 Is it too early to silently judge the font choice on our title slide? I know it's a lot of bright red, but I had to do something to get your attention because I know the coffee might not have kicked in yet for all of us. My thanks to Sharon and the rest of the Ed Forum crew for putting me on first so I can take the brunt of the AV hiccups. Keep an eye on you JP. Really just means in 18 minutes or so I get to sit back and relax and just enjoy the rest of your presentations, maybe judge some of your title slides. I'm greeting you in German this morning not because of my own heritage, but because of that of whom I'm here to speak about. More on her shortly, but first I'd like to ask you all the question, what does it mean to have lasting influence? This presentation is about how one person influenced my career as a designer and an educator, but I'd like all of us, a room full of people who spend their days attempting to impact students' lives for the better, to think deeply about who or what influences you and whether or not we're being purposeful with that influence. Is it temporal or is it lasting? The person who inspired the easiest conference abstract I've ever written is named Claudia Rochman. Claudia is the coordinator of the BFA and MFA programs, communication design programs at Texas State University, located in San Marcos, Texas. Let's go Bobcats, no, okay. She wore only black every day that I saw her for four years. I'm sure she still does, and that shows commitment, consistency. She made bets on the World Cup with her father and where the loser had to cut their hair incredibly short, shows follow through. She once stayed past midnight at school to help me and another grad student learn how to bind a book when she lived well over an hour away from campus. These things made an impact. She's been my professor, my advisor, even my thesis chair, and now I consider her a cherished colleague and a friend. I don't work with Claudia. I teach at Austin P. State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. Let's go Pete. That really is the champ. I haven't seen Claudia since my graduation over three years ago, but I think about the lessons that she taught me and the manner in which she dedicated herself to her students every time I crossed the threshold of my design classroom. I'm going to take just a couple minutes today to share a few of the lessons that Claudia taught me with you. So here we go. Lesson one, good design takes your best effort. In preparing this talk, I almost said that good design takes hard work, but I don't think that that's necessarily true. Of course, if you love what you do, then the work is not hard. And if you're actually paying attention, you'll work smarter, not harder. Claudia has certainly embodied these traits. I know that she loves what she does. She wouldn't put in the effort that she does if she didn't. In fact, I haven't seen personally a clearer example of a hard work ethic paired with an enthusiastic attitude than in Claudia Rocheman. Even from my very first class with her, I got a taste of Claudia's high expectations. Mind you, I was 32 when I started grad school. I kind of came back after a few years in the profession. I had never encountered someone who expected 100 perfectly drawn thumbnails neatly labeled by the next class, which was only 48 hours away. And that might be normal expectations for many of you in this room. But for me, Claudia was the one who taught me how to work that way. And I'm very grateful for it because it certainly upped my work ethic as a creative professional, and it helped me set better expectations, higher expectations for my students that I have now. I also learned that good design takes your best effort through the countless, seemingly endless revisions I made throughout my grad school projects. These are some examples, a very small amount of examples of a logo I was asked to design by Claudia for the BFA program. We all know how this goes. I remember driving home many nights after class was over. My wife would ask that ill-fated question, is it done? Did you turn it in? No, I'm still working on it. Thought I had it here. We ended up on this. Claudia always had a way, even though that process might have been frustrating at times, she always had a way of making you believe you were just a fraction of an inch away from the best solution. She did this by asking questions instead of giving answers, which I think is an incredibly wise way to teach. And she helped instill in me a willingness to always try again. And again, and again, and again. Lesson two, the world is bigger than what you've seen. Claudia always set out an international scope and vision for the program. Every lecture or conversation included examples from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the like. She did this because she wanted us to see beyond our own personal experience and to become better informed, more empathetic designers. One specific way that she did this, and this is an opportunity that I'm eternally grateful for, is through her annual study abroad program to Germany, her home country. When I participated in the trip, we spent 10 days based out of Berlin and Heidelberg, so we got to see a good portion of the northern and southern parts of the country. We visited each location of the Bauhaus and learned about it first hand, spent time with world-class designers in their studios, got to visit the monotype office, the Heidelberg press factory, the Klingspur and Gutenberg museums, and countless cultural landmarks. Incidentally, I chose Kabul as the typeface for my presentation today because of an amazing experience I had on this trip. When visiting the Klingspur Museum, Claudia