Research in Communication Design
Since 2014, we have been serving the community to further the field of research in communication design and related disciplines. Please consider a donation.
Friday, November 14, 2025
11:00AM – 12:30PM EDT
Online (ZOOM)
Recent research in Communication Design. Presentations of unique, significant creative work, design education, practice of design, case studies, contemporary practice, new technologies, methods, and design research. A moderated discussion will follow the series of presentations.
Friday, November 14, 2025
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM EDT
Online
Cat Normoyle
East Carolina University
Women Graphic Designers: Rebalancing the Canon
Elizabeth Resnick
Professor Emerita
Massachusetts College of Art and Design
The Keywork: Using AI for Insight, Not Replacement, in Creative Practice
RJ Thompson
Associate Professor
University of Pittsburg
Make, Print, Share: Fold, Print, Share: Collective Learning Through Risograph Printing
Kyla Paolucci
Assistant Professor
St. John’s University
Vic Rodriguez Tang
Assistant Professor
Texas State University
From Denim Wars to AI: Rethinking Fashion Advertising in the Classroom
Summer Doll-Myers
Associate Professor
Kutztown University
Born Digital: Fresh Attempts around Typography Courses for Students Today
Jialun Wang
Assistant Professor
Otis College of Art and Design
Eager Zhang
Assistant Professor
Otis College of Art and Design
Mis/Understanding: Reframing Language Barriers and Miscommunication Through Interactive Design
Najmeh Pirahmadian
Graduate student
Ohio University
Call for Nominations and Entries for the 2025 Design Incubation Educators Awards Competition.
Design Incubation announces a call for nominations and entries for the 2025 awards for communication design educators in the areas of scholarship, teaching, service. The aim of the awards program is to discover and recognize new scholarship (creative work and publications), teaching, and service in our broad and varied discipline. We hope to expand the design record, promote excellence and share knowledge within the field.
We ask colleagues and mentors to identify outstanding creative work, publications, teaching, and service being created by design educators in the field communication design and to nominate these individuals for an award. Nominations will be accepted until December 31, 2025 .
Entries will be accepted until (December 31, 2025). Nominations are not required to enter in this scholarly competition. Complete the online entry form (https://designincubation.com/design-incubation-awards-competition-entry-form/) with the following:
Title: Description of project and outcomes (not to exceed 500 words.)
Supporting Materials: (limited to 5-page medium resolution pdf of artwork; web links to websites, videos, other online resources; published documents or visual documents.)
Biography of applicant/s (150 words per applicant.)
Curriculum vitae of applicant/s.
Entry fee: $35.00 USD.
Steven McCarthy (Chair) University of Minnesota
Leslie Atzmon – https://www.emich.edu/art/faculty-staff/l_atzmon.php
Bernard Caniffe – http://piecestudio.org/case-studies, https://www.design.iastate.edu/profiles/canniffe/
Matt Gaynor – https://www.memphis.edu/artanddesign/people/matthew-gaynor.php
Myra Thiessen –https://www.monash.edu/mada/design/people/myra-thiessen
Leslie Atzmon is a designer, design historian, and design critic. She has published in Eye, Design and Culture, Communication Design, and Design Issues. Atzmon edited Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design (Parlor Press 2011) and co-edited Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things (Bloomsbury 2017) with industrial designer Prasad Boradkar. Most recently, she edited The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury 2019) with Teal Triggs of the Royal College of Art. In 2016, she was a Fulbright Fellow at Central Saint Martins in London investigating the topic of Darwin and design thinking. Atzmon and colleague Ryan Molloy were awarded a Sappi Ideas that Matter Grant, which supports design that changes lives for the better. For the grant, students rebranded Ypsilanti’s non-profit Riverside Arts Center as a community arts hub. Atzmon recently curated the exhibition Design and Science, and is currently working on a collection also entitled Design and Science (forthcoming Bloomsbury 2020).
Bernard Canniffe is a current professor and former department chair of graphic design at Iowa State University, and has held faculty positions at MICA (Baltimore), MCAD (Minneapolis) and Ringling College of Art and Design (Sarasota), A native of Wales (UK), he has presented and exhibited on a global scale since earning an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1999. PIECE Studio, a creative venture he founded in 2006, is an agency that “engages in and with communities, organizations, activists, governments and municipalities and has run projects and workshops that promote social justice and community empowerment internationally,” primarily through the design of identities, publications and posters.
