AAS Graphic Design

Online student book samples, Jennifer Lee Moulton, Fall 2012

Since last fall I have been developing and teaching a ‘Process and Skills’ online class for graphic designers. It has been an opportunity to reflect on my teaching practice and evolve with new educational digital tools.

I have taught this class on campus for several years. The syllabus, created by Katarzyna  Gruda, is very hands on and require students to experiment with manual skills such as collages, book binding and three dimensional model making. One of the challenge in the online syllabus was to recreate the book binding workshop which traditionally takes place in the classroom with the help of a book binder guest instructor.

I approached Scott McCarney, a book artist and experienced book binding professor, to be a guest lecturer and collaborate on an online book binding workshop. I wanted the workshop to be as complete as the campus one and integrate the making of three different book binding techniques. From his home studio Up State New York, Scott McCarney created and shot a series of step by step instructional videos demonstrating the making of a three holes pamphlet stitch, a concertina album and a Japanese stab binding.

Scott McCarney’s workshop is great. The videos are challenging but well paced and easy to follow. The workshop is very popular with the students:”This was really fun. Thank Scott McCarney for us. His videos were really clear and easy to follow‘ – Bethany Bilbrey, student Fall 2012

I was happy to see the excellent quality of the work when the students posted photos of their books to the online class. I realized that delivering the workshop online had a great advantage: students can follow it at their own pace. They have as much time as they need to review the techniques and therefore their sample books are very finished and professional. On campus, the workshop lasts 2h40 min. and it is a race to cover three binding techniques.

Although I strongly believe communicating knowledge to students is more fluid when you are physically in the same space, this experience proved that digital communication can be a valuable teaching tool .

Jeanne Verdoux

Still from Scott Mccarney’s online book binding workshop, Fall 2012

This printer’s roll was found in the school’s Green Supply Center. The paper looks like it was discarded too. An illusion! The lines of flawed letters, streaks of dirt, and crumpled surface were all hand-drawn by graphic design student, Angela Choi.

-Grace Burney, Drawing

There have been articles written, a TED talk given, and a website founded, all to promote the doodle. Proof of an unfocused mind, doodles are usually found scrawled among students’ notes and on scraps of paper. In my drawing class, doodling is an assignment in the sketchbook. It is where the mind flows freely – both in and out of consciousness –  and I get a first peek into each design student’s creative world.  (Since the process is continuing, the doodlers are not identified.)

- Grace Burney

Matthew McPherson (Spring 2012)

Fahad AlHunaif

Two posters, designed by Matthew McPherson and Fahad AlHunif, students in my spring 2012 Process & Skills class, are currently on view in an international poster exhibition at the City Hall of Leipzig, Germany. The show ends 09/23/12.

These posters were designed as an assignment in my class in response to the international call for posters ‘Occupy: What’s Next?’. Every students submitted a design, all of professional level. More than 350 posters were entered to this competition by students and professional designers from all over the world, 68 are in the show. The exhibition will be traveling around the world.

Congratulations to Matthew and Fahad!

http://occupywhatsnext.org/
http://www.posterpage.ch/div/news12/n120831a.htm

Jeanne Verdoux
Process & Skills, online and on campus

Bye Bye

Photography: Thomas Bosket
Custom Typography: William Morrisey

I have written this message on August 17, since then Juliette Cezzar has been appointed as new Director.

Dear Friends,

We’ve had a fantastic run together and I want to thank you all for your commitment, dedication, passion, loyalty, and friendship. The 2011–12 academic year was a stellar one for the AAS Graphic Design Program, with both you and our students being recognized publicly and professionally. I hold you all accountable for our success.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and this is where I take my final bow as Director. I have sent my letter of resignation on the last day of July and it has been accepted. I will continue as a faculty and perhaps spend a little more time on my own professional endeavors. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you, and I look forward to continued camaraderie and conversation around our shared love of art, design, and education.

Anne Gaines, the new Dean of AMT, graciously offered to field your email and answer any questions until my replacement is announced. Knowing many people who worked with her at the SPACE I have no doubt that you will be in excellent hands.

With love and friendship and honor,

Katarzyna

Dobra Grafika: Polish Design Before the Deluge

Poland is known for music other than polka, and for good graphic design (dobra grafika) other than the brilliant Polish poster tradition. Recently, I obtained a collection of Polish sheet music that is exemplary of the modernistic style of type and illustration so common in Poland before the country was carved up during World War II. Like posters of the same period, these were not the subversively symbolic images used to circumvent Communist censors, but the joyful pictorial display of a thriving cultural and commercial nation. The designers and artists, sad to say, are unknown at this time, but anyone with information should not be shy.

1. “Jasnie Mr. Chauffeur”

2. “Lover From a Screen”

3. “Black Pearl”

4 “Babuliczki [Grandma], According to a Folk Russian Song”

5. “Soldier’s Tango”

I am very happy to share the news that two students from my ‘Process and Skills’ class are winners of the international poster competition ‘Occupy: What’s Next?’. Both Luiza Dale’s and Fahad AlHunaif’s posters were selected in the student category amongst hundreds by an international jury of designers in which I participated.

This poster design competition was assigned as a three weeks project this spring semester to every students in my class. All entered the competition with a large number of successfull designs. The subject ‘Occupy: What’s Next?’ brought very interesting ideas and discussions to the classroom.

You can see all the results and entries online at http://occupywhatsnext.org/

Jeanne Verdoux

Luiza Dale

Fahad AlHunaif

I am two weeks into a three-week gig teaching two graphic design classes at Ludong University in Yantai, China. This is a return engagement for me, having taught three classes during the last two weeks of December to many of the same students.

These are selections from the first of the two exercises I assigned. Each student received one of the twelve Chinese zodiac signs and a Latin letterform as outline illustrator files. They had to combine them in a way that “respected” the essential parts of both elements and they had to bring some of the background white shapes into the foreground, making all three colors – black, red, and white – active participants in the viewer’s experience. As is my usual purpose, intentionality in design decision making is the real goal of the exercise.  The result is a lively, abstracted mark that combines East and West.

The second exercise applies this mark to an A3 poster. The poster features a 5×7 unit grid (5cm squares and 2.5mm margins), has primary and secondary type, and a requires a timeline that spans three-quarters of the poster’s width. Both exercises had a 10 day development period.

The AAS Graphic Design program student work exhibition opening is tonight from 6:30–9 p.m. Come see the outstanding work presented as part of the Parsons Festival 2012.

206 West 16th St, 6th Floor Gallery

The show will be up until May 20.

Thursday April 27th at 12:00 Noon

“Why do we see colors? Why do we see at all?”

This short series of presentations will attempt to answer some basic questions about vision. Why do we see in color? How did we get this way? Are there alternative forms of seeing? Are there colors that we don’t see? (Yes!) How long has this vision thing been going on? How did we come to our present notion of how we see? How does our perception of color affect what we create? Do we all see the same thing? We will explore these questions with the hope of creating for each of us a fuller, richer sense of what it means to see.

Jack Carter is a retinal surgeon in Winchester, Virginia. For more than two decades he has been talking to people about what they don’t see that is in front of them, and what they do see that isn’t there. Beginning from this clinical experience he has developed an interest in understanding the subtle (and sometimes not subtle) differences in how people may perceive the same thing. These differences in visual perception may then go on to create very different notions of ourselves and the world we live in. Dr. Carter is the President of Retina Associates and has published in various journals of ophthalmology including the American Journal of Ophthalmology and the­­ Archives of Ophthalmology.