One Plus One Equals Three

Warm'n Fuzzy Department

One of the great joys of teaching (not that I actually teach anymore) is watching young people develop as living, breathing, thinking designers before your eyes. Helping students acquire design and communication skills, encouraging them to think about how their work will be used by people, how their work may hopefully improve the lives of others, and how you should never, ever, ever use Comic Sans are some of the facets of the 'teaching gig' that I used to enjoy.

Seeing students, in turn, blossom into highly-regarded professional designers making intelligent contributions to their profession and the culture at large, is also immensely rewarding – and imparts one hell of a warm'n fuzzy feeling to their 'old' teacher (insert swelling violin music here).

My copy of ID Magazine arrived in the mail yesterday, and to my delight I saw someone whom I remember from their student days: Zoe Wishart. Zoe is listed as a juror in that particular magazine's annual design awards. I never taught Zoe myself, she was a final-year student at Swinburne when I first started to teach there. I knew she started a design business in Sydney and now also works at Psyop, Inc in New York. That's great to see. Good on you Zoe.

And that got me thinking about other 'old' students I've taught...

Graphic Design: Where to?

Reweaving the Web. Where is graphic design in the new order? An interesting article at Communication Arts. Above quote from article by Michael Rock of 2x4 on Generation Y designers.

Even though technology is incorporated into the curriculum: “Most design schools are still approaching the teaching of design the same way they did 50 years ago ... Graphic designers now have to think in more dynamic sequential relationships, in three dimensions. In comparison, the old way of designing was static.” Christopher Vice, designer and teacher at the Indiana University Herron School of Art and Design.

Character 3 (and the Giant Ant of Spencer Street)

When it's July in Melbourne you know it's cold (but really not all that cold) and 'design season'. The Melbourne Design Festival starts on July 6 and a highlight of last years festival: "Character, a free public forum discussing the social and cultural aspects of graphic design and typography" is on again. The theme of Character 3 this year is "accidents - the odd and unpredicted happenings that influence, contribute to, or just plain skew the creative process". Character 3 features an exhibition 'Accidents Not So Groteque' that features accidental happenings that have emerged in design projects and there's the Character Forum with speakers Kevin Finn (Open Manifesto), Simon Pampena (Mathematician extraordinaire) and Anna Gerber (UK Design writer and author of All Messed Up: Unpredictable Graphics).

On Criticism

Two very interesting articles on the dearth of criticism in design and cinema. Rick Poynor in Icon magazine and David Bordwell in Cinema Scope. The Poynor link via Design Observer, the Bordwell via Speak Up.

Criticism is intrinsic to furthering and developing design. Even as a student 20 years ago, I could never understand why art, cinema and architecture had healthy critical scenes and criticism was considered a vital contributor to those fields. Design merely had glossy portfolio showpieces, or big thick books on 'the big, famous guys'—and that was about all the writing about design one could easily access. I turned to reading cinema-related criticism  and writing where David Bordwell and, in particular, Jonathan Rosenbaum, also a writer for Cinema Scope, were two of the names whose writing I devoured. Australian film critic Adrian Martin was another. And as an 'academic on the side' I'm afraid I do concur somewhat with Bordwell: "...too many academics seem to illustrate Nietzsche’s aphorism that to most readers muddy water looks deep".

Where will new design criticism develop from: designers? the academy? writers? blogs? hopefully all the above. And hopefully it won't be muddy, or glossy, or heavily reliant on famous dead men.

Stephen Banham: 'Character'

...I have this in common with Michael Worthington who once said of designers ' If you met any one of 90% of graphic design attendees at a party you'd run a mile. Just because we're designers doesn't mean we have anything in common'*. My social habits have always been centred around people in other fields such as fine art, education, literature and architecture. It was during one of these social occasions many years ago that I came across the Half-Time Club – a social club of architects where the philosophical and professional issues of the day are vigourously discussed and debated over many (often too many) drinks. Perhaps it may have to do with the long term investment of time and effort that architecture demands (after all there's often only so much you can say about a brochure) but this idea appealed to me – the fact that an issue (rather than a folio) was debated avoided the more sadly familiar and insular arguments about style.

So when the opportunity came up to create a series of events for RMIT, this seemed the perfect opportunity to test this model in a graphic design context.