Matthew Gaynor received his BA and MFA in graphic design from Yale University, and is currently chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Memphis. He has held faculty and leadership positions at University of Kansas, California State University at San Bernardino, University of Cincinnati, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Kansas State University. He also served as creative director for F+W Publications, which published HOW magazine. Gaynor has won numerous awards for his design work, which is focused on the intersection of type and image, and continues his practice of typographic design, as well as an ongoing interest in photographic portraiture.
Myra Thiessen is a researcher and senior lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and is the program coordinator of the communication design program in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture. She earned a PhD in typography and graphic communication at the University of Reading and a Bachelor of Design degree in communication design from the University of Alberta. She has published her research widely, especially about typography and cognition, in the journals Visible Language, Ergonomics, and The Design Journal among others, and co-edited the book The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design.
Steven McCarthy is professor emeritus of graphic design at the University of Minnesota, where he taught for over two decades. He earned an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from Bradley University. His book The Designer As… Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating was published in 2013. McCarthy’s creative work has been in over 150 juried and invitational exhibitions, and has been awarded inclusion in the AIGA annual, the STA 100 show and in Graphis Poster. He has published in the journals Design Issues, Message, Visible Language, Design and Culture, Visual Communication, and occasionally writes for Eye magazine. In 2017 he was awarded the Minnesota Book Artist Award.
Call for design research abstracts. Deadline: Friday, October 3, 2025.
Submission Deadline: Friday, October 3, 2025.
Event date: Friday, November 14, 2025
Format: Virtual/Online
Location: ZOOM
We invite designers—practitioners, creators, and educators—to submit abstracts of design research, creative investigations, and productions. This is a virtual online event format. Abstracts can be submitted online now for peer review.
Abstract submissions are double-blind peer-reviewed. Accepted abstracts will be published online. Please review the articles, Quick Start Guide for Writing Abstracts and Writing an Academic Research Abstract: For Communication Design Scholars before submitting.
There is a $10 conference fee required upon acceptance of the research abstract for non-members. The conference fee is waived for active annual members. Find out more about our annual memberships.
Researchers will videotape their 6-minute presentations which will published online in advance of the colloquium. The video recording is due by Friday, October 24, 2025. We encourage all attendees to watch the videos in advance of the moderated discussion.
Presentation format is Pecha Kucha. For more details, see the colloquia details and description.
The colloquium is a moderated panel discussion of the research involving the researchers, thought leaders, and Design Incubation members.
Why we do what we do. Design Incubation awards for research in communication design.
Unlike many design awards, which tend to judge projects according to aesthetics, Design Incubation takes the conceptual intent and the impact of the work into account. This award means more than “peer approval” — it is national recognition of an educator’s research, teaching, or service-based contribution to the field. This is important for tenure and promotion candidates whose institutions expect evidence of excellence, often through external forms of validation. Beyond this, design and designers benefit from institutions that recognize the full scope of our work. In my case, much of my research and teaching seeks to build bridges between historical research and contemporary practice. Receiving the DI teaching award has helped me communicate the value of design and design history to my colleagues, peers, partners, and potential students.
Some ideas need time, space, and the right community to develop. For my project, that place has been Design Incubation. I am honored to join in celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Awards and deeply grateful to the organization, nominators, and reviewers who continue to recognize and uplift design research, especially work that does not always follow a straight line.
I first encountered Design Incubation at the 2017 UCDA Design Education Summit in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. The founders’ vision, voiced through a panel presentation, made a lasting impression. In 2020, at Colloquium 6.3, I shared an early version of what would become Tangible Graphic Design. That moment gave the project language, direction, reflection, and confidence.
Receiving the Design Incubation Award in 2022 was a meaningful moment of affirmation. It validated not only the outcome of my work but also the process behind it—messy, iterative, and deeply personal. The recognition opened new opportunities, broadened the visibility of my research, and encouraged me to continue asking challenging, yet necessary, questions through design.
The Design Incubation Awards offer more than recognition; they provide a platform for growth. As the program marks a decade of generous and inclusive vision, I invite designers, educators, and researchers to help shape its next chapter. Together, we can build a more expansive, reflective, and impactful future for design research.
