_i exist by implication_

As part of their office group dynamic, I asked them to design logos or marks for CAMTeen, a made up program that would address their age group.

Here some more examples.
Read the rest of this entry »

After the ideation session… (during the first two days of me teaching the exercise), I divided the groups to work on their posters. It’s a bit confusing (and it involves math… hehe) but this is how it worked:

• Every office was made up of 4 students, and all of them participated in the ideation session together. (The less engaged groups must have come up with about 20 ideas, while the more engaged ones generated over 60).
• Students where then asked to pick the 2 ideas that they liked the most from all of the post-its and which they thought would work best for the museum. (Remember, some of these were pretty wild… like anti-gravity chambers to experience modern art.)
• The 4-student groups were then divided into 2-student teams, and each of the subgroups had to work on one of these two chosen ideas. Each student made their own poster, so in the end, we had two posters on every idea.

Following are more images of the students working.
Read the rest of this entry »

At this point is where I committed the teaching mistake for the week.

For the first two days of the week, after the ideation session, I divided the students to work individually on their posters. In retrospect, this was a bad call. The momentum that I had gained with the office and ideation exercises was suddenly completely lost. Students still made posters, and actually some very good ones too, but the energy level dropped substantially.

Having gone from group to individual was not a good call. For the last three days of the exercise I changed it a bit… and had them work as teams, which not only kept the energy levels going, but also produced larger scale work.

One of the biggest challenges of my design camp experience circled around getting teenage strangers to work comfortably with one another.

I remembered how hard it was to speak and share ideas with others at that age, specially others whom you not know (not that it is really easier now, but at least I’ve gotten better at hiding the awkwardness). In order to attack this problem, and in anticipation to the larger project of the afternoon, students were divided in groups, pretending to be offices, and in five minutes they had to come up with a name and gesture sketch to serve as their logo.

At first, I was skeptical of my own strategy. Part of me thought that separating them into offices was to be received with critiques of being lame or stupid, but actually, students surprisingly engaged very well at the opportunity of creating a name and a mark for themselves. I gave them only one rule: anything was allowed other than pornographic. I even joked with them a bit to get them loose. I gave them an example: if they had be dumped this past weekend, they could call their office I Was Dumped Design. It was impressive to see how they came up with names. Some of the ones I remember were taken from: the brand of the pencil they were holding, the initials of their names, their favorite foods… to name a few.

After their office inauguration, I gave them a wall, which became their work space for the day, and the first exercise was a moderated ideation session. During this portion of the day, I gave them a topic (always related to the CAM museum) and they wrote ideas on post-its and placed them on the wall. This session was high energy and moderated a bit crazy, to get them thinking wildly about museums. Some of the recurring ideas were a petting zoo in the museum, water slides, night parties, coffee shops, better shopping stores and more do it your self art.

I have to say that this was a hit. It may not have generated a pool of realistic ideas for the museum, but it got all team members talking and working together.

Read the rest of this entry »

After the t-shirts were made and various ice-breaking games were played, it was time to get started. In addition to all of the visual materials available on the walls, students had a photocopier, stencils of many kinds, color patterns, different color cardboards, black and silver sharpies, crayola markers, x-acto knives, glue sticks, elmer’s glue, scissors, post-its, and (only later in the week) glitter paint.

The official start for Design Camp, once it has done the initial orientation, really happens once the students separate into their groups to customize their camp t-shirts.

This year I was particularly proud of the t-shirt design for the Camp since it was last fall’s Practicum GD 400 class that I TAed with Santiago Piedrafita who designed the content for it, while it was Stewart Bean and Nick Schlax from the sophomore Imaging Class I taught this past Spring who actually produced the final piece. I was very involved in the whole process, which produced a great feeling once I got to see the actual shirts.

The shirts are customized with spray-paint, cardboard templates and sharpies.

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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!

Debbie Millman just announced the publishing of her new book The Essential Principles of Graphic Design.

The book, designed by the amazing Rodrigo Corral, was published by Rotovision and distributed in the U.S. by HOW Books. It contains 35 case studies by designers, featuring a look at how they work and come up with ideas…

…AND SOME COMMENTS OF MINE HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED AS PART OF THE PUBLICATION!

The book is described by the author as both visual and verbal journies of projects from concept to creation. It also includes basic primers to the principles of Graphic Design, written by experts in each discipline. Some of the other designers included are Stephen Doyle, Marian Bantjes, Fabian Monheim, Peter Buchanan-Smith, Vault 49, Yves Behar, Hillman Curtis, Jacob Trollback and many, many more…

I have not seen it yet, but I just hope that I have not embarrassed myself next to all of the other great designers showcased in the publication.