Research in Communication Design
We’re excited to announce our very own Robin Landa’s recent publication, the 6th Edition of Graphic Design Solutions, publisher Wadsworth. Congrat’s Robin on completing this 2 year project.
For a little insight, check out the articles she wrote, “Graphic Design Career Competencies & Expectations in the Digital Age” and “Notes on Composition: Closed versus Open Composition“.
C.J. Yeh
Professor, Assistant Chair
Graphic Design
Fashion Institute of Technology
FIT is one of the pioneers in creative technology and design education. For this presentation, the founder of the Creative Technology program at FIT, C.J. Yeh, will introduce the most innovative design projects from FIT’s creative technology courses.
FIT’s Creative Technology curriculum has strong focuses on augment and virtual reality, user experience design, design thinking, and digital thinking. Digital thinking is probably the primary difference between Creative Technology and the other programs at FIT. For Creative Technology program at FIT, technology is more than just a tool, it is an arena in which the students learn to explore new possibilities in digital media and conceptualize new experiences and digital product innovations that has never been done before.
One of the most unique pedagogy from FIT’s Creative Technology and Design Program is called “Guided Experiential Learning.” It is a unique merger between the traditional studio classes and internship. Through its Guided Experiential Learning initiatives, FIT faculty and students have worked with major brands and international research institutions like the National Football League (NFL), Infor, and Fabrica–a highly regarded research center in Italy. For each Guided Experiential Learning project, FIT’s faculty design customized workshops, lectures, and training to maximize the learning for students, and, at the same time, ensure the collaborating brands/organizations receive the highest quality design products at the end of the process.
This presentation will share case studies, best practices, and insights on how Guided Experiential Learning has been adopted in higher education. Relevant pedagogies and teaching methodologies will be introduced, and a discussion regarding the challenges and opportunities particularly in its application and relevance to college-level design education.
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 4.2: CAA 2018 Conference Los Angeles on February 24, 2018.
Kelly Porter
Assistant Professor, Graphic Design
Art & Design, College of Arts & Sciences
East Tennessee State University
My first introduction to design was a sign on the outside of my Pop’s shop, which was on the same property as the house I lived in. My Pop was a country mechanic. He hand painted the sign on the masthead of his garage. JOE’S AUTO SERVICE. My dad followed in the same genre of work as my Pop. He was a traveling tire salesperson for more than a decade between the 70’s and 80’s. We would travel across the southeast with tires piled higher than the cab of his 1975 two-toned brown Chevy Bonanza. Most of the clientele were located in rural or isolated towns and non-metropolitan areas. These backroads were peppered with mom and pop businesses like JOE’S AUTO SERVICE, many of whom created their own signs just like my Pop. These signs were made with the “amateur aesthetic,” a term borrowed from Alfred Stieglitz and applied to untrained “designers” who create their own signs. These rural towns were not homogenized “omnitopias”, but rather were, and in some cases still are remote islands of authenticity, resourcefulness and ingenuity when it comes to visual communication.
This paper examines the vernacular of small town amateur aesthetics in design including techniques and materiality as well as mythology and humanity inherent in hand made vernacular and DIY signage. I will also acknowledge and discuss cultural hierarchy and privilege that separate the design world from the untrained naïve design. Can we collapse the distinction between the professional and the amateur? What opportunities present themselves in the divide? What can we learn from these approaches?
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 4.2: CAA 2018 Conference Los Angeles on February 24, 2018.
Meredith James
Assistant Professor
Graphic Design
Portland State University
There are a number of textbooks on the market for research strategies used by designers, from A Designer’s Research Manual by O’Grady and O’Grady, to Visual Research by Bestley and Noble, to Design Research by Laurel and Lunenfeld. These texts offer a range of approaches, from marketing strategies used by designers, to more academic case studies. However, what is missing from the marketplace is a simple “how-to” guide that introduces basic primary and secondary research techniques to students.
This presentation will provide a literature review of tactics every designer and educator should know, and then present a practical research guide created for designers that fills the gap in existing literature. This pocket guide is being used in design classes at both foundational and advanced levels. Our students work has advanced to be more culturally and critically aware due to the implementation of these techniques.
This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 4.2: CAA 2018 Conference Los Angeles on February 24, 2018.
