 I'm Megan D., and I'm here today to talk to you about the role of hand lettering in a contemporary design curriculum. And a lot of that is because I work at Virginia Tech, and they want to emphasize technology and the latest and greatest of everything. So I really strive to contextualize this with authenticity. So one of the biggest challenges of teaching a hand lettering class is getting students to create authentic designs instead of just following trends. How often do you introduce a project, only to see your students immediately turning to Pinterest for inspiration? While there's nothing wrong with creating a mood board or trying to see what else is out there, what I really want is to push students to dig deeper and go beyond mimicry and into research and refinement. So when I talk about hand lettering and calligraphy, I don't just want students thinking about Etsy style crafts. I want them thinking about the origins of language and contemporary designers and how to explore with form and materials. Even though I know much of this technically doesn't fit within the term lettering, which is why the next time I'm teaching this class, I'm calling it experimental typography and hand lettering, which also has calligraphy in it, but whatever. But when it actually comes to calligraphy and lettering, there is a certain amount that isn't meant to be unique. For instance, if you're trying to master a copper plate, you need to practice, learn hand skills, and study existing forms, perhaps eventually developing your own variation only after spending a tremendous amount of time honing your skill. Here while calligraphy might be about perfecting creation of form, designers all face issues of originality. What's the line between plagiarism and parody? What's the difference between inspiration and appropriation? Retinart has a lovely article on the comparison of these two pieces entitled Paula Cher, Herbert Matter, and Swatch. Was it plagiarism or parody? The article starts off, after the flames of modernism became mere embers, the design community wanted to turn to something with more warmth. People were after something more comfortable, a song buried in a memory. So designers of the 80s began looking back in order to move forward. But at least in Paula Cher's case, she got in contact with AIGA and Matters of State in order to get permissions. In some of my other classes, I sometimes even assign a project in which students research and assign designer, study their design methodology and their grid systems, and then they design a poster emulating the work of that designer. However, these pieces are never meant to stand on their own. They're more of a way to get students to remember a designer through making. I think of John Ruskin's view of drawing as a way of seeing, or in Elaine de Baton's words, from the art of travel. I had seen many oak trees in my life, but only after an hour spent drawing one did I begin to appreciate and remember their identity. Through making and recreating, students can better understand a designer's process or by spending time drawing letters, they can truly see their forms. Yet I want students to find inspiration beyond the most famous designers and through their quick Google searches. So I kick off my class with a hand-lettered syllabus, and then I take them over to the Special Collections Library at Virginia Tech on the first day of class. Here they can see beautiful original pieces, such as pages from illuminated manuscripts and books that are hundreds of years old. I also encourage this exploration because in the words of T. Boer Kalman from Good History, Bad History, the historical lens is both a way of seeing or including, and a way of not seeing or excluding. When we look back at eras that are beyond personal experience and memory, we become more dependent on what we see through that lens. What we don't see, in effect, doesn't exist. So I want the students to know that there's more to design history than what was curated by Phil Megs or whomever wrote their textbooks. And I think this also fits into broader issues of inclusivity, particularly if you think about who tends to get put in the history books. But I also want to get them to feel the specialness of fragile paper, of textured leather-bound books, and of seeing the raised gold leaf, and also seeing how letterforms shift through time periods and across regions, particularly before the internet. Things really look different depending on where you are in the world. I want them to think about the development of letterforms alongside the evolution of language, writing, and culture. I took all the M pictures because I'm Megan, but often the first assignment I'll give in hand lettering is the creation of an ornamental letter. I assign each student a story by the brother's grim, and they are tasked with creating first a hand-drawn ornamental letter, and then later on a digital iteration. I start by having them sketch many different ideas and then teach them how to develop those through trace paper iterations. During this assignment, I'll have students read chapters four and five of Phil Megs' history of graphic design, focusing on illuminated manuscripts, and I bring in reproductions from the book of Kells. Yet I encourage students to find contemporary solutions to this assignment, as they have a plethora of tools at their disposal. And in a contemporary design curriculum, hand-lettered elements can be integrated into all sorts of pieces, like posters, websites, apps, signage, and packaging. Additionally with this project, I like how students get to spend this much time on one character or symbol. And playing with these stories can bring letterforms to life, such as by twisting the tail of the big bad wolf into the L of the little red cap, which you probably know as little red writing hood. And the digital component of this project also gets them thinking about how they can apply these illustrative and lettering skills to other sorts of projects. It can create a foundation for larger projects that students can develop after my class has ended. So throughout the course of this semester, I sprinkle a lot of lettering and calligraphy exercises. And the one seen here is a cray-lig-ra-fy exercise by Tierney. And part of the reason I'm showing this example is I have a lot of lefties. And for some reason, brush lettering, especially with a