Tag: collage

Call for Exhibition Entries

Past(e)-Up: Reassembling the Past, Imagining the Future

“Paste-up” refers to a pre-digital production method that involves cutting images and text from diverse materials, such as photostats and type galleys, and carefully pasting them into layout. Paste-ups were once the modus operandi in print media, but were eventually outmoded by the Macintosh and the ensuing digital revolution, giving rise to new, experimental approaches to collage in communication design. Yet, as historian Freya Gowrley shows in her book Fragmentary Forms (Princeton University Press, 2024), collage far predates this technological rupture as well as histories of modernist art and design. In craft traditions, domestic pastimes, and DIY cultures, people have long engaged in juxtapositional practices to creatively respond to their world. 

Taking the paste-up as one point of departure, this online exhibition explores collage as an enduring material practice and an evolving mode of inquiry. How do artists and designers draw on the extant and historical to reimagine the future? How do they transform diverse sources into compelling image-text combinations? How have new technologies added to the collagist’s repertoire? 

We invite submissions that focus on contemporary collage in communication design. Designers, artists, illustrators, and craftspeople are welcome to apply. We will accept submissions for new and existing work, including independently authored projects, projects for commercial clients (with copyright clearance), or academic research. We are particularly keen to review submissions that take advantage of the online platform, such as those that incorporate motion graphics, animation, video, or interactivity. Submissions should be primarily visual, but may also include sound. The curators will make selections based on alignment with this theme, choosing works of formal and conceptual excellence that stand out individually, while also contributing to the exhibition overall.

Exhibitions at Design Incubation is a new initiative. We aim to curate regular online art and design shows. Design Incubation welcomes designers and design researchers to propose and curate topics for upcoming shows.

This inaugural show is being co-curated by Aggie Toppins and Liz DeLuna and developed with Borami Kang and Dan Wong.

Mining for Ideas: Collaborative Collages as Spaces of Opportunity

A method founded in play and inspired by design history

Anna Jordan
Assistant Professor
Rochester Institute of Technology

I will present a method that I designed to help students and practicing designers come up with new and surprising ideas. The method, called “Mining for Ideas,” is grounded in collaboration and experimentation. It can be used in a classroom or design studio setting to effectively generate ideas about both form and concept. Designers begin with a collaborative collage game, involving an enormous selection of unconventional tools and materials, leading to spectacular sculptural creations. Each sculptural collage is altered by each designer, leading to truly collaborative pieces. Next, designers photograph the sculptures to create two-dimensional images that are mined for ideas, similar as to how a miner would chip away at earth to reveal valuable gems. Very quickly, designers generate many surprising ideas, each with corresponding examples of concrete design elements such as typography, grid, texture, color, and image. Then, the raw ideas are expanded into applied pieces of graphic design via a flexible morphology that is structured around these concrete design elements. The method is founded in play and inspired by design history precedent including my personal design practice, the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse drawing game, and Skolos-Wedell’s form-to-content method for designing posters. In this presentation, I will illustrate how the method works with several examples from my classroom, explain how the method could be applied to various design problems, and cite student interviews as evidence proving that the process is successful.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.