 Hi, I'm Charmaine Martinez. It's a real honor to be speaking at TypeCon today, and I teach graphic design and typography at Cal Poly down in San Luis Obispo, California. And today I'll be talking about a project that I developed about five years ago. And I was looking for a way to have students work together so that they would understand typesetting, book design, and how much typography can affect the reading experience. And I found that students really struggle when they start working with longer bits of type. So just to give you some context, at Cal Poly we have a three course series in typography. And I have found that this course works particularly well about halfway through the curriculum of type. So the students already have some basic understanding of the rules of typography. They're beginning to develop that sensitivity toward type. At the same time, they're still learning to deal with those longer blocks of text. And they tend to be really intimidated by projects that require more text than a poster. And since we're on the quarter system, things move pretty quickly. So we spend about three weeks building up to this project with two shorter projects, a lot of reading from Butterick's Practical Typography. And then I have the students dive right into creating a small print booklet. They have a week to design and produce it. Okay. And so I chose the text for this project for several reasons. I was really familiar with it thanks to a high school English teacher who was a disciple of the elements of style. And the book is divided into shorter sections which makes it easy to break up for a team project. And the content is, it's particularly rich. There are multiple levels of information. It forces students to think about hierarchy and clarity when they're designing the text. And the other thing is in my design classes I always try to stress the importance of good writing skills. And this book is actually a really nice, short and sweet reference guide for how to become a better writer. And I hope through doing the project that students actually retain some of the information from the book. I don't know if they do, but they've at least read it more than once. So the way that the project works is each student is assigned either section one, section two, or sections three and four. And so when I give them the text, it looks like this. It's a really messy Microsoft Word document. All of the examples are in these pretty hideous tables. And I tell them they can do whatever they want as long as the end goal is to make the text as clear and legible as possible. They don't need to keep those tables. So there are several challenges that students face when they start this project. Because it's a print book, there are a lot of details. The content is pretty complex and the turnaround time is really tight. And I like to do a mix of print and digital projects in my type classes. And so in this case, creating a simple bound book really forces the students to experiment with pacing and white space and margins in a way that they might not if it was designed for the screen. They have to make sure that the number of pages is divisible by four. That's a challenge in and of itself. And they don't always succeed in working that out in the first round. As I mentioned, they really have to read the text. If they're used to working with placeholder text at the beginning of a project and viewing that type is just a rectangle. They can't really do that in this case. So they really need to understand what's going on with the content in order to come up with an effective design. So some of the things that I'm hoping the students will get out of this project are just a better understanding of the grid. Even if it's just a simple manuscript grid, they still need to consider basic things like optimal line length, distance of the main text from folios and footers, how each spread is going to relate to the next. And I try to keep the format itself pretty simple. The page size is five and a half by eight and a half. So the students can just use InDesign's print booklet feature to output their files. There's no trimming. They just have to fold and staple the book together. It's black ink on white paper. So it's the students, I think, considered to be a fairly dry assignment, although they eventually come around towards the end. But I wanna make sure that the assembly of the book is pretty easy, and so they can really focus on the design. That being said, they still definitely struggle with trying to plan out a full book, even though it's a relatively short book. The other thing that I stress to students in this course is the importance of understanding and applying styles in InDesign. So I find that many students are really resistant to setting up their documents properly, and I think they're just trying to work as quickly as possible to get their layout done. But I warn them that since they're gonna be collaborating with one another, it's really important to think about paragraph versus character styles and how they're gonna work together, and that their technical skills are really gonna make or break the collaboration. In addition to all that technical stuff, the students really need to consider how the typography is gonna affect the reading of the text and our comprehension as a viewer. So they need to decide what needs to be emphasized and how they can use subtle shifts in a type style to help the reader really understand what's going on. And when I initially developed this project, I wanted to create a collaborative component in which students could work with each other, yet they were ultimately responsible for creating their own final piece. And I know that students, and I think professors as well, can really dread team projects. There are always issues of workload and fairness that come up. And there's a lot of tension around that. But one thing that I've found is that if the collaboration goes well, and surprisingly it often does, the students really feed off each other's energy and ideas in the second phase. So here's what happens when the students have their first crack at designing the books. They know going into the project that there are gonna be two phases. And sometimes I think they treat the first round as really more of a draft than a final piece. So I end up with some things that have pretty poor craftsmanship, like this guy that wasn't even really folded at a right angle. Or they don't really think about the fact that there's gonna be a cover design and they end up with a design that really looks like an afterthought. Or, as I mentioned, they have problems with pagination and trying to figure out what goes where. So in this case, the student just decided to start the text on the inside front cover. And if it ran all the way to the back cover. So, or are they ran out of print money? I teach at a state school, I get that too. So in that first critique of these books, we talk about the craft. And it's a little thing, but there should be some thought into where the staples are positioned. They shouldn't be completely random. I don't know, I love this one. And the other thing is, one of the things I've noticed when students start working with longer chunks of text, they really shy away from bold type treatment. It's like, oh, it's not a poster, it's not expressive. So it's just gonna be really bland. I've just gotta get this design done. And so they don't really play with scale a lot. In this case, the footer is not much, smaller than the main text. Subhead is not much more prominent than the flowing text. So they're kinda working it out, but it's very utilitarian. And another thing that is fairly typical in this project is because there are descriptions and then examples of maybe a rule of grammar and a more correct example versus an incorrect example. They'll try to find ways to show that. But they might not think that switching text weights is gonna be ultimately kind of distracting, right? Or switching between different sizes within the main text. Or going back and forth between a serif or a sans serif. And these aren't really mistakes per se, but they might not be the best solution. Another issue that really arises in that first design round is just the idea of space and how important it is to give elements enough breathing room and to really think about the full