 Hi, my name is Eva and I'm an assistant professor at Kent State University. I teach classes in typography and graphic design and today I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about my background as a typeface designer and how that's influenced my thinking on graphic design and led me to re-work a couple of assignments for my students. So I'm going to just talk you through the three kind of characteristics or defining parts of the practice as I see them, how I see them relating to design pedagogy, what exactly I change about the projects and then show you some examples of student work. So to start off with, why that's super loud, I think one of the defining features of typeface design practice is an obsession with modularity and iteration. So as typographers you'll probably be with me on the idea that letters themselves are modules that build to make words and words are modules that build to make sentences and sentences are modules that build to make paragraphs and paragraphs are modules that function in the modular grid. But for the type designer this level of modularity is a little bit more fine grained and starts with the parts of the letter themselves. So if you as a type designer want to make a change to your end that changes all of the ends in the paragraph and changes the overall color of the paragraph and the texture of the type but it also changes anything that has a relationship with that end. The most obvious ones are things like the M, H, U and R and that kind of plays out and say you change the top serif of the ends and then anything that has a top serif or anything that looks like a top serif will change. Similarly the arches or the stem weights and so on and so forth. Basically the point being that all the letters in the typeface have an interrelated kind of complexity in their relationships with all the other letters in the typeface. So it's sort of systems thinking to a higher degree so it's this idea of iteration that's found in all design practice in typeface design practice is kind of magnified. So secondly type design practice is involved with abstraction and translation. So in terms of abstraction what I mean by that is that this is the interface of the font editor robo font and as you can see it's almost entirely black and white and gray. So type designers deal with making meaning and personality just purely through formal characteristics and shape. And secondly this idea of translation is that typography there's a well-known phrase typography is what language looks like and so as type designers you're thinking about translating meaning into shape and thinking about two forms of users so there's a very strong interaction with user interface design here. In terms the two users I'm thinking of are graphic designers who use the font products like tools and so you're thinking about how they're going to interact with open type features and how you're going to structure the typeface how many weights it's going to have things like that but then also how the reader will interact with it which obviously is of paramount importance to any typeface designer. And then lastly type designers are concerned with dealing in visual language and visual language obviously has many different meanings for different kinds of theory but what I'm talking about here is cohesion and consistency in building a tone of voice. So what I mean by that is if you look at two typefaces that might fall loosely into the same category like doko and chaparral here they're both slab serifs that are fairly monoline in weight and there are differences obviously but when you look at them up close you see the differences even more and these subtle differences play out at the paragraph level that change the typeface completely to have a totally different tone of voice and this kind of tone of voice is what I'm talking about when I say visual language or vocabulary that plays out in things like logo type design also and different weights within a typeface making sure that the tone of voice of any typeface is consistent throughout even if there is well obviously there's going to be a variety in the styles themselves. So those are the three defining features as I see them modularity and iteration abstraction translation and visual language. So how did those things parallel in type design or in design pedagogy? Well I see modularity and iteration as playing out in systems thinking which is obviously a catchphrase. Thinking about modularity and iteration and reflecting on process is a way of making flexible integrated and responsive strategies will help students with things like web design but also any kind of design really that has to do with making an integrated system. Abstraction and translation I see is playing out in design thinking so making the students aware that making is a form of research and creating a user-centered focus and this idea of abstraction helping to create new answers to ideal problems and then obviously lastly visual language we are as visual communicators aiming to be visually fluent and so an ability to immerse yourself in a set of shapes and a palette of personality based visual cues can help the students to develop identity systems, information systems, wayfinding, book design etc etc. So in reworking the briefs my main well I reworked two briefs I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a second but the main objectives that I had were to get the students to learn in a modular way so that one brief would lead to the next to encourage them to design and build personality modularly so just to focus on the usefulness of modularity and to encourage a reflection on process and the value of revision or mistake rather than seeing it as something to shy away from to encourage students to think in metaphor and analogy and to encourage a focus