crayola marker, not only is it obtainable, you can get it for how cheap. But it's also, we do a lot with the parallel pen and the pointed pen. And this can be, if you have frustrated lefties, try this sort of thing. But when budget permits, I like to raise the bar by bringing in experts. For one year, I got to bring in the talented Joey Heneford, who got students working at a beautiful large scale, where they could really begin to understand the relationship of letter forms to the gestures of the body. She starts them off on paper, working with the structure of Roman capital letter forms, so they can understand geometry and proportions, of which I've seen a nice extended variation in the book, Calligraphy in 24 Hours. She then moved the students to a large scale, which freed up how they moved their arms and let them see the detail of the forms. From there, she demonstrated how to do numerous other alphabets. And they just sat there drooling over her drawing letters on the wall, which I think means I did something right, or I broke them. And she also let them play with a bunch of her tools. There's so much about what we do where they're not going to get to be experts at everything, but it's nice to just let them see a little bit of gold leaf or to see some of these tools. And if they get inspired, maybe they go off on their own and dive deep. I've seen others that do variations of the large scale calligraphy, often done in water or chalk. And I've heard of some people doing this just to get their students out of the classroom and into the space. Then, hey, look, campus, there's graphic designers. But all of these studies get back to a basic understanding of the relationship to the human form. They also get students to look more closely at letters. Most of my students will not leave my class and go on to become calligraphers, but nearly all of them will work very closely with type and creating letter forms by hand gives deeper understanding to the similarities between letters and my strokes vary from thick to thin. For the projects in my classes, I often integrate current issues and I try to shift some projects each time I teach it. For example, in the fall of 2016, I used the AIGA, get out the vote prompt, and had students hand letter poster design solutions promoting voting. Although apparently our 20 posters didn't quite do the trick. But also the first class I taught after the 2016 election, I introduced an exercise in response to some of the conversations I'd heard and had on campus. One student from my class, who's the daughter of immigrants, had come to me the day after the election and told me I no longer feel at home in this country. This interaction inspired me to give the assignment small acts of kindness in which students were asked to spend a few hours creating something handwritten that integrated an act of kindness for someone, either friend or stranger. My hope was to focus on positivity in spite of all the hateful rhetoric and the us versus them sorts of fighting. But also to remind students how if you have control over beautiful lettering, all you need to communicate well is a writing utensil. Seen here is my student friend's note she gave to a friend. And my student Corey, illustrated tiny bookmarks, went to a bookstore and she snuck them into her best loved passages of her favorite books to create a nice surprise for strangers. Another challenge I'll often give students in hand lettering is a group project. It is difficult to get a variety of individual styles working together cohesively. So for the project seen here, we did an installation on stairs and windows, I guess this is just the stairs, but integrated an Ira Glass quote who'd been a speaker at the Moss Arts Center earlier that year. A different year I assigned the group project with the prompt of creating a visualization for the circles of hell as described in Dante's Inferno. One group solved this problem by creating a contemporary magazine focusing on greed, lust, and other examples in popular culture. Another group created an artist book which had a page for each layer of hell with a unique patterned border on each page which was based on the relevant sins and punishments of that layer. And this piece overall integrated hand lettering, screen printing, and laser cutting. And the last interpretation of the Dante project that'll show was this group which created a wine level for each layer of hell and chose more full bodied reds for the most treacherous sins. One of my favorite aspects of hand lettering is that you can do it on almost anything. So I'll often give prompts to letter upon physical objects. Seen here is an example of a longboard and another of a guitar covered in the lyrics from Castles Made of Sand. But students will often interpret letter of physical object in a number of ways. The student on the left was obviously influenced by her internship at Kroger Grocery Store and the one on right is how we somehow ended up with a 50 pound concrete ampersand in our studio space. And while I find it hugely important to teach history, form, culture, and context alongside hand lettering, I'm also OK with sometimes just focusing on joy and on play. In the words of one of my favorite designers, Alan Fletcher, pleasure also fulfills a function. That sentiment combined with the fact that we usually have an awkward two weeks left after Thanksgiving break, meaning I don't know what to do with that time. I'll often give a small project where students design a card of their choosing. They're asked to create a design that incorporates hand lettering, but one that can be reproduced. And sometimes I talk about what I think makes design and versus art or those kinds of things. And one of it is not that you can't have a one off design, but as designers it's nice to think about reproducibility, whether that's digital or print or other. They also have to hand letter an envelope and send someone a copy in the mail. And sometimes I'll have them do tiny animations. But overall, hand lettering allows designers to create typographic forms that would be difficult to draw on a computer. Teaching lettering to design students can help reinforce typographic principles and can show how letter forms relate to gesture and to motion. Lettering can also bring a more human touch to the cold glass interfaces in our digital era. So thank you all for your time.