In 2017, I was acknowledged by Design Incubation’s Scholarship: Creative Work Award after finishing my graduate work at NYU. The project was rooted in personal and intellectual growth, not in advancing my career. While I felt fulfilled, I soon realized my questions needed to translate into something meaningful beyond myself. I needed to share a story that others could connect with.
The recognition from Design Incubation marked a turning point. It helped me understand that my inquiry held value, and that I could shape it into something legible to the world. That award gave me clarity at a time of uncertainty, showing me that my work had potential to resonate beyond academia. It transformed what had felt internal and esoteric into something that could live beyond the studio or classroom. It helped me to move forward with more direction and a clearer voice, carrying with me not just the confidence of that moment, but a broader understanding of the impact creative inquiry can have on the world.
Design Incubation’s Communication Design Educators Awards for my collaborative projects, The Sit&Tell Project (awarded in 2017) and In The Round (awarded in 2023), in the service category, are meaningful recognitions. A significant mode of my academic work centers around Design as a Scholarship of Engagement, where my creative and collaborative work aims to foster growth in communities, spotlight the value of design, and contribute to the common good of the design discipline and the public. In these works, the designer and communities work together locally, and accolades from such a reputable organization as Design Incubation provide illumination and validation of the project’s impact and significance to extend beyond the project’s regional situatedness. As there are few venues where design educators can receive recognition for comprehensive service work by a jury of academic peers nationally, Design Incubation’s acknowledgment through a service category amplifies value to institutional and community stakeholder investments in Scholarship of Engagement projects and fortifies confidence for future opportunities.
“Ask the Expert” is a series looking at various considerations and practices related to design research, scholarship, publication, and other academic topics.
We invited Design and Culture’s Principal Reviews Editor, Maggie Taft, to respond to questions about different aspects of journal publishing. This is the first of a series from Taft, an independent scholar and Director of Writing Space, a community-based writing center for artists and designers.
Question: How do design research journals evaluate the quality of submitted articles?
Answer:
I think of this question as a two-parter: how do journals go through the process of evaluating submissions and what criteria do they commonly use at different stages in that process?
After an author submits a journal article, it moves through many people’s hands before the author hears back with the journal’s decision. Typically, a Managing Editor, who’s in charge of the journal’s day-to-day coordination and administrative work, is the first to review. The Managing Editor confirms that the article abides by the submission standards and style guidelines evaluating, for instance, that the piece meets the journal’s length specifications and that the topic corresponds with the journal’s. (You might be surprised how often that’s not the case!) Next, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief—that’s the person in charge of the journal’s vision—reviews the piece to confirm that it aligns with the journal’s mission and that, broadly speaking, it follows academic publishing standards. For instance, does it include research with citations? If the Managing Editor and the Editor-in-Chief think it looks good, then they pass it on to one of the journal’s Associate Editors. Associate Editors, sometimes called Editorial Board Members, are specialists in various fields who collectively contribute to a journal’s scope in expertise, perspective, and geographic reach. They oversee the next phase of the review process, during which an article receives more thorough attention and feedback from peer reviewers. Typically, peer reviewers do not hold positions on the journal; you won’t find their names on the masthead. Rather, they’re specialists in the article’s subject area and thus are particularly well-positioned to evaluate its argument, methodology, and contribution to the field.
Different journals configure the peer review process differently, and most use either a double-blind or single-blind review process. Double-blind peer review, which is typically the most highly regarded within academia, means that the reviewers will not know who the author is and the author will not know who the peer reviewers are. Single-blind peer review means that the author does not know who the reviewer is but the reviewer does know who the author is.
When a journal sends out an article for peer review, reviewers are typically asked to evaluate a piece using a questionnaire. Every journal has its own version of this questionnaire—unfortunately, they don’t often make them public—but most ask reviewers to assess some or all of the following features—
Scope: How does the article fit within the journal’s purview?
Impact: What is the significance of this article for its field of study? How does it contribute to research on its topic? How and in what ways does it build on existing literature?
Audience: Who is this article’s primary audience? (For instance, practitioners? Design historians? Design studies researchers?)