on user experience. So all of these things then will culminate in thinking about systems thinking as a flexible conceptual approach and promoting visual communication as an equivalent to verbal or written language. So the two projects were designed to work in tandem and the first was a two-week exercise and it was called rinse and repeat and that was a reworking of an existing brief called the creative process poster but when I googled creative process I got hundreds of thousands of examples of creative process in like flow charts then diagrams and tree diagrams and I just thought well that's just going to end up in more of the same so in order to get them to think actually creatively and really push them I want to just sort of throw them in at the deep end and then the second one was designed it's a seven-week project it was a reworking of an existing project called narration and mapping and I changed the focus from mapping to translation to try and put the idea in their heads that the designer is a sort of medium and so I'll start off with rinse and repeat and the focus here was to get them I just told them to find a mistake in a process and left a totally open-ended what they defined as a mistake or a process and I left the format completely open also so they really were just kind of thrown to the hounds and the hope here was that they would push push beyond their comfort zones and not just make emulative work to think abstractly in their visualizations to reflect on the iterative process and as a means of researching and to think about novel or unusual kinds of visual structures so Marianas think and overthink was kind of this really made me happy when she came up with this idea because I was like yes somebody gets it she decided that she would represent her mistake of overthinking in her process of living so kind of grand ideas here and she made a small I think six inch by six inch booklet that is designed to visually articulate the idea or the process of overthinking so her colour palette is all kind of like pastel pinks but they blend to make kind of warmer reds as you go through the book and she represents a thought as a singular node that has the potentiality for overthinking indicated by a dotted line around it and then as she thinks about it or overthinks that node then forms extra kind of connection connecting dots that come off of it and start to build a structure and as she overthinks the structure gets more and more complex until it gets out of control and all the connections start to break down and her mind gets troubled according to Snoopy there and she brings us through the process by and shows us this kind of like abstract and realization of her thought process by using colour contrast and very formal abstract visual language and then brings us to a culmination where she's letting go of thinking so it's just a really simple idea very well articulated I think. Lindsay's as the second of this I'm going to show two of the exercises since it was short and she focused on the mistake that she found in Chicago's train service on the L line where there are five stops called Western which obviously is a little bit confusing so rather than you know focusing on that as a mistake she decided to put a positive spin on it and turn it into a kind of a boon rather than a bus and she made a small booklet for the tourists to use so that if they got off at the wrong Western stop that they could make something good out of that and some of the things like this one here actually there's not much to see here maybe you should have answered yes to the last question just keep passing through so there's a kind of a tongue-in-cheek look at the whole thing but she maintains a consistent visual vocabulary that ties in with the train lines aesthetic and I think she does a good job of turning the idea of a mistake on its head so both of these projects show this idea of abstraction and translation and a focus on process and that was supposed to then build to lead into the next project which is a seven week project called narrate and translate in which the students were supposed to embark on a new experience new so that they would be able to reflect on the steps involved and then build an informational experiential artifact so again very very open ended and the format was totally open it should be dictated by the content and so the steps involved were that they should do an analysis and deconstruction of this experience visualize the experience in metaphor and analogy and try to think abstractly about what the essence of the experience is and structure and pace the delivery of information in a way that is conducive to the user having a sort of vicarious experience and then the whole thing is aimed at helping the students reflect on the role of the visual in the broader field of communication so Marianne again embarked on a trip to the Cleveland Botanical Gardens and decided to frame her project around the cactus garden there which is housed in a glass house so defining the essence of her experience she said that what you remembered most were the panes of glass in the glass house and this idea of unveiling or unearthing looking through a pane of glass and seeing this lush greenery on the inside so with that in mind she made a set of uh logo types that are all um in kind of a latin um they're all latin and they they refer to the idea of a place of life they vary it means place of life in latin and she was referring to the botanical naming conventions there and she used um this framing device throughout and she took all the photography herself and it's all kind of macro level photography that is um cutting off parts of the photo and kept the visual language consistent and very clean um the outside is almost entirely white and um when you open it you are unveiling and unearthing