 Okay, hello everyone. My name is Matt Wozinski. I'm an assistant professor in the School of Design at the University of Cincinnati. And I'm Renee Seward. I'm an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati. I'm also serving as the program coordinator. So our presentation today is titled Do It Again, which I think I've already heard in maybe two or three titles already. So some themes certainly resonating in this room. And for our presentation we're sort of applying this title to a workshop that we conducted earlier this year in the spring semester for our fifth-year senior-level communication design students. And what we're really trying to get at in this workshop is to find a way to kind of bring to students who are in their very final semester working on capstone projects, some of them in the sort of intense stage of senioritis trying just to get done and get out of the school in some way. Trying to bring them back to some of the core competencies of working with typography, working with letter forms, and I think even beyond like using words like core competencies, some of the joy of playing with typographic material as a raw material for them to consider compositions and making. And so kind of getting back to that spirit of play also. This is a decision that was based a little bit on sort of these students themselves, but also it's kind of a curricular thing that we have seen happening a bit within our program. So I think probably one of the most distinguishing features of our undergraduate program at the University of Cincinnati is that we have this co-app program that's embedded entirely into the curriculum. And so our students are actually leaving starting this sophomore year, second year, every other semester to go work in a paid position anywhere in the U.S. or beyond in the world. So we have some great things that come out of this. For sure our students are building networks, getting professional experience. Many of the students have jobs even before they have graduated from the program. All very good things. On the other hand we have some challenges with this within our curriculum, starting with these sort of like hard breaks after every single semester. So the students are in school, they leave, they go work in New York, they come back, they think they're hot shit. There's this kind of like having to sort of reacclimate to being in the classroom and learning again and listening to their professors and sort of advancing themselves. And also I think gears them towards a sort of like accelerated professionalism in what they're doing. Another challenge which is probably shared by a lot of people in this room is that as certainly discipline of design has expanded in many ways over the last several years and decades, we find that we're trying to kind of jam more and more kinds of things into a curriculum which doesn't get any bigger. And so for us this happens I think a lot in our fourth year which is our junior year where we are focusing a lot on design research methodologies. So preparing students to really think about how they can conduct research and sort of propose, define pitch and sort of implement their own projects as well as issues around usability, sort of testing communication systems or communication artifacts that they're producing within studios. And we think these things are important and we think that they should be taught. We think this is a sort of a good time for it when the students have gone through some of the earlier stages of their education. But with this immediately followed by their one semester of their senior year in which they're actually producing their capstone projects, this final semester which is titled Synthesis seems like it doesn't quite always do that. Sometimes somehow they're forgetting when they get to this junior year and start getting really involved in research and sort of crafting the narrative of their own projects that like all that other stuff that they learned about working with typographic material for example, formal exploration sort of the iterative process of design gets a little bit lost and they seem like they've already really targeted in on this is what I'm going to do. And so in some ways what this workshop was really all about in a very simple kind of way was dragging in some ways some of these exercises and some of the fundamentals that they may have picked up on in the first year or two in some 2D foundation courses and typography one or two courses and bringing them into the very final semester for our fifth year students. So this is the moment when they're actually going to be producing their final capstone projects and we're trying to think about what can we give them in the first couple of weeks while they're working on those projects to also you know again inspire this sort of play with the material inspire them to maybe drop rational thinking and logic just for a second to engage again with their eyes and hands. And so this is where we went and sort of came up with this notion of a very exploratory form and semantics related and very hands-on workshop again a lot of themes we've already heard today. So these things don't happen in a vacuum and of course we all sort of learn from those we've studied with and we've learned from each other. One point of reference is a guy that I know so a few people in this room know a very cool dude named Leander Eisenman, Zurich based designer who also teaches at the Basel School of Design and I was very fortunate as a graduate student to take a poster design workshop with Leander in Basel and in a one week workshop that was very focused on the poster Leander really insisted upon this very kind of you know hands-on methodology starting with existing letter forms and in some ways really kind of constructing those letter forms into a narrative as one was working towards producing