Tag: typography

New Director of Peer Reviews, Chair and Director at Large

Welcoming Cat Normoyle, incoming Director of Peer Reviews, and Camila Afanador Llach as Chair, Director-at-Large

This 2024 academic year has been busy and productive at Design Incubation. We have had many activities this fall, including the Design Educators Awards, currently accepting nominations and entries until December 31, 2024. In October, we had our first fully in-person colloquium since the onset of the pandemic and our largest one to date at Boston University with four sessions and more than 20 research presentations. This year, we celebrate our 10th year with new members and ongoing development. We continue to host the series, Design Your Research Agenda (DYRA), the latest one in November. We will be publishing this episode online shortly. 

Starting this September 2024, we welcomed Cat Normoyle, Associate Professor at East Carolina University as the incoming Director of Peer Review. In spring 2025 she will be taking over this role from Camila Afanador-Llach, Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, who has held the position since fall 2021. 

Normoyle is a designer, writer, and educator whose research and creative activities focus on community engagement, interactive and immersive experiences, and design pedagogy. She has a strong record of contributions to design scholarship and community engagement, evidenced by publications, presentations, and grants. Notably her writing appears in articles and book chapters published by AIGA Dialectic, Design Research Society, AIGA Design Educators Community, Routledge, and others. She is a recent grant recipient of the Engagement Scholarship Consortium for her work on the project, Our Story: The LGBTQ Stories of Eastern North Carolina, which is preparing for a fall 2025 exhibition of work. She is currently working on a book project, “Community-based Practices in Action.” We are excited to welcome her as the new Director of Peer Reviews at DI. 

Afanador-Llach has made tremendous contributions to the peer review process at DI over the last 3 years. She has further developed the peer review process, ensuring the double-blind process is objective, anonymous, rigorous, and fair and that it offers the benefits of the peer review to our members by offering feedback to all who have participated in our colloquium submission process. 

Afanador-Llach will be staying on as a Chair and Director-at-Large as she segues into other DI initiatives. We would like to thank her for her three years of service as Director of Peer Review and we are excited to be working with her in new capacities.

Afanador-Llach was promoted to tenured Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, and is currently researching and writing about the history of graphic design in her home country Colombia. She recently completed a three-year NEH-funded project cataloging and translating metadata, developing an online resource. With her experience with metadata and from her role as DI Director of Peer Review, we hope to further the development of keyword analysis and implementation at DI.

Pedagogical Workshops and Collaboration

Engaging with dialogue, risks, intuitive creativity, and happy accidents.

Chen Luo
Lecturer
Boston University

My research is centered on pedagogical workshops and embodied publishing that encourage cultural exchange through collective practicing and community building.

I believe the pedagogical workshop as an interrogative exercise is a place where practice has no preconceived outcomes, but engages with dialogue, risks, intuitive creativity, and happy accidents. The workshops bridge making and thinking, focusing the process rather than the final results. They serve as a tool to gather individuals who want to practice together without hierarchy and institutional pressure.

The programs and writers, such as Typography Summer School, Workshop Project, Vilém Flusser, etc. inspired me to think about workshops as a place to gather discussion and craft on the need for today’s graphic design curriculum, and the relevance of typography in design history and the part it plays in today’s society. Etc. A workshop I designed with designer Chuck Gonzales, we asked students to list vocabulary related to their identity, culture, love/hate, methodology and previous work. Then they connect any two listed words into a final deliverable which is not disciplined in a certain format, but visually and sensorly engaging. The goal is to build connections among one’s beliefs and interests by considering materials, languages, performance, identity, scales, spaces at a fast pace. There are workshops that transform research into collective visual experiments. My methodology begins with trust-building exercises and instructional constraints, allowing unexpected possibilities to happen during the process. In the “Pen+Pen-Pen” workshop, hosted in multiple Art Book Fairs, Designer Bella Tuo and I made a set of creative pen tools that provide variable lengths and multiple participants to hold a pen at once. By using the pens to experiment with symmetrical typography patterns, we questioned how to create sustainable tools built upon the existing art material, and what exchange would affect in a group practice. The prompt was inspired by artist Job Wouters’ methodology.