Argumentation: What is the article’s central claim? Is it clearly presented and well-supported with adequate evidence? Does any part of the paper need to be expanded to make the argument convincing? Is the approach methodologically sound and appropriate for the subject at hand?
Accuracy: Are there any factual errors in the paper? Is anything misrepresented?
Form: Is the writing and its style clear? Is the paper sensibly organized? Are all citations provided and complete? Are images of high quality and adequately captioned?
As you prepare an article, you may find that answers to the above questions feel self-evident. But it’s important to confirm that they are also apparent on the page. To evaluate if they are, I recommend stepping out of our role as author and trying to approach your text as a reader. Reread your article and try to answer the above questions using only the information provided by the text. For instance, does the text name its intended audience? Can you highlight a sentence that states the article’s central claim? If so, is this in a place where a reader could easily find it, such as the introduction, or is it buried in the paper’s middle?
Approaching your text as though you are a reader can provide new insights into how effectively the text presents your article’s argument, methodology, and contribution to the field. These are the key things that your article’s first readers—the managing editor, editor-in-chief, and peer reviewers at the journal where you’re submitting—will be looking for.
Maggie Taft, PhD
Founding Director
Writing Space
114th CAA Annual Conference, In Person Format.
Deadline for abstract submissions: August 29, 2025.
We invite abstract submissions on presentation topics relevant to Communication Design research. Submissions should fall into one or more of the following areas: scholarly research, case studies, creative practice, or design pedagogy. We welcome proposals on a variety of topics across the field of communication design.
Submit an abstract of 300 words using the Design Incubation abstract submission form found here:
https://designincubation.com/call-for-submissions/
Submissions are double-blind peer-reviewed. Reviewers’ feedback will be returned. Accepted presentation abstracts will be published on the Design Incubation website.
Accepted researchers will be required to produce a 6-minute videotaped presentation that will be published on the Design Incubation channel. The CAA conference session will consist of a moderated discussion of those presentations.
The session will involve a quick 3-minute presentation overview from each accepted submission researcher, followed by a moderated group discussion.
114th CAA Annual Conference
In Person
Hilton Hotel, Downtown
Chicago, IL
February 18-21, 2026
Presentations and Moderated Discussion
Presenters will follow the basic membership and fee requirements of CAA.
We are accepting abstracts for presentations now until August 29, 2025.
Thursday, June 19, 2025
10:00am – 2:00pm EDT
The online Academic Abstract Writing Program at Design Incubation offers a series of activities that will help design researchers to craft a written synopsis of their research. The outcome(s) will be a concisely written document typically expected of academic publication venues. This includes conferences, journals, grant applications, publishers, and academic organizations.
The program is designed along two tracks:
We are excited to announce Leslie Atzmon, Eastern Michigan University, Jess Barness, Kent State University and Dan Wong, CityTech, CUNY will be facilitating and moderating the various activities.
| Time (EDT) | Activity |
| 10:00am-11:15am | Presentation on Abstracts. Dan Wong, Jess Barness. Abstracts Reviewed. Breakout rooms with Mentors. Atzmon, Barness, Wong. |
| 11:15am-12:15pm | Fellows Abstract Workshop |
| 12:15-1:00pm | Lunch Break |
| 1:00pm- 2:00pm | Abstracts—Repurposing Research. Leslie Atzmon. Group Consultation with Mentors. Atzmon, Barness, Wong. |
Katie Blazek
Assistant Professor
University of Illinois- Urbana Champaign
Grace Hamilton
Assistant Professor
CUNY, Baruch College
Brooke Hull
Assistant Professor
Pennsylvania State University
Megan Asbeck
Assistant Professor
SUNY Brockport
Ruichao Jiang
Artist/Designer
Minoo Marasi
Graduate Student
University of Illinois Chicago
Golnoush Behmanesh
Assistant Professor
University of Mississippi
Friday, June 20, 2025
11:00AM – 12:30PM EDT
Online (ZOOM)
Recent research in Communication Design. Presentations of unique, significant creative work, design education, practice of design, case studies, contemporary practice, new technologies, methods, and design research. A moderated discussion will follow the series of presentations.
