 Hello everyone, my name is Hans Schellhass and I teach visual communication design at Northern Kentucky University and today I will be talking about the conference poster project incorporating re-iterative practice into a methodology for student advancement with typography. Hopefully I can do a good job of demystifying that title today. So the project I'm talking about occurs in our typography 2 class and to give you just a little bit of context for the project, I just wanted to show you a little bit about our curriculum. In our curriculum we have three typography classes, typography 1 and typography 2, those occur in the sophomore year and those are back to back and then our typography 3 class occurs senior year. Typography 1 is really all about just giving the students a good overview. They're new students to typography, we have a lot of different projects and we're kind of working with the Ellen Lupton system going from letter to word to sentence to paragraph so they get a good range of things they get to see in type 1. But the project that I think is one of the most important projects and one that relates to the project I'm going to be talking about is the third project, the type variations project. And in typography 2 that's really all about text design so that's important because when students are engaging with typography in the professional world that's probably how they're going to be using type most of the time working with quantities of information, working with text. The variations project that's used in typography 1 is based on the iconic exercise that Dan Friedman came up with in the 1970s, his typographic permutations project. And many teachers use this, they kind of customize it to their own specifications, to their own learning objectives. Friedman gave bland information to his students who focused on legibility and readability with the text. In my opinion when it's facilitated well this is one of the most effective ways that students learn how to work with text, with hierarchy and that kind of communication. Friedman said that the project was simple but it was very deep for his graduate students. My teacher who, when I was a student I first came in contact with this exercise in Kristin Cullen's type class and she had mentioned that it was like musical scales for typographers. And I probably embraced that concept even more than she does. And you don't become proficient by doing something once and even professional musicians continually practice scales over and over again to hone their chops to get really strong. Certainly in sports, you know that's another place where repetition is critical and doing exercises are critical. And that really allows us to isolate and hone in on certain things to strengthen those weak spots. And so here's an example of the typographic variations project for my typography one. And it is typically taught that students are assigned a set number of studies with the initial ones having restrictions such as using only one type size then as we move along they might be able to use multiple type sizes or certain type sizes they can use more weights and styles. And this is the first place where they organize information and bring hierarchy to the communication. Students explore important typographic factors such as space, weight, scale, contrast, alignment, clustering and composition. So there's a lot they're working on in this simple exercise. With that background I just like to speak a little bit about the conference poster project itself. And this is the first project that we do in typography two. So I think it's a really good bridge from typography one to typography two. The inspiration for the project comes from I get a lot of two-sided posters sent to me that I get to my office for various things. Some are designed so that the postal information is designed into the poster and some are designed so that they can be stuffed in envelopes. But what they typically have is on one side there's more amenable information where it's a grand announcement and on the back there might be a schedule or a list of events. It's more informative on the back. It can be hung on either side but each side has a little bit different of a function. And so to summarize the brief that I give them for this project, students will design a two-sided poster with text provided by me. They may add copy to it. They could add quotes or anything else to enhance it but they can't take copy away. Students will determine the format size. And the process begins by performing five typographic variation studies with the abbreviated version of the copy to help pre-visualize the final layout. I'll be explaining that in a minute here. And there are four structured phases to this project. It's very structured how they go through the process. There's this variation stage and a concept generation stage and an image combination stage and then the final poster design. So they're building up to the final poster. The copy that they're going to use is pre-written copy that I provide them. I've written it. The first one is called Human Rights in the 21st Century, A Conference for Change. Future Living, A Conference for Designing a Sustainable Tomorrow. Type Talk Text, A Conference on Typography. And you're going to see examples of all of these but since I've been giving it for a few years I took away the Human Rights in the 21st Century copy because the students are new and as they're working with imagery, sometimes they weren't very culturally sensitive to the images they would be using. And I thought that that kind of content would be better for seniors who are a little bit more sophisticated in using imagery. So this is the copy that I give the students. There's a lot of copy. It's really bulky. It's hard to work with but that's what I want them to do. I want them to kind of struggle. I want them to be challenged to have to manage all of this copy. Ideally what I would like to do is to be able to get them so that they could be invincible, that they could take on any amount of complex copy and still be able to do, produce a poster that is designed well, that's beautiful, that functions well. So that's the goal in an ideal world. But for students coming out of type one, that's just too much copy. That would just be a recipe for disaster for them to jump in and take on all this copy and work with imagery and work with concept. So we're going to break it down. All this stuff highlighted in green, the descriptions for each one of the conference events we're deleting out and then they're going to start by doing an exercise with this abbreviated copy. So it's kind of a modular system we're creating. We're working with the abbreviated copy and then once we get to the final stage, we're going to kind of fill that in with the more descriptive copy and they're going to handle more information. And here are kind of all the stages in between. And the whole project is about seven weeks to go through all these steps. So now I'll show a few case studies from the project. So here's where the student starts with doing some of the typographic variations. They're kind of getting used to the information in here. Thinking about composition, they're resharpening their skills. I always find that when we start this, even though they've done it in type one, it's like they forgot all the stuff that we taught them in type one. So it's just a really good restrengthening, regrounding, resounding exercise to start out