Through transforming participants’ responsive creation into performative and installation typography through the process of writing, sharing, and moving. We explored the boundaries between bodies and language, typography and space, the individual and the communal. In “Embodied Making as Collective Publishing: The Body and Hanzi”, hosted in Boston Art Book Fair 2022. Mary Yang and I designed this workshop to explore embodied making and publishing. During this workshop, we explored the relationship between the body and Hanzi (Chinese characters) through a series of hands-on exercises to create collaborative, large-scale wearable posters. With participants who have/have no Chinese background, we proposed questions including what does collective publishing look like through collaborative labor in a shared space and time and how can this workshop create a space for cultural exchange and expression. The workshop was not only a typography experimentation, but also more lively with posing, collective moving, dancing, and photography. I have enjoyed practicing the phonetics and hieroglyphics of Hanzi through letterform writing. My aim is to create a new interplay of workshops by activating the body and traditional graphic design mediums. It fosters a sequence of processes, discourse, culture expression, and prolongs the conversation after the completion of a project.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.

Accessibility and Creative Authorship in Design Theory Through Multimodal Learning and Metacognitive Reflection

A course that engaged a cohort of international first-semester masters students in complex theoretical concepts encouraging self-reflection and creative authorship.

Molly Haig, Lecturer & Dr. Till Julian Huss, Professor
University of Europe for the Applied Sciences
Berlin, Germany

The study of media ecology offers design students vital insights into our culture, but like any detailed framework of ideas, these should be approached with precision, care, and scaffolding. Ecological thinking engages with the interconnectedness of complex systems, from the environment to technology and culture (Hörl 2017). Using ecological thinking as a conceptual entry point and typography as a visual one, we built a course that effectively engaged a cohort of international first-semester masters students in complex theoretical concepts by encouraging self-reflection and creative authorship.

The theoretical branch of the course involves lectures and discussions, engaging with theories of media ecology from their early anticipations (Kiesler 1939) to their defining approaches (McLuhan 1967, Strate 2017). Design is understood through the environment, or as transformation of lived environments (i.e. the Future Ecologies series ed. Löffler, Mareis, & Sprenger since 2021, and in a historical perspective Busbea 2020). Gibson’s (1979) concept of affordances, which Don Norman (2013) translated to a key principle for user-centric design, offers a bridge to design practice, and the theory of metaphors is introduced as a foundational mode of creative thinking.

The practical branch of the course frames typography and publication as tools for conceptual analysis, integrating excerpts from the theoretical texts into increasingly complex visual assignments. Students also keep a scrappy physical journal or “commonplace book” with 30 entries, each linking an in-class idea to an external one. Each student’s final publication is an “autobiographical user manual” guiding the “user” through the course based on the student’s subjective experience.

Student work revealed unique representations of theoretical content and strong metaphorical thinking, and many projects were reflective of students’ fresh experiences of a new environment during their first semester in a foreign country. Publications ranged from a hand-bound dictionary of terms, to ChatGPT’s “diary,” to directions through a distorted Berlin, to thirty existential questions posed by a whimsical humanoid peach. We heard from many students who found the course structure engaging and welcoming.

Our theoretical/practical approach is supported by an abundance of research on the educational benefits of multimodal learning, or engaging with more than one “mode” of accessing information (i.e. Moreno & Mayer 2007, Serafini 2015) especially when studying in a second language (Yi & Choi 2015), as well as metacognitive reflection (understanding one’s own understanding of a topic, i.e. Cummings 2015).

Our course offers an example of how explorations of ecological thinking and typography can support each other, but more broadly how collaborations across disciplines can be mutually beneficial, and increase the accessibility of both.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.

Kaithi Script’s Revival: An Intersection of Design and Cultural Inheritance

Script revival serves as a means of reclaiming and preserving cultural identity.

Anmol Shrivastava
Assistant Professor
Illinois State University

Kaithi (KAE-THEE), also known as Kayathi or Kayasthi, is a script that was once widely used in northern India. Now classified as a “major extinct” script, Kaithi once flourished alongside companion scripts like Devanagari and other major Indian scripts of today. The name Kaithi is derived from ‘Kayastha’, a cultural group known as “scribes”. I am a Kayastha.

Script revival is crucial to colonized cultures, serving as a means of reclaiming and preserving cultural identity. It fosters pride, heritage transmission, and resistance to cultural homogenization, empowering communities to rebuild unique identities and celebrate their heritage.

This presentation explores the intersection of design and ancestry through a personal journey to revive the nearly extinct Kaithi script, historically used by my ancestors, the Kayasthas. It will demonstrate how design can become a powerful tool for historical and cultural revival, offering a unique perspective on the interplay between design, identity, and heritage.

