my project, my week and my life. If you took a look at the classroom set-up photos, you probably noted that some of the walls were covered with icons or patterns. These were Marty’s and Rebecca’s doing. I just played along inside the great template that they provided.

Here some other samples from the Neubau books that we all used in our exercises.
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Design Camp 08: Getting Ready…

This is the project sheet that the students received from me this past week. The letter-sized print-out was distributed as part of a set of five briefs, each describing a soon-to-be-carried-out project. My presentation is succinctly explained, purposely skipping over details, just so that I could still surprise them during the session.

Here a better quality image of the setup where I worked during the week.

Design Camp here we go…

One of the reasons for the stay in Raleigh this summer is my participation in Raleigh’s Contemporary Art Museum’s (CAM) Design Camp for High School Students. I will be teaching the Day Camp (week 2) of the three week program hosted at the College of Design in NC State University.

My classmates Marty Lane and Rebecca Tegtmeyer already set the bar very high by carrying out an exciting, unique and AWSOME project in the first session! (See here & here)

I posted here some photos of the set-up where I will be carrying out my exercise this week. I have to credit Rebecca and Marty, for basically I am working within their template (with just some minor modifications to the physical space). My project will be different to theirs and tomorrow I get the chance to try it out for the first time. Let’s see how it goes…

Let’s see how it goes!