Using What We Make Tony Brock
Students have been designing with the aid of a computer for over a decade and the shift from hot-press illustration board, pencil, and Rapidography has resulted in a disconnect from what is designed and how it came to be. This is not to cherish the good old days and bemoan the new but to underscore the need to reflect on what it means to drop this media on a student’s desk.
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Social Us: Graphic Design Education Futures Tony Brock
Leveraging and further defining “socially-constructed education” both online and face-to-face is the step beyond the step we find ourselves considering currently in graphic design education. This is where we begin to use what we make and practice what we preach. It may also have us begin to follow the social and collaborative aspects of design that we profess as the future of all design disciplines.
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Experimental Text for Screen Tony Brock
This is an outline for one of my courses. It is an advanced typography course focusing on the range and role of time-based texts on screen. Screen-based typography is positioned as generally counter to the development of cinematic and televisual traditions in which both making and reading privilege image and spoken word. Students bridge narrative concepts of page and screen media by exploring distinctions between spatial text/image synthesis and time-based text/image mutability.
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Introduction to Temporal Contrasts Tony Brock
We graphic design types spend a great deal of time considering/teaching/making spatial contrasts. To balance space and time, here is an abstract I submitted outlining approaches I take to teaching an introduction to temporal contrast. Yes, it is all print-based—this prepares for time and motion studies while integrating ideas of print.
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The 3 in the 2 and the 4: Graphic Design and... Tony Brock
Graphic Design is becoming a common [essential] language for all designers and artists. Of course each discipline has its own take on the page, book, or poster, but aside from these vernacular forms of graphic design found within, accepted, and codified by Architecture, Industrial Design, etc., what might be the expanded role of 2-D and 4-D visualization and Graphic Design within the design disciplines?
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Adding More than More/Less/More Tony Brock
Vector leaves and budding vines, rainbow gradients, supermodels tucked in between it all—this hyper cool vector/pixel haberdashery is everywhere and is going nowhere. You have to give it up for the radical craft in the work of Brand New School, but enough already—they did it. Adding layers, adding more, simply adding—enough already and, yes, we can do the nil thing too. A few years back (2000-04) we had our old new-modernist, Helvetica, chill-out when doing nothing was the preferred and now the gluttony again. Yes, there have been attempts to intellectualize it by dropping it all into info space—chartifying, infographisizing, mappifying—but that just reads like putting on the smart glasses to look the part. The frequency increases and the style cycles collapse—more/less, less/more—it matters little in how the distinction is made—it is all the same. Please, tell me you hope more for your isometric pixels than either on or off.
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It Will All Be Over Soon! Tony Brock
The AIGA National Conference this year had one very un/fortunate event which marked the continuing self-destructive nature of graphic designers. There on stage for all to see was the tragic comedy of graphic design which wallows in self-pity while begging for universal respect. Tee-hee-hee, look, I paid $99.99 so I can puppet a mindless, fellow graphic designer through meaningless iterations of a meaningless logo. Why? So I may make a point—the point that I have no more respect for my field of study than those who ask why anyone would ever go to school for four whole years (or more) to learn such a thing as design.
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Time Management Tony Brock
Our ability as designers and teachers to understand and manipulate time has never been more important. [insert giga superlative, angst-ridden examples of ‘our day and age’] This is not the sense of time we find working in AfterEffects or Final Cut, but the sense of punching in and out of a time clock—the sense which demands a student get it figured out in a duration defined in a multi-week assignment, semester, or 4 years.
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The Glow and Glare of Software Tony Brock
How does one extract teaching digital media, tools, and processes from the host of variables one balances in becoming a graphic designer worth an agreeable mound of salt? One cannot—must not.
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Originally posted on April 6th, 2004, I’ve brought it back to the fore so we may chew on it a bit more.
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Glad to see the Support, AIGA Tony Brock
Below is an email (May 05) I sent a few friends concerning one of AIGA’s e-newsletters. What is AIGA’s goal in publishing such a description when it goes counter to established AIGA initiatives? Glad to have other perspectives but this garbage was going to students and it offered no other angle. That is the way to invest, eh?
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Word/Letter Counts Need to Count Tony Brock
I get the vibe that no one works from a word count anymore OR even thinks about word count as a step in composition. Who was the last AD to spec a word count to a writer? What team got together, looked at the content, and considered the physical dimensions of that content to the degree that words and letter were counted?
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Brief Assignments Tony Brock
I don’t recall an assignment from my undergraduate studies that successfully synthesized an exploration of form, process, and research methodology with content that truly enriched my depth and breadth of knowledge. In response, assignments went through a major overhaul once they reached my desk. I learned to set parameters and goals on my own, as well as seek out what I felt to be meaningful, engaging content.