By delving into sparse historical documents of Kaithi and sharing a personal journey of self-learning the script, the presentation will showcase current and upcoming projects that combine typography, type design, lettering, poster design, and embroidery. It will explore projects aimed at broadening the reach of this nearly extinct script by making Kaithi easier to self-teach. This presentation will illustrate how design can play a crucial role in reconnecting with and reviving our ancestral roots, fostering a deeper sense of identity and belonging.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.

Typography as Racialization: Euro-American Craft and Asian Labor

Exploring the capacity of conventional genres of activity in graphic design to narrate historical phenomena.

Chris Lee
Associate Professor
Pratt Institute

This project undertakes the design of a “chop suey” typeface called 1882–1982–2019. The general aim of the project vis-a-vis design research is to explore the capacity of conventional genres of activity in graphic design to narrate historical phenomena, while also figuring design as a vehicle of antagonism, and as a space of contestation. The project enacts graphic design research not by dint of the traditional forms of scholarly research and creative activity that go into it (i.e. as transparents texts written for academic publications, or work created for display in public exhibitions, where both constitute forms of production valorized within through institutional peer-review processes, for instance), but rather by the fact that it produces a form (a typeface) that is not typically legible as an artifact that instantiates scientific knowledge production. Furthermore, such an artifact acts as a case that exceeds the conventional pathways initiating and animating design (i.e. the client brief), and thus does not satisfy even commercial valorization—that is to say, it has little to no prospective value as a commercial product. In sum, the project is an argument for design outcomes as a form of discursive (quasi-)autonomous design-as-research, recognized as such only by the grace of its inclusion in design discourse (hence, the above qualification, “quasi”).

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In the case of this project—a typeface in three ‘weights’ (called 1882, 1982, 2019, respectively)—the outcomes serve as vehicles for a historical narration of the status of the “Asian,” or what Iyko Day calls “alien capital” in North American settler-colonial political economy. The primary outcome of this project is the process of producing the typeface itself. This entails a raw archival excavation directly sourced from historical material (1882, the year that the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress); the “correction” or “refinement” of these according to the kinds of normative idealizations articulated by figures like Gerard Unger, Karen Cheng, etc. (1982, a seminal year in the history of the formation of “Asian-American” as a racial subject position); as well as the generation of AI generated “hanji” (Chinese ideograms) in resonance with Day’s characterization, as well as popular depictions of the “Yellow Peril” that persist from the anti-Chinese attitudes that have persisted from the 1880s until today (2019). In sum, the work aims to prompt a reflection on the extent to which design outcomes are inflected by somatic knowledge and subjective performance (from calligraphic skill to “craftsmanship” in writing AI prompts), in spite of the fact that very little to none of this is residual and legible in the final artifact. Sofie Fetokaki’s work on classical musical performance pedagogy provides a clarifying lens for examining the role of performance and charisma in valorizing and institutionalizing what Diana Taylor calls “performatic” knowledge as objective, inevitable, and stable basis of evaluation in graphic design outcomes in formal educational contexts like accredited design schools.

The typeface is framed by a typographic specimen book that serves the conventional functions of such publications, namely, unpacking the origins/inspirations of the typographical forms. The story that emerges demonstrates the ways that “alien capital” has served as one foil (that is, one Other, amongst whiteness’ many other Others) against which white Euro-American normativity has been defined. Tracing the history of anti-Chinese, and more broadly, anti-Asian animus for over a century and a half, yields an account of attitudes that are resonant with the ones that subtend and stabilize otherwise contestable ideas about validity, correctness, and progressive excellence in typography and graphic design today. As scholars in whiteness studies like Ruth Frankenberg have articulated, “whiteness” lacks its own internally coherent content, and is figured primarily by all the things that it is not. In short, the project aims to serve as a case for examining the way that typographic design has participated in the construction of whiteness. The project casts typography itself as a racialized field, while also functioning as an actuator of what the race scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant call “racialization.” In this narrative, Euro-American craft is given its content, marked tautologically by aesthetic ideals articulated primarily in contrast to the outcomes of “cheap Chinese labor.”

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.

Copy, Transform, Combine: Extrapolating from 19th Century American Wood TypeOld World, New Forms: Extrapolating 19th Century American Wood Type

The repurposing of Variable OpenType technology as a tool of digital preservation

Javier Viramontes
Visiting Lecturer
Rochester Institute of Technology

“Copy, Transform, Combine,” refers to a 2017 University of New Haven exhibition of historically significant Swiss posters from the private collection of Tom Strong, with the aim of deepening the historical/practical education of graphic design students with a more immersive material and contextual experience. The title of the exhibition outlines a methodology of using archives in an experiential manner to engage history, not as a static memory, but rather as an experience that allows students to revisit design history through their own perspectives, allowing them to copy, transform, and combine new works based on historical exemplars.

