As my first year at RISD comes to a close I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned and digesting what I think is the most important lesson or skill. I know my eye has improved, and has become more critical. I’ve definitely improved in my drawing skills and the ability to render form. But as I think back to everything I’ve done I realize the most powerful thing I’ve learned in my time here is to be curious.
The curriculum here enforces curiosity. And by that I mean we are forced to look at everything differently. In order to use a visual language we are educated on the origins of that language, and are told to ask “why?” Why did Helvetica become popular? Why do roman capitals look the way they do? Why did posters in the 19th century look the way they did? How can I represent this object in its simplest form? Once we can answer these questions we can move forward in a way that utilizes the past as a method for progress, instead of recycling. The assignments I’ve been given this semester have pushed me outside of my previous role as a decorator, and into one of a story teller. It is up to me to decide what information is included, how big it is, what color it is, all of these decisions lead to telling a story. I am forced to look at things with a different perspective, both physically and intellectually.
It’s incredibly empowering to realize that everything exists as a result of someone making decisions, and that by making decisions of our own we will affect the way the world looks in the future.
This past weekend was one of those experiences that “builds character.” Like when your dad makes you cancel your weekend plans to teach you how to build a fire or change a tire. There’s a million other things you’d rather be doing, the process is irritating, but at the end of it you’ve learned something. Not just a new skill necessarily, but a new way of looking at problem solving that you’ll take with you for the rest of your life.
The entire sophomore class of graphic designers taking Type 2 were part of a weekend long workshop with visiting designers Keetra Dean Dixon and Ben Van Dyke. Their work is very tactile and engages the viewer to interact with the work in physical space. This is a pretty big departure from what most graphic designers consider “typography.” Most of what we do is organizing letterforms on two dimensional surfaces, whether they be screen, paper, or wall. This workshop was set up to push us out of that, and to rejuvenate how we think about the design of letters and the meaning of words.
After two great lectures we were told to get into groups of seven and to come up with a word that exemplifies our group. After our word is chosen we were charged with doing a series of material studies and type studies to find materials and letterforms that inform the word and to finally produce an installation that speaks to the personality of the group. Getting seven creative people to agree on anything is a challenge. It’s a bigger challenge outside of the professional environment when there’s an established hierarchy. But luckily there wasn’t a lot of head butting to be the leader of the group and any disagreements we had were part of a really productive discourse in looking for the best direction to take the project.
With the groups established we went our separate ways to talk about the project and to decide on our word. In talking with the group we discussed what brought each of us to graphic design, and more specifically to RISD’s graphic design program. We were all very interested in structure. Creating order and systems in our work was something everyone else was excited in, and something that I’ve definitely felt was lacking in my work and was a major part in my decision to go back to school. Our conversation turned to what structure really meant and what about that word was interesting to us. A list of adjectives was created we discussed them for awhile until we decided we were really intrigued with the fragility of structure. There’s something poetic about all the work that goes into creating a complicated building, and in seconds it can all come down. Our conversation helped me realize that structure is more than a grid, it’s a series of agreements.
In order for complicated systems to work together, each element needs to agree to do its job. The role in the structure needs to be accepted and the relationship must be nourished for the structure to succeed. A family is a structure, an economy, a country, are all systems with complex inner workings and complex relationships. A family’s structure can be brought down with the act of adultery, an economy can collapse with a stock market plunge. This set of relationships is what we wanted to explore in our installation.
In discussing materials that had complex relationships we kept coming back to the egg. The shell is hard, and contains and protects the yolk inside from outside interference, but it’s also meant to be broken when the embryo is mature enough to interact with the outside world. As a result the egg shell itself is a structure that can fail instantly. We wanted to illustrate our concept with wire letters that would house the eggs and suspend from the ceiling. The mesh and the egg share a visual language of the farm, and the addition of form and suspending them in a precarious position would be a welcome way to illustrate all the complex relationships in our piece (yolk to shell, egg to mesh, mesh to wire, wire to line, line to ceiling). After this drawing one of the group members noted that they looked just like the wire letters that Urban Outfitters sells and that they would probably be less expensive than the material required to make them (not to mention all the time involved). We purchased the letters, and a ton of mesh and got to work.
Cutting the mesh to size and then crimping it around the iron structure was tedious and resulted in a ton of nasty cuts on our fingers, thankfully our word was only nine letters long so we were all able to construct one much quicker than if someone was doing this project alone.
After the initial layers were attached we filled the letters with about 12 dozen eggs and closed it up.
Hanging posed some problems, but we found a nice little space that housed the letters well and allowed the viewers to walk through the piece itself.
The project was tough and the weekend was full of blood and sweat (seriously, we cut up our fingers on that wire, and those hooks were pretty tough to hang). But the process was super inspiring, and the reaction to the piece was priceless.
As a graphic designer I’ve been used to my role of organizer and image maker. I’m given content and it’s been my job to organize that content in a way that makes it more functional and aesthetically interesting. Lately I’ve been given prompts that give me the ability to tell a story, to be in control of the content itself. Being told to “do something typographic about plants” is incredibly wide open, and with only 3 weeks it’s not a lot of time to do something coherent with a subject I’m not an expert in. After some deliberation I decided I wanted to explore the use of genetics in industrial farming. Due to the tight timeline I decided to focus on corn, America’s largest crop. Tons of research and then building that research into coherent, easy to understand story is incredibly challenging and rewarding. Inspiration for the aesthetic language came from industrial machinery of the American mid-west of the middle of the 20th century. I wanted to bridge the gap between mid-century Americana and the new confusing world of genetics to create something approachable and digestible. Food production in America is a hot topic right now as the country looks at conserving resources and focusing on sustainability. Food production is also an incredibly complicated labyrinth of secrecy and what little information that is available is scattered across a variety of sources. It will be up to designers to take that information and distill it down into something that can be understood by consumers.
Today I finished a long and grueling project. In my graphic design history class we were all assigned a landmark event in the history of visual arts as it relates to graphic design. We were then charged with designing a poster that educates the viewer about event along with a 500-750 word essay describing its importance. 500 words is a lot of information to put on a poster, especially one that had to be 8.5″ x 22″. Photography is obviously a huge topic, and it wasn’t invented by a single person or even in a single century. Developing a visual language to tell the story of the invention of photography as well as carefully selecting text and images that were concise representations of this invention was a great challenge in editing and concision. There was a lot of wrangling with the structure that I went through and found myself constantly stripping things away. Overall it was a very challenging and rewarding experience, and I’m very pleased with the results I’ve achieved in attempting to create a careful balance between bold and eye catching, but also thorough and informative.
Once I nail down a direction I’ll pull out the big photoshop guns and get rid of the junky masks and go in there and fix all the poor craftsmanship. It’s been a really great experience to have a project that encompasses building with my hands, photography and type, all working together. While the results could have been possible just rendering in 3D software, I don’t feel like I would have arrived at some of the results I did.
Ok, it’s ugly. There are visible seams, glue marks, pencil marks, uneven x-acto work and the thing just doesn’t square up. But damnit, I’m proud of the sonuvabitch for standing up on its own power with nothin’ but PVA holdin’ ‘er together. I’ve never even built a cube before, so being charged with drawing and building this thing scared the hell out of me. While it’s rough around the edges and I wanted to turn my blade on myself a number of times I’m proud of the sonuvabitch. Makes me feel like I can do anything if I put my mind to it. And hey, I learned a thing or two.