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Strengthening Conceptual Skills in Graphic Design Students Dan Warner
Advertising, so the maxim goes, is the mother of design. This rings true even if we haven’t spent a lot of time exploring the historical roots of the field. And most of us can also agree that graphic design is fundamentally about persuasion: intellectual, logical, emotional and aesthetic. We intuitively grasp that even when a piece of design is not hawking a particular product, brand or lifestyle, it is always hawking an idea or making a pitch to the emotions.
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Choosing a Path Tony Brock
To a faculty member in a ‘research one’ institution or any other hall of higher learning, what constitutes a viable research track in graphic design? Do you feel you should be positioning your research so that it has a direct impact on how and what you teach?
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Commence Writing Tony Brock
I encourage you all to write a commencement address for the following reasons. First, you can not be depressed about what your students are failing to learn.
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Graphic Design Bibliography Tony Brock
This site is in its infancy and will be moving a bit quicker now that I can focus some attention to it. In short, the goals are the same—a place of discussion and resources for those new to teaching graphic design. A current graphic design bibliography is first on the to-do list and I would greatly enjoy hearing from you about the texts (online or off) that you are reading, have read, or intend to read.
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Intimidation, Criticism, Comfort Parke Shissler
Hi boys and girls seeking to be graphic designers; you are studying at an internationally known, large-scale university. You are competing with approximately one hundred students for one of twelve openings in your major.
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Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure Tony Brock
Why is there such a poor level of confidence in graphic designers about their skills, field, and place within practice and the world? Could it be that they have heard one too many of their kind bemoaning the lack of understanding by their families for what they do? Is it that architects have soaked up all the confidence to be had by those in any design discipline? Is it that any yahoo can fire up a Mac and hang out a shingle no matter their talent, taste, visual intellect, or level of understanding for what they do?
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Design for Education: An Aesthetic of Engagement Tony Brock
Visuals, sound, and writing for screen-based media have a rich history of integrated design in cinema, documentary and experimental film. From Charles and Ray Eames’ use of poetic simplicity in Powers of Ten to the layered surrealism of the Brothers Quay unfolding explanation of anamorphosis, this history illustrates the art and craft of utilizing an aesthetic that does not preclude educational materials from rich formal devices.
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What’s More Tony Brock
With the expanded variables of time, motion, and interactivity afforded by new media, graphic designers have the opportunity to be entrepreneurial both in their business and their design.
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About Design History—What, Why, How? Martha Scotford
I don’t believe the importance of design history to designers/students can be overstated: we need to know where we have come from. What was different, what was the same; and why. The best design reflects its time and context; this is easiest seen in hindsight.
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A Few Notes on Teaching Learning Applying Considering it All Tony Brock
Twenty years ago this January during the Super Bowl, Apple Computer, Ridley Scott and Chiat/Day showed us how 1984 wouldn’t be like ‘1984’—they introduced the MacIntosh and promised blue skys. Only in the past five or six years have we seen a respectable integration of the computer into graphic design education.
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Design Education as Applied Anthropology Anthony Inciong
We seem to have reached a plateau in graphic design – the feeling that everything that could be “out there” already is. More alarming is the apparent devaluation of intellectual rigor (creativity) for technical know-how (software and hardware obsession). What is designed? Among other things, it is art, technique, commercial, expressive, experimental, subversive, selling out, problem solving, not art, activism. The question is innocuous enough. It is a visual artifact. It is clear, meaningful, at times beautiful, at times ugly, and at times appropriate for its intended audience, at times self-indulgent. But it can be much more.
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Our Jobs as Design ‘Directors’ Stacie Rohrbach
In ‘What is designed?’ Tony has done a nice job of raising many of the teacher—student questions I believe many of us have. I’ll keep my views on the topic isolated to that section of the site. That being said, I’d like to focus primarily on our jobs as design ‘directors’. As educators, I believe it is our responsibility not only to provide students with the design information and skills necessary to enter professional practice, but also to lend a hand in directing the future course of our field.
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What is Designed? Tony Brock
Thanks for visiting! A few of you heard about this idea several months ago and asked periodically if I was ever going to get it off the ground. Well, here it is. I have left it just as you see it, a bare shell, in hopes that we can build it up collectively. This forum is not called ‘design ed,’ although that is what it is about. It is called ‘designed’ in hopes that is what it becomes. The site begins with a need to discuss and develop new ways of approaching and teaching the ever-growing base of consideration required of graphic designers.
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