Riesling Dong

This course covers the elements and principles of graphic design and provides students with the technical and conceptual tools to develop effective design strategies. Students expand their understanding of what surrounds them and learn how to look at and evaluate products, graphics, architecture, advertisements, and more. Class discussions challenge students to consider the world of design through a contemporary art lens, drawing upon the work of Saul Bass, Paul Rand, Paula Scher, and others. In addition to using traditional materials like sketchbooks, students use Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop, and output work using high quality digital printers. Students can expect to create portfolio-quality works that explore symbols, logos, typography, layout, image and text integration, and sequential design.

*NOTE* Basic computer experience required.

This course examines the fundamentals of two-dimensional design in the digital age. Students will explore principal design elements, including composition, color, and typography, through projects introducing Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop as primary graphic design tools. The importance of effective visual communication in commercial and experimental design is stressed as students understand the professional design process from the client brief to the finished digital project. Students will leave this course with a solid foundation in strategies for solving design problems, a basic design vocabulary, and an understanding of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop's specific role in creating professional work. Before starting this course, students should be comfortable creating, deleting, renaming, and moving files and directories without assistance.

This research, discussion, and critique course develops a visual and verbal vocabulary by examining relationships between form and content, word and image. Study includes symbolic association and the problem of effective communication in a highly complex culture.

This studio course explores typography's impact on language to create meaning, organization and tone. Students experiment in typographic composition and page structure with special regard to the flow and rupture of different text types and reading scenarios. Students learn the technical aspects of typography (specification and copyfitting), methods for composing dynamic multipage formats (combining digital and analog), and contexts (both historical and structural) for understanding the vast repository of typefaces. This course is a core requirement for the Visual Communication Design portfolio review.

The framing text for this class is Ellen Lupton's Thinking with Type. But students will be introduced to numerous examples from the history of (predominantly Western) letterforms and concretized language. Understanding these historical forms in their contexts will reveal the logic behind the modern classification of digital type.

Students produce weekly type projects which are critiqued and handed in as three project sets. The first set analyses letterforms, structurally and then programmatically. The next project set covers text setting and typographic compositions of increasing semantic and syntactic complexity. The last project is a multilingual, illustrated book layout where students engage the fundamental concept of 'structured variety' over a series of pages.

How will knowledge pass through this moment in time? This studio course takes up the `publication' as an epistemological framework and set of design principles spanning print and new media. Teams of students reimagine the structures and inflections of existing experimental books, manuals, catalogues, archives, and museum collections, creating app-based interactive incarnations. Students will design and prototype using contemporary tools, such as Adobe XD and Principle. While designing, beta-testing and presenting for phone and tablet, the class will focus on the conceptual parallels, analogues, and tensions between print and new media design as to aesthetics, structural possibilities, inspiration, and context.

Students are given lists of material to reimagine, including: experimental books such as An Anecdoted Topography of Chance or Jung?s Red Book; reference manuals such as How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive; archives such as Art and Architecture magazine; and artifacts such as the Rosetta Stone or Nutshell Studies. This course also asks students to analyze and present to the class a variety of apps and websites from publishers like Touchpress, Tender Claws, Washington Post and the national parks service.

Students will work in teams of three to concept, design, produce and present two interactive app prototypes for touch tablet. Students will also analyze existing apps and present their findings.