with. After that, they start working on ideation and concept development. And so I have them come up with at least 20 good concepts for their posters. Here we go into the image combination. And so I think it's important that students are making this bridge with how do I work with image and type together now. Because in their first two courses, typography is here, visual communication design is here. And I'm really trying to break those barriers between image and type. So I have them, they have to combine at least three images or two images and type and just play and experiment and see what comes out of it. So she's working on some different ideas here. Out of that, she's starting to come up with some poster directions. Now she's kind of isolating down to one. And then this becomes the final poster. So, you know, the typographic variations aren't a template. They're not a footprint for what she uses in the final design. But there's definitely a lot she's taking from that. And I don't think she would be able to wield that amount of information had she not gone through that initial exercise. So looking at some close-ups, I think there's some nice typographic details and nice type nuances in there. And that's definitely from going through that variation process to begin with. Another case study looking at the process. These are some sketches for her type variations. Here is her typographic variations set. Again, it's not going to be a template, but it definitely gives her a lot of confidence when we're moving into that last phase of she can handle all that information. She's going to take a lot of lessons from here or a lot of comfort. But still working on all those basics like hierarchy, composition, et cetera. Here's some of her process, exploring different concepts. Here are some of her type image combinations using the name tag, sort of a conceptual element. And then she starts to move into a poster concept. And here's her final. I think overall she was able to achieve a good structure, a good organization to the information. I think the concept is solid. Maybe some of the image choices could have been a little bit stronger. But overall she was able to, I think, achieve a number of different things and bring all that stuff together by working through the steps. Another case study as far as the process goes. And this is the concept development stage. And this is pretty typical of what I get a lot of times where the thumbnail sketches are really rough. And that can be okay because I'm not looking for a design plan at this stage. I'm really looking for ideas. And I'm looking for concepts. I think a lot of that design planning we're really taking care of in the variation stage or getting used to the copy there. Here is her image combination stage. And these are kind of rough. They're not great. But again, this is really new to her. And so she's trying to figure out how do I bring some of these things together? Maybe in the past she's only used one image on its own for. And now she's combining a few. Another study, kind of one-dimensional. But as she adds, as she develops and layers in other imagery, such as the wind power and the idea of the urban and the environment, we have a more sophisticated story going on. Here's her first crack at trying to bring the type and the image together on the back. And as we can see, it feels like kind of an awkward dance. The type and the image are clashing. They're fighting with each other. But she starts to work that out. Starts to be more of a space creator. And here's her final solution. Certainly there are some things she could still do to refine the poster. But I think we can really see a learning process going through of how she's better understanding how to balance type and image and structure and composition. Here are some additional examples. And these are more final solutions. Here's a solution where the student did his own photography and somehow convinced his classmates to do the shoot. And I don't know how he shot, maybe the feet is borrowed imagery. But I think, again, a pretty good balance with type and image and structure and hierarchy. He was able to come to something very sophisticated, I think at the end with balancing all of those things. This concept was sort of a mother earth kind of idea where she's working with collage and again bringing together different elements to tell the story, figuring out how to balance that with type and image. And again, there's a lot of clunkiness that goes through this whole process of how to get there. But I think the process helps with that. Another example, again, where a student shot his own photography, that's him. And I think he had a friend help him with the camera. This was inspired by some of the content, talking about torture. And so I like when they're able to make a good connection with the content, with their concepts. Here's one of the type talk texts. I enjoyed the back of the poster, actually a little bit more than the front. I thought it was a little bit more sophisticated, but I thought it had some nice hierarchy, some nice organization, and I thought got a lot of good typographic learnings out of the exercise. Here's another one where the student shot his photography. We have a letter press in our studio, so he was able to use some of that stuff in creating imagery. This was from the first time I taught the project. And the first time around, I actually had them work in the folds and they had to design it so that it could be mailed out with all the postal information on there. But I think that just is a little too much for sophomores on top of everything else. But I think he came to a nice conclusion in how to figure that out. Here's another concept where the idea would there would be these perforated tabs on the front. And when you remove them, you would see the image underneath. And so all the conference information would be on the tabs. So the idea is you'd have this collection of cards and then this would be kind of like your guidebook for the conference that you could take the cards with you. Another concept about, you know, with the fingerprint, about the idea of the actions of one and then juxtaposing that against community and masses in a social movement. The student took an illustrative approach and it was kind of a fun Rup Goldberg inspired approach where we have the old energy, the unsustainable energy on the back or on the front. And then on the back, we have the more sustainable ways of how to work with energy. Trying some different ways on the back to integrate, type an image. Kind of thinking back about the project, one of the things that I'm trying to do with sort of this reiteration and bringing that exercise back in is a lot of times when we're teaching these more advanced courses, we're thinking about what the next new thing is, what the next more challenging thing is. And it kind of looks like a model like this where those things are separate. But I think it's really important before we move on to the next thing that we're making sure that the students are getting some really solid fundamentals before we're taking on those next new things. If the fundamentals are solid and we move on, I think they're going to do much stronger work and just get more out of that. So that's kind of the trying to make a bridge here, trying to really reemphasize things at each level as we go through. And I think that's kind of the sweet spot there is the overlapping part. Thank you very much.