This is a special program during the College Art Association Annual 2018 Conference in Los Angeles.
This is a special program during the College Art Association Annual 2018 Conference in Los Angeles.
Affiliated Society: Design Incubation
Friday, 2/23/18: 12:30–1:30 PM
LA Convention Center: 406B
Gloria Kondrup
Executive Director
Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography
Graphic Design Faculty, ArtCenter College of Design
Liz DeLuna
Associate Professor
Graphic Design
St. John’s University
A Modular Approach to Type Design – The Identification and Design of Particular Elements and Patterns
Leon Butler
Research Fellow
National University of Ireland, Galway
Rethink Typography Education for Digital Content Design
Christie Shin
Assistant Professor
Fashion Institute of Technology
Empathic Typography
Michele Damato McCaffrey
Assistant Professor
Department of Design
Syracuse University
Variant Letterforms
Monica Maccaux
Assistant Professor
University of Nevada, Reno
Typographic Landscape Ecologies
Joshua Singer
Associate Professor
San Francisco State University
Joshua Singer
Associate Professor
San Francisco State University
Typographic Landscape Ecologies is an ongoing design research project that documents, maps, and visualizes typographic artifacts in the urban landscape as a way to explore cultural forces in the constructed world. The project presuppose a model of a semiotic landscape; a complex multi‐dimensional text or collection of texts in geographic space; the landscape as a collection of symbolically mediated phenomena understood only through representation. The typographic elements of the urban landscape form, through their invisible connections to the greater world of meaning, an ecology of meaning that constructs geographic space as real as its material forms.
Typographic Landscape Ecologies uses conventional research as a means to authoritatively document the landscape in an attempt to reveal patterns and relationships. The project uses experimental methods as a foil to the authority of conventional research as a way to generate speculative conclusions. Imprecise and questionable associations generate new semantic connections and new forms of thinking and knowledge. The illumination of new knowledge is the ultimate goal of research giving subjective and illegitimate conclusions value by revealing something not yet known. The work of the radical architecture groups Superstudio and Archigram, the design fictions of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, the iconoclastic maps of Denis Woods, and the imaginary science of ‘Pataphysics offer examples of the ability of working data into new syntaxes, into alternative and speculative narratives, that can offer glimpses of other potentialities. In Typographic Landscape Ecologies this is demonstrated by the visual cross-referencing of aesthetic ecologies and cultural vectors, their overlay onto three dimensional virtual environments comprised of layers of historical maps that encourage us to read between the lines or layers of a cultural-semiotic space. This does not offer concrete answers, but rather poses new and unexpected questions.
This research was presented at the Affiliated Society Meeting: Design Incubation Special Program on Typography on February 23, 2018.
Leon Butler
Research Fellow
National University of Ireland, Galway
Leon Butler
Research Fellow
National University of Ireland, Galway
All lettering uses modularity as the basis of form can be seen across different cultures such as the Roman order systems for construction numerical and Chinese types always adhering to a square grid structure. Johann Neudörffer the Elder the author of Fundament, [Becker, 2005], and credited with the development of a blackletter type ‘Fraktur’ which he released in copybooks for people to develop the calligraphic style. He also constructed full type systems using a square which provided the basis for each letter and was divided into ten equal parts allowing for a grid to be placed in his copybooks. While researching historical modular type systems a little know typeface ‘Fregio Mecano’ was identified, a modular typeface of Italian origin that dates to the 1920s. The designer of ‘Fregio Mecano’ is unknown but it features in The Encyclopedia of Type Faces by W. Turner Berry [Berry, 1990], alongside the typeface, Fregio Razional attributed to Giulio da Milano for Nebiolo, so it can be assumed that da Milano designed Fregio Mecano also. Using the original grid form of ‘Fregio Mecano’ as a basis, the twenty elements were created in various orientations and positions to construct the letterform. By investigating visual forms in upper and lowercase characters, it is hope to be able to draw insights around the use of vertical sections, curved joins, negative counters, and other comparative elements common across the forms. The system of typographic modularity was developed through simple graphical techniques, such as layering. Comparative insights were generated relating to various themes and visual characteristics that were common across each of the glyphs. A completed typeface – including numerals and punctuation, has now been constructed. This has allowed an exploration of how these modular elements combine to demonstrate how this practice-based method can help designers, students or educators build a modulator typeface from a fixed palette of visual elements. The arrangement of these elements can create various styles of type for use in different contexts or visual approaches.