Friday, June 20, 2025
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM EDT
Online
Cat Normoyle
East Carolina University
Resonant Pages: Artist Books, Natural Rhythms, and Digital Interactivity
Lingyi Kong
Adjunct Professor
Parsons School of Design, The New School
Inclusive Characters: Merging Aesthetics and Accessibility in Type Design
Katie Krcmarik
Assistant Professor
Illinois State University
Typography of the Transreal: N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus
Andrew Shurtz
Assistant Professor
Louisiana State University
Creative Computation in the Age of AI: Reimagining the Boundary of Human Creativity
Bei Hu
Assistant Professor
Washington University in St. Louis
From Designer to Design Facilitator: Turning Studios into Dewey-Inspired Learning Labs
Michael Berrell
Assistant Professor
SUNY Farmingdale
Type as Cultural Bridge: An Interactive Fusion of Iranian and American Design
Narges Sedaghat
Graduate student
East Carolina University
“Ask the Expert” is a series looking at various considerations and practices related to design research, scholarship, publication, and other academic topics.
We invited Design and Culture’s Principal Reviews Editor, Maggie Taft, to respond to questions about different aspects of journal publishing. This is the first of a series from Taft, an independent scholar and Director of Writing Space, a community-based writing center for artists and designers.
Question: What is your top tip for scholars and designers interested in publishing in a design research journal?
Answer: Read.
We often think of reading as a parallel activity to writing. (Consider the elementary school trifecta “reading, writing and arithmetic,” which seems to position reading and writing as separate enterprises.) Yet when it comes to academic writing, reading is essential in so many ways.
The most familiar way to connect reading with academic writing is in the form of research. You read existing scholarship on your topic so that you can reference and draw upon previous findings and build a bibliography that demonstrates your knowledge of the field. Reading for research is essential.
But reading supports academic writing in at least three other crucial ways–
The more you read, the more you’ll learn about different ways to structure an academic argument and mobilize evidence in support of that argument. You’ll encounter some authors who highlight their subjectivity as a researcher and others who minimize it. You’ll find some authors who interpret case studies and others who analyze data sets. By reading widely and keeping track of the texts you find most compelling, you can identify the kinds of arguments you want to make and get ideas about how to use your research to make them.
My colleague Liat Berdugo recommends prospective article authors identify “sample journal articles”. These need not be articles that address the same topic as yours, but rather articles that make the types of arguments and interventions you hope to make. Having a good example of the kind of writing you wish to do will make it easier to figure out how to put together your article.
Academic arguments offer new ways of understanding, new paths of inquiry, and/or new recommendations for practice. These interventions are meaningful insofar as they respond to existing conventions. What is your work responding to? What is it seeking to change or rethink? To do meaningful work, you need to know what other people in your field are paying attention to and talking about so that you can explain to them the connection between their concerns and yours. Keeping up with ongoing scholarship in your field by reading will allow you insight into the kinds of work people are doing right now and what they’re paying attention to. This will, in turn, allow you to connect your specific area of research to broader patterns in the field, whether your ambition is to shift or refocus these conversations or to develop them in new directions or through new approaches.
There are many international journals that publish design scholarship but that doesn’t mean every one of them will be a good fit for your design research article. Every journal has a different historical focus, thematic emphasis, and methodological bent. Familiarize yourself with different journals’ respective missions (available on journal websites) and read the scholarship they’ve been publishing recently so that you can evaluate which is most likely to publish your work.
During my five years as the Managing Editor of Design and Culture, I think we rejected 50% of the articles we received not because they were bad scholarship but because they simply did a different kind of work than that which the journal sought to highlight. Some submissions deployed a scientific approach whereas the journal favored a humanistic one. Others focused on architecture, which at that time fell outside of the journal’s purview. Read the journals in your field so that you can both target your article submission to the ones most likely to publish your work AND target your article to that journal’s constituents. For instance, if you’re publishing research on graphic design education in a design history journal (like The Journal of Design History) you might frame your argument a bit differently than if you were to publish the research in a design education journal (like International Journal of Designs for Learning).
Ultimately, it is easy to think of reading as extraneous to the publishing process. You’re busy. There are so many urgent personal and professional matters vying for your attention. It can be difficult and even feel indulgent to dedicate time to reading, a task that typically rewards slowness. But for all the reasons described above, reading is not extraneous to writing for journals (and to writing more broadly). It is fundamental to it.
Maggie Taft, PhD
Founding Director
Writing Space