“Copy, Transform, Combine,” can also serve as a unique way to rethink historical preservation. For this presentation, we will discuss the repurposing of Variable OpenType technology as a tool of digital preservation of Aldine Expanded, a 19th-century American Wood Type design, first manufactured by The Hamilton Mfg. Co., Two Rivers, Wis. As indicated by the research of David Shields, Associate Professor, Department of Graphic Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, 19th-century letterforms such as Aldine Expanded were produced in a time without standardized classification systems. Furthermore, without notions of intellectual property or copyright, 19th-century movable wood type designs were often plagiarized, altered, or expanded without a sense of attribution. This typographic revival aims at mapping and classifying Aldine’s various copies and offshoots into a single digital Variable Opentype font file sourced from various design archives.

This presentation will discuss the early and middle stages of this experiment. We are interested in engaging design educators looking to engage archives through preservation, remixing, and the study of historical visual culture through contemporary design technologies.

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

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.

You Look Like the Right Type

In a daily ritual since 2008, exact-dialogue fragments of overheard conversations are made into illustrated quotes

Mark Addison Smith
Associate Professor
DePaul University

On November 23, 2008, in the Chicago downtown loop, while hurrying to catch the subway, a young woman approached Mark Addison Smith and asked for a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” he said. She snapped her fingers and replied: “Ahhh, you look like the right type.” Suddenly and strangely inspired by the exchange, he raced home and illustrated their brief conversation with expressive hand lettering, and a daily artistic practice was born.

In a daily ritual since 2008, Smith redraws exact-dialogue fragments of overheard conversations as 7×11-inch India ink works-on-paper, combining verbatim, hand-drawn text with visual and tonal embellishment; he often draws more than one quote per day. For gallery installations and artist’s books, Smith edits the single drawings into larger, theme-based conversations between people who have never met or exchanged words. When amassed together as modular narratives, the black and white drawings—voiced by strangers and collectively titled You Look Like The Right Type—share grayscale conversations across time, place, age, and gender (the who, what, when, where, why, and how of documentary storytelling). And the audience, as interlocutor, triangulates the conversation by reading that which was once spoken (a tenet of grammatology) and making their own non-linear, grayscale associations between text, image, and completion of what’s left unsaid.

https://www.markaddisonsmith.com/you-look-like-the-right-type

November 2023 marked the fifteenth anniversary of Mark Addison Smith’s You Look Like The Right Type archive, now containing over 6,000 works-on-paper; he has never missed a day of eavesdropping and drawing other people’s words since he first began this series.

Select exhibitions:

In 2023, McMaster Gallery, within the School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina, celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of You Look Like The Right Type with an exhibition of Smith’s drawings, artist’s books, and sketchbooks. The exhibition spotlighted drawings Smith generated during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, in which he held remote conversations with strangers across the world and translated their words into drawn, visual essays of how they were grappling with the pandemic.

In 2019, The Bakery Atlanta, co-presented by Atlanta’s Eyedrum Gallery, celebrated the tenth anniversary of You Look Like The Right Type with an exhibition of 365 drawings.

Other solo exhibitions include Chicago’s Center on Halsted Gallery, where Smith showcased the original 24 drawings from his Years Yet Yesterday drawing series, sourced in language spoken by gay rights activist Larry Kramer, to commemorate World AIDS Day.

Group exhibitions include the Center for Book Arts in New York, Co-Prosperity in Chicago, Hegyvidék Gallery in Budapest, the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, and Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA).

Mark Addison Smith’s type specimens and broadsides are included in the permanent collections at Emory University, the Kinsey Institute, Leslie-Lohman, Ringling College of Art and Design, and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Select interviews with Mark Addison Smith about this work:

Steven Heller, “The Daily Heller: Drawing to Manage Stress,” PRINT, July 1, 2022.

Debbie Millman, “Illustrating Sound,” The Mic, produced by NYCxDesign, episode one, October 30, 2020. 

Mark S. King, “This gay artist draws what he (secretly) hears you say on the streets,” Queerty, September 5, 2020.

Steven Heller, “The Daily Heller: Typographic Eavesdropping,” PRINT, May 5, 2020.