This research was presented at the Affiliated Society Meeting: Design Incubation Special Program on Typography on February 23, 2018.
We invite faculty, researchers and interested parties to engage with the data collected as part of the Faculty Census 2018 and to use the information gathered here to support their own work and their engagement with institutions in higher education.
Presentations and discussion in Research and Scholarship in Communication Design at the 106th Annual CAA Conference 2018 in LA.
Hosted by CAA Affiliated Society, Design Incubation
Research in Communication Design. Presentation of unique, groundbreaking, significant creative work, practice of design, case studies, contemporary practice and the academic and scholarly review of creative projects. New approaches to design education and pedagogy will also be discussed.
Design Incubation Colloquium 4.2: CAA 2018 Los Angeles
Saturday, February 24, 2018, 2:00–3:30 PM
LA Convention Center: 402A
Abstract submission deadline: December 21, 2017
Submit abstracts online at Colloquium Abstract Submissions.
The colloquium session is open to all conference attendees.
Aaris Sherin
Professor
Graphic Design
St John’s University
Bruno Ribeiro
Assistant Professor
Graphic Design
Department of Art and Design
California Polytechnic State University
Lessons From Mom & Pop on Resourceful Design
Kelly Porter
Assistant Professor
East Tennessee State University
Insectile Indices, Los Angeles 2027
Yeawon Kim
Graduate student
Media Design Practices
Art Center College of Design
Research for Designers
Meredith James
Assistant Professor
Portland State University
Geometries of the Sacred and Profane in Lewerentz’s St Peters
Nathan Matteson
Assistant Professor
DePaul University
College of Computing and Digital Media
School of Design
Guided Experiential Learning for Design Innovators
C.J. Yeh
Professor
Fashion Institute of Technology
Transforming ‘Graduate Students’ Into ‘Competent Designers’
Benson Cheung
Associate Professor
Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong (THEi)
Faculty of Design and Environment
Leveraging the Smartphone as a Teaching Tool
Heather Snyder-Quinn
Professional Lecturer
DePaul University
College of Computing and Digital Media
School of Design
During the conference we will also be holding an Affiliated Society Meeting: Design Incubation Special Program on Typography. The meeting agenda for the meeting will be posted in an upcoming announcement. The meeting is open and free to the public.
Design Incubation’s Communication Design Educators Awards program was established to recognize and showcase faculty accomplishments through peer review. This competition reflects the organization’s mission to foster professional development and discourse within the academic design community. Since 2016, applicants from around the world have entered this awards competition recognizing design excellence and ingenuity in the academic study of communication design, with categories in published research, creative work, teaching, and service. The award processes and procedures are rigorous, transparent, objective and professional. Each year, entries are reviewed and ranked by an independent, renown jury of design educators and researchers across a broad range of design expertise and scholarly accomplishment within the discipline.
After envisioning the academic design awards and chairing the jury, University of Minnesota graphic design professor Steven McCarthy is passing along the role of Chair. We value his continued support and involvement in the program. Design Incubation offers their gratitude for his leadership in the launch of this important effort.
We are excited to announce María Rogal, Professor of Graphic Design in the school of Art + Art History at the University of Florida will chair the 2018 jury. She has had the distinction of being a juror of the awards since its inception. McCarthy writes, “Rogal brings vast experience, great powers of empathy, and astute judgment to the task. Rogal’s disciplinary connections and intellectual network will undoubtedly offer the jury some fresh input as the competition enters its third year.”
Rogal offers McCarthy her greatest respect and appreciation of his leadership over many years, particularly in having recognized the need for professional development and creating a program to support it. Rogal writes, “the diverse submissions I reviewed over the past two years were rewarding and inspiring. But this process also highlighted how important these awards and the application process can be for communication design educators. Through the application and peer review process itself, we also support professional development.”
We thank Bloomsbury Publishing, the sponsor of these awards. The 2018 awards program will follow the same timeline as previous years, with entries due May 31, 2018. An overview of the awards program is on our website. Look for more information on the program in the coming months.