arranged for us to go back into the archive room. We all donned the white gloves, and we're actually able to handle the original type specimen booklets for Kabul and many other amazing typefaces. She always looked for ways to elevate the experience beyond the normal. A trip like this will change your life. In fact, it certainly changed my entire focus throughout grad school. My focus of study, the eventual topic I chose for my thesis. And it even continues to inspire me today. I'm currently in the midst of an approval process to start my own study abroad program to Germany for our design students at Austin P. Paperworks in progress, and we hope to take our first trip in May of 2020. Lesson number three, it's okay to fight about fonts. Now, I'm not talking about trolling people on Twitter. I'm talking about discourse. I know that we all have strong opinions about type. One of the reasons we're here. But I believe if we can set aside our preferences, I believe that a good font fight can actually teach us a lot about how to use it. Claudia, for some reason, hates slab serifs. I know this because I happen to love them and use them very frequently in my grad design work. She and I rarely, if ever, agreed on a typeface choice. But rather than chalk it up to personal taste and get mad about it, I took a note from her and asked why. And through those conversations, she was able to teach me about the various ways that we make decisions about design and how we influence the way people react to information through the typefaces that we choose. From an educational perspective, I believe it's not really all about agreement, but about critical discovery in the classroom and beyond. Another way to think about influence is through lineage. Lineage is something I speak of often in my graphic design courses. I think it helps students to find the thread to recall things more easily when the time comes. Whenever I start to see that glazed-over look in their eyes when I'm explaining why we fuss over the amount of space that should be around an end-dash, I just take a minute, I stop, and I share this story about typographic lineage. Long time ago, a man wrote a book about stealing sheep. Or rather, his desire for us to stop stealing sheep. That man's name, of course, was Eric Speekman, a German designer and self-proclaimed typomaniac. In his earlier years, he also taught design courses at the Hochschule für Kunst in Bremen, Germany. And there he had a student, Claudia, obviously, whom he challenged multiple times in all aspects of typographic minutia through her work. I mean, just ask yourself, like, when was the last time that you manually curled some ordinals in a footnote or selected a typeface solely for the arc of the ear in the lowercase G, and you'll get a sense of the minutia that I'm talking about. But there's other characters in the story. There's also a well-known Italian design couple working in New York. The husband was famous for only using a select group of a few typefaces. Some say six, some say 12. The point is, it wasn't a lot. And they were, of course, Massimo and Leila Vignelli, who opened Vignelli Associates in New York City in the 1970s. Where that same student, Claudia, eventually came to work after her school was finished. And while there, she learned from the type purist who taught her many things, things like discipline, organization, objectivity, and economy when it comes to type. It wasn't about pure minimalism, but what was essential for typographic communication. Okay, so we've got the type of maniac and the type purist leaving a lasting influence on Claudia, the type nerd. A bit later, Claudia became a professor herself, and she taught me and many of her other students continues to teach us that there is more to know about type than you could ever possibly learn. It's part of the reason why we keep coming back to things like typecon every year. She taught me that a true type nerd never settles for just all right, that your designs can always use a bit more perfection. And she taught me that every typeface has a distinctive voice. Some might do well to stay silent most of the time. So what does that make me? I guess simply put, you could say I'm a type lover. And I tell that story to my students. I tell them you're the result of this long lineage of passion, of rigor, of influence. And you're the ones who will continue to care through the work that you do when you leave here. I never get a slow clap or standing ovation when that story is done, but I like to think that it gets their attention. Okay, to sum up. Many of you have probably heard this phrase, caught, not taught. Remember that our students are far more likely to remember what we're passionate about, what we're excited about, than just straight facts, procedures, and Photoshop shortcuts. I would not be the designer or the educator that I am today if Claudia had not been so entrenched in her type nerdiness. It was every day. Second, who or what influences you? It's my hope that this talk will inspire you to take stock of the influencers in your life. Maybe it's been a while since you've personally been in school. Maybe you've never really asked yourself that question before. I don't know, maybe you write a couple thank you notes when you leave here. We'll see. Lastly, I want you to consider the influence that you all have. Most of us have another school year that's fast approaching. What are you excited about? Can your students tell? Do they give you feedback about what sticks with them? So I'll leave you with the same question that we started with today. Is your influence temporal or is it lasting? Thank you, Claudia, for your lasting influence and Dankeschön.