Kathryn Weinstein, “Sharing Loudly,” Designer, University & College Designers Association, Volume 24, Number 2, Summer 2017.

This project was the 2023 Design Incubation Educators Awards winner recipient in the category of Scholarship: Creative Works.

Mark Addison Smith is a queer artist whose design specialization is typographic storytelling: allowing illustrative text to convey a visual narrative through printed matter, artist books, and site installations. With his on-going, text-based archive, You Look Like The Right Type, he has been drawing snippets of overheard conversations every single day since 2008 and exhibiting the works as larger-scale conversations between strangers exchanging words on topics never spoken. You Look Like the Right Type has been featured in All Things Letters, Deadline, Design Sponge, Goodtype, Hyperallergic, I Love Typography, PRINT Magazine’s The Daily Heller, Queerty, MAGMA Brand Design’s Slanted Magazine, and in conversation with Debbie Millman for the very first episode of NYCxDesign’s podcast, The Mic. His artist’s books are housed in over 80 permanent collections and library archives, including Brooklyn Museum Artists’ Books Collection, Center for Book Arts, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Getty Research Institute, Guggenheim Museum Library and Archives, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Library of Congress, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J. Watson Library, MoMA Franklin Furnace, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California, Smithsonian American Art and National Portrait Gallery Library Artists’ Book Collection, Walker Art Center Archives and Library, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Frances Mulhall Achilles Library. Smith holds a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

From Bricks to Pixels: The Evolution of Banna’i Kufic

During the prosperous Islamic era, Persian architecture began to incorporate calligraphy as an ornamental element in mosque design

Sajad Amini
Assistant Professor
DePaul University

By exploring the historical roots of calligraphy and typography in one of the world’s most ancient civilizations, we can uncover the origins of some genuinely captivating scripts that still serve as powerful symbols of Arab and Persian cultures today. This narrative commences with the Islamic doctrine’s prohibition of natural imagery, prompting Iranian scholars and calligraphers like Ibn Muqla (10th century) to craft various distinctive scripts, including Naskh, Muhaqqaq, Rayhani, Thuluth, Riqa’, and Tawqi.’

Proposal-imagesDownload

During the prosperous Islamic era, Persian architecture began to incorporate calligraphy as an ornamental element in mosque design, sparking the creation of a new script known as Banna’i Kufic (Banna in Farsi means building), often referred to as Square Kufic. This progressive typographic approach borrowed the square and solid geometric characteristics of its foundational structural components: bricks. It’s noteworthy that Square Kufic’s minimalistic design coexisted alongside complex calligraphic scripts like Thuluth. Diacritics were deliberately omitted, pushing the boundaries of typography to extremes and enabling the intricate formation of holy names and Quranic verses. Architects ingeniously intertwined two or more texts by manipulating negative and positive spaces. The fundamental structure of Square Kufic bears a striking resemblance to the inherent nature of pixels and the constraints of early computer graphic art. Banna’i Kufic’s modular design and adaptability have allowed it to endure as a versatile typographic foundation still in use today.

This presentation will provide an in-depth exploration of the historical underpinnings of the Banna’i Kufic and its structural rationale and aesthetic through the design lens.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.2: Annual CAA Conference 2024 (Hybrid) on Thursday, February 15, 2024.

Tangible Graphic Design 

Lee is committed to making the field of art and design more diverse and inclusive with people from diverse ethnic, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds.

Taekyeom Lee 
Assistant Professor
University of Wisconsin-Madison

The project, Tangible Graphic Design, was initiated during Taekyeom Lee’s graduate study. The eye surgery and the face-down recovery were life-changing experiences academically and personally. For a young graphic designer and an international student, it was a horrifying experience, especially the surgery. A gas bubble injected into the eyeball applies gentle pressure and helps the detached retina to reattach to the eyeball. It took almost three months to recover fully. After the surgery, Taekyeom Lee was fully healed, but it left minor vision issues. This invisible disability made Taekyeom Lee embrace the experience and initiate a new graphic design project with vision, tactility, design, and materiality.

Since graduation in 2014, Taekyeom Lee lost access to the ceramics facility. It inspired him to build DIY 3D printers to work with various conventional and unconventional materials in three-dimensional printing. The most exciting feature of these Do-It-Yourself 3D printers is that anyone can be a tool maker building affordable machines and customizing them for individual creative practices. The project was a self-funded low budget project. Since Taekyeom Lee SNS went viral, the project inspired many people across the globe to build their own 3D ceramic printers. During the artist in residency at the Internet Archive, Taekyeom Lee created and shared the detailed plan and instructions online to make it accessible to everyone.

