#jtestamarck

As a young girl, I enjoyed craft time. I enjoyed collage, cut-and-paste, illustration, and illustrating type. This is not completely unique, as many other children love crafts and play, however, my love for letterforms and numbers now has evolved me into the world of graphic design. The sidelines of my notes in grade school became canvas for illustrated type and it was not until recently that I have been able to study type formally and rediscover my fascination with letter-form and begin to play again with a child-like spirit to create sophistication from the rough and sloppy.

In the book 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design, Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne touch on the topics of many different ways to play with type – metaphoric lettering, visual puns, paper cutouts, ransom notes, collage, and calligrams. Using type not only as a readable message, but as a visual to emphasize or create a double meaning seems to appear over and over throughout graphic design history.

Calligrams Calligrams were first introduced in order to play with metal type and took great care when working under rigid constraints. Their structure of type implies an image in relation to its readable content. Sentence structures are formed to fit shapes that provide a surprise. Today, with type more easily movable with software and cut & paste, calligrams have become somewhat cliché. I think their is still an opportunity to play with calligrams in web and other electronic forms, where rigid constraints of laying type have once again come back into graphic design.

Metaphoric Lettering Stephan Sagmeister is associated with metaphoric lettering. Heller and Vienne share in the book: ‘Sagmeister transforms everyday natural & industrial objects into letters to convey messages in which the metaphors trigger deeper understanding of the message.’ Metaphoric lettering allows for visual puns, adds dimension to print, and helps to bring life to the written word.

Collage Under the category of collage, we can find montage, ransom notes, and basic cut & paste similar to the style of Henri Matisse. Collage may include images, texture, and sketches, but for me I really enjoy collage with typographic elements. Deconstructed, merging, and aggregation of type turns into its own visual, and the letterforms can lose their meaning as a sound or part of a word and turn into shape, line, and image.

As I begin to prepare for my thesis topics, I am hoping that play with type can once again line the sidelines of my notes, perhaps even my final book, and allow me to explore type in new ways.

I have seen, inspected, and eaten a lot of my favorite food, sushi, but if I were to write down a recipe for how to make a beautiful sushi roll, I could guarantee that it would fall apart or not taste very good. I have never made my own sushi, how can I know the process?

Bryan Lawson’s book How Designers Think, he explains how design education has changed from studying and analyzing successful design to actually doing making design.

“One of the weaknesses of the traditional studio is that students, in paying so much attention to the end product of their labours, fail to reflect sufficiently on their process.”

In our graduate design studio this year, we are thinking about our process a lot more and our resulting designs are something we can stand proudly beside and explain how we got the result. Lawson further points out that different disciplines have different processes and a successful design can result from collaboration with others who think differently. “The danger is that each [person] may be conditioned by their education and the design technology they understand.” This makes me think that the more different kinds of people I collaborate with , the more I can begin to learn different ways of approaching the same problem. If we all begin thinking about the design problem using different processes, then we can decide which solution or combination of solutions will achieve the best results.

Lawson also shares the importance to remember design is a skill. Not an ability, but a “highly complex and sophisticated skill” that we all need to practice in order to get good at design. If we will do, make, build, perform the skill we want to learn, we will gain much more success in our future careers as designers, than if we were to simply observe, analyze, and study technique. In our studio, we do a lot of hands on “making” and I feel what will separate us as masters level designers from others is our ability to understand our process and be well practiced in making a hundred different designs to develop our skills.

If we really wanted to teach ourselves how to make an excellent sushi roll, or design a successful project, we must first understand the process, look at the approach from different perspectives, and finally practice making design.