this giant plethora of plants on the inside and the um product works in a modular way in that it has three parts to it one is an app that you can use to scan the QR codes of the plants that you see um and get more information about them the second part the middle one there is a botanical exploration that helps you get around the place itself and tells you more about the plants that you see and auxiliary which is a set of useful tools to help you take photographs of plants to grow them and take notes and sketch um and this is the app that goes along with it which um can like maintains the same visual uh identity Jess's uh Hona beauty kit is something similar she decided she would make her own um homemade and natural beauty products and defining the essence of this experience as a kind of do it yourself getting back to nature taking reclaiming um your um ability to do things for yourself and not have to be a slave to consumerism she decided that she would make a product that empowered the user she made a very um nice consistent brand identity that has sort of mini brands for each of the products that she made but she gives them empty jars and um a list of ingredients and a dvd to go along with it to just explain how they can make all of these products themselves um and it's in essence translating what she went through this is just um making some softening lip scrub right there um and the idea of do it yourself is uh continue through the um hand lettering and illustration that she uses throughout the colors are also color coded according to um different kinds of feelings that you want to have come through and the logo type the little kind of um flower guy is supposed to represent rosemary which is the greek goddess of fertility i believe um so again lindsey's fine fresh food does something similar um she embarked on a three-week vegan eating experience and um in terms of translating that she felt that the defining characteristic of this experience was having to research for herself and be very mindful of what she was putting into her body so she decided to make a toolkit essentially that gives the um power back to the consumer and she um supplies them with a bag and a kind of book that has three parts to it um and translates it in a what i've called a multimodal translation that where the tactile qualities of the papers themselves and the fabric are all very organic and um feel very paired back and the um the illustration throughout is just that it's illustration rather than photography with the view to keeping it less about specific foods and more about just the general reflection on food stuffs and what you're putting into your body and it's broken into three parts so we see a little bit we read a little bit about her experience she gives some recipes as a starting point and then there's a section for notes at the back and a little pocket to hold all of your um ideas as you're going through the process yourself and then lastly um Greg's dissolution into the obscure uh he took part in a paranormal investigation um and went in with a skeptical uh approach and came out with a skeptical approach um but decided to make it a kind of a tongue-in-cheek look at it and he made um he decided that the essence of the whole experience was a sort of like fumbling in the dark and then trying to rationalize it in a scientific way so he wrapped the whole thing in a wooden box that's completely unmarked so you have to open it to find out what's inside and then it's got two levels so the top level there um the quirk board actually sits between those two levels and you read the investigation guide dissolution into the obscure first to assess whether your evidence is good or bad for the existence of a haunting and then if there is good evidence for a haunting you are instructed to please access the next level of the box and at the next level of the box you are supplied with a seance board and all of the spiritual items that you might need to conduct a seance so again it's this kind of modular set of ingredients that the user can use to um create their own experience and it translates his experience into something uh useful and in terms of visual vocabulary he makes good use of a kind of fairly um encrypted hand lettering style here where you have to sort of work to decipher what's being written out combined with a very formalist approach to typography that makes it feel sort of pseudoscientific um so um what did we learn since we're in the thinking of learning here and the students the stronger students learned a lot from the process and had no problem with running with abstraction and open-ended briefs but for the weaker students I noticed that not having specific deliverables and not having specific milestones along the way was kind of um scary and threw them off track a little bit so I um I think if I ran it again I would want to incorporate some more milestones maybe not weighted but just so that at the start they can latch on something and run with it um for continuity I would rather than having sequential projects I would nest them um so that when content wise leads into the next so that there's a bit more of an investment in the project and then lastly um and these two things are kind of intertwined I would rebalance the time so instead of the first one being two weeks and the second being seven I would make the two week one longer so that they have time to assimilate the skills that they've just learned and the seven week one shorter so that it prevents monotony um and those things should be easier if it's all the same content too so that's all I have to say about that and as I'm new to teaching I would love to hear your feedback on these things that I'm saying at the Q&A later and if anybody wants any more information about the students I have some business cards too thank you