Designers can use various printing techniques to produce visual materials and solve visual problems. Since the invention of printing technologies, type designers have spent hundreds of years developing impeccably proportioned, beautiful typefaces to use on flat and static space and print technologies to support the perfection of printed materials. Digital fabrication can change the notion of printed text and how we experience materialized type since the tangible type does not lie on the static surface or live on-screen as a mirrored image. Digital fabrication, particularly 3D printing, has become more refined, common, and accessible. These new technologies have introduced new tools for pushing the boundaries of typography both in terms of concept and medium. 3D-printed tangible graphic elements acquire characteristics such as dimension, structure, materiality, and even physical interactivity. For this project, various conventional and unconventional materials in 3D printing were used to explore both the challenges and potential for typography. 3D printed tangible type not only amplified visual but physical interactions. The tangible type provides engaging tactile experiences, which would be more intuitive, expressive, and memorable.

Humans have five basic senses. Sensing organs send information to the brain to help us perceive the surroundings and the world. The sense of touch is the first sense to develop, and we have the largest sensing organ for touch as touch occurs across the whole body. Visuals and touch are closely linked together, although touch is fundamentally a non-visual perception. Touch can enhance and reinforce the user’s experience with the text, and the idea has been done with traditional printing methods.

The 3D printed embosser and other tangible graphic design applications combine both senses. The concept of the embossing technique can trace back to the cylinder seal, invented around 3500 BC to make an impression in wet clay. As this new embosser is portable, affordable, and customizable, there are a few possible applications. It can be used for participatory activities for promotional events and campaigns. It provided not only visual experiences but also engaging physical experiences. Not like today’s digital printing, the process involves a rich tangible experience, which is more intuitive, fun, and memorable. As the outcome provides a three-dimensional experience and substance, with braille, it could be developed for people with vision impairment.

Through his research, Taekyeom Lee has tried to bridge different areas of art and design. There are more design tools and processes in different industries, such as product design, architecture, sculpture, and metal smithing that have been working with various physical media. The tools and processes those areas have developed could be adapted to graphic design education. An extension of the project addressed how dimensional typography could utilize Rhino, computer-aided design (CAD) software, and Grasshopper 3D, a visual programming language run within Rhino, could be implemented in design processes and methods for typography in graphic design education. They bring extended physical experiences in typography from computer screen to physical space to enhance the interaction of typography directly. The outcome of the method was exhibited via many exhibitions.

Diversity is more than just a popular buzzword in discussions about art and design, and education. Taekyeom Lee is committed to making the field of art and design more diverse and inclusive with people from diverse ethnic, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds. As a first-generation college student and a foreign-born (Korean-born) designer, Taekyeom Lee wants to create opportunities to appreciate and embrace diversity and inclusion. Hangul Alphabet typeface highlights intercultural and bicultural experiences between Korean and English. Currently, Taekyeom Lee is working on a collaborative project with a group of design educators.He is very interested in supporting the new generation of artists and designers using emerging technologies such as 3D printing, digital fabrication, and creative coding.

The next chapter of my research is called Graphic Design for Accessibility, based on years of experience working with tactility as a graphic designer. Crafting better and more accessible experiences for people with low vision and vision impairment has been demanded. Fostering accessibility is inevitable. It will be developed as a regular course to embed my research and practice into my teaching and increase the understanding of diversity and inclusion for future graphic design students. The course will be an introduction to visual communication design for accessibility. Fostering accessibility in Graphic Design education is inevitable. This direction has excellent potential as a future design research project.

TaekyeomLee_Portfolio_p5Download

Biography

Taekyeom Lee is an educator, multidisciplinary designer, and maker. He is currently an Assistant professor of Graphic Design at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received an MFA degree in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research explores unconventional materials and alternative solutions to create tangible typography, graphics, and even designed objects using digital fabrication. He infused 3D printing into his research and has been experimenting with various methods and materials. He presented through national and international conferences, including AIGA Design Conference, AIGA DEC, UCDA Design Incubation, DEL, ISEA, IEEE VIS, ATypI, TypeCon, Education Summit, Tipografia México, and NCECA. His work has been featured in various media. His research draws attention nationally and internationally. He exhibited his work and provided workshops and lectures across the country and abroad.