composition of the page or spread. Those tables, they really end up coming back to haunt the student if they keep them in the flow of the text, they'll just leave them with the sort of default in design styling and you end up with these pretty clunky rectangles throughout the whole book. Even little things like margin size or optimal letting, line length, even text size when the students bring them in for the first critique, even though we've already been looking at them and we've had an interim meeting, they'll be like, oh, my text is really too small or wow, my text looks really clunky, like maybe it's four or fourth grader. So through comparison, they'll sort of find a sweet spot of type size. And every time I've given this project, I've had at least one student try to use strike through text throughout the book. And it's actually a somewhat logical way to show that something is maybe incorrect or less correct. But of course, strike through text is not the easiest to read. And it's not necessarily black and white, it's not maybe right or wrong, it's a little bit more subtle than that. And so as I mentioned, text styling and just that technical stuff in InDesign, one thing that always surprises me is how students don't catch these things, right? Letting the changes from one paragraph to the next or something that all of a sudden switches to a way bigger size. And I think sometimes it's a factor of time and other times they just start styling really late in the process and so there's a lot of manual styling going on and they don't catch that. And then there's the little things, the nitpicky things like orphans and widows, that they don't catch on that first round and I do recognize that learning typography, it takes time and it's hard work and so I try to be really empathetic and patient even though these things tend to drive me crazy when they make it into the final critique. So after that first week, which is really kind of a boot camp of book design, we move into the collaborative phase of the project. And so I put students in teams of three and each team will basically, with their sections form a complete book, they're gonna continue to work with their original text. And so this time they get an additional week to work together and to create a unified series of books. So we have a pretty quick class critique and then the teams will have a more extensive critique in their small groups. So the students in this class are primarily junior graphic design majors. This is their second type class and so I'm trying to shift the burden of critiquing increasingly onto the students. I don't want them always to be dependent on me to tell them if something isn't working and I really want them to develop that eye for type. And when they work in these smaller groups, I've found that they're actually, they're really constructive with each other much more so than they might be in a big class critique where you've got 24, 26 students and some people are resistant to talking. So the small critiques seem to work really well and the students will spend a lot of time actually finding mistakes, marking things up and deciding what elements they want to keep in their final series. What I have them do at this point is to plan out their styles. So if they didn't really do their styles the first time around, they're kind of forced into it during the collaborative part of the project. So they actually have to print out every style they're gonna use, character, paragraph styles, table styles, anything that's in there. And this becomes a really good indicator of how detail oriented the teams are and how much they're really considering hierarchy. So here's what happens after the students work together as a group on this. So the first thing that I noticed when I gave this assignment out initially was the incredible improvement that happened in terms of just craftsmanship, overall craft of not only just the physical construction of the booklets themselves, but also the typography. And they get much more creative and they have a little bit more fun with things like the title page and section dividers. They pay a lot more attention to the pacing of the text. In the first round, a lot of the students will try to stuff a pretty long introduction into one small page. Inevitably a few students run it to the next page and then it's like a light turns on. The students are like, oh yeah, I can actually start my introduction like halfway down the page and use a big prominent subhead. Or I can do something a little bit more dramatic on those pages that have less text. I can use a great big number. It's almost like they're waiting for permission to do this kind of thing. And working in the group helps them take a lot more risks with a type. And again, this is sort of like micro risks compared to some of the experimental stuff. But it's still really exciting to see that. And the typesetting of the main content also improves dramatically. Students compare sections, they try to find similarities in the content. They become a lot more engaged with the content. And many of them actually admit that they were confused by some of the grammar rules but they were too embarrassed to admit it. But being in smaller groups, they're like, oh yeah, I didn't get that. I don't understand that. What does that mean? They also think about breaking up that text with more prominent subheads. And once they start working with larger text, it kind of opens up the typeface options they have. And then one big thing that happens is those nasty tables end up getting a makeover as they realize they can actually get in there in InDesign and they can style it, they can remove the exterior border and they can make it just a lot more subtle. And then it just become more critical overall of what that type looks like. The covers get more interesting. They even start thinking, can you see that? They even start thinking about end sheets and using contrasting paper stocks to kind of indicate a break between the cover and the interior text. They find ways to relate the cover typography to the interior design of the book. So I'm just gonna show you a few before and after images from the last time I gave this project. Here's the initial group. You can see, I mean, this student ended up, I don't collect these on the first round and they end up putting them in the backpacks. They get all beat up. They don't love them. And that turned into this series which was inspired by great novels of the 20th century. The Sun Also Rises, The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. And that's loosely connected to the elements of style but I was glad they were thinking about literature. That was exciting. Here's the team's first round. And initially they had one that was more interesting. The student actually used a little separate flap for the title. So they ended up modifying that and creating a custom pattern for the final team version. So if they have things that are working in the first round, I tell them, don't reinvent the wheel. Use those things that you like. It's fine. It's not cheating. It's how design works. And this group, which was just pure coincidence that they all use red on the cover, that turned into this really lovely series. So even little things like the colophon, I mean, pormonic. This is clearly an afterthought. But turn into this. The clunky tables, as I mentioned, usually go away or they get pushed back. Confusion about what should be emphasized. So in this one, the incorrect or less preferred version is bold. And over here on the right hand side, the more correct version is bold. So there's a little bit of like, huh? What's going on with that? And that usually gets resolved as a team's, again, they become just more aware of what the text is actually saying. So what I found in giving this project is that having the students collaborate, it really improves their sensitivity type, their comprehension of the text, their openness to experiment with different type treatments and even materials, their ability to craft a well-made book with a simple binding and their technical skills with document set up in InDesign. And so I just wanna thank you for listening today. And please feel free if you want more details on the assignment or you just wanna have a conversation about teaching typography to shoot me an email. Thank you.