a poster. Another point of reference is this other cool dude from Minneapolis Eric Brandt. I saw Eric give a wonderful presentation at the AIGA national conference last year in New Orleans. Eric has on the one hand miraculously been able to make his garage in Minneapolis like a world famous gallery by the magic of social media. He has invited people to submit typographic experiments that he can produce as posters and puts all over the place and this has sort of translated into a course that he's taught many times and now has become a kind of traveling international week long workshop that he's called Fuziones Tipa Grafica and I was really like enamored by what Eric was talking about in terms of the intentions of again a very kind of simple procedural typographic workshop but that was really producing some interesting results so I told him I was going to steal it and he said yeah that's cool so we did that and some of the stats are sort of the setup here is that we were working over three weeks it was really only four studio sessions and we have two and a half hour studios really focused on students just working in class it's not a homework kind of thing at all we have a very large school of design so we're working across three sections we actually had 55 students in this workshop which is a lot and sort of the rules of the road or at least sort of the spirit of the workshop were these we wanted students to really foster a personal and idiosyncratic relationship with typography not really thinking about rules and break the rules but hey you guys have been in here for four and a half years you've sort of been through a lot of this now how would you kind of re-approach some of these foundational projects we wanted the students to consider their own personal journeys through their time at our program as the foundation for a narrative that could steer them as they worked on these projects so rather than having some kind of end goal in mind to write a short story what's the craziest or most interesting or exciting thing that may have happened to you while you were a student here since our students are co-oping regularly in New York and San Francisco and stuff they have very crazy stories to share it's awesome and to sort of write that story down and let that sort of be in the back of your mind as you're then sort of playing with eyes and hands and creating compositions uh steps or sort of rule three here a very popular one in the presentations today get off the damn computer just enjoy the satisfaction of working with your hands and eyes and sort of trusting the skills that you've acquired over these years and the last one is sort of like the rules which is play first, rationalize second and judge last so step one was again maybe one of the most fundamental things to do with typography which is understanding this relationship between form and counter form and so I'm going to kind of back and forth here show some project samples from the very early years in this case a year one typography one studies that students do working with greek letter forms so only slightly more exotic than the latin ones they know but making compositions into which they're making sort of tight crops of these letter forms focusing in on some of the unique characteristics of the forms and then building compositions out of those in the fifth year workshop then we distributed the only materials they could work with we're working with accidents grotesque bear told in two sizes bold you can see how thrilled some of the students were when they found out they had to use markers and scissors and stuff others drove right in but you know in the studio with these materials asking them to play asking them to make without thinking too hard about it but also not rushing the process and encouraging it's fine to like turn up the music really loud and and do this and hopefully find some sense of joy again and in doing this kind of work and they produce you know very quickly a wide range of compositions or at least a lot of compositions and again investigating this very sort of fundamental principle about looking at the forms and the counterforms and sort of the relationship between positive and negative spaces that happen when you work with letter forms individually or when you start to compose them together they were then asked to take one of those or a few of those and then to start to put them into small mini series and so again we have the sort of template provided here in terms of the formats and students are then asked to sort of find some identity identifying features within the compositions they've made and extend them over three steps and then again produce a small narrative so these little mini narratives about these sort of fantasy typographic worlds they've created so it's the one at the bottom says citizens of a rigid town go about their typical day everything is in place everything is in order everyone is moving along their path until you know dot dot dot and then finally for step one to find one of those compositions and to recreate it four times larger again working only by hand so in this case with marker the goal here is not necessarily sort of perfect perfect perfect articulation of the form you see it's a little bit messy still but in some ways to give some evidence to that thing they created very quickly and then investigate it a little bit deeper sort of make analysis of one thing that you had created in this in this moment recreated larger and again write a small narrative to go with it all right i'm going to continue on with the second step it's called constructed glyphs and so we printed out a bunch of glyphs for them similar to the first assignment and at this point they are supposed to take these glyphs and construct new typographic forms with them and it's to promote like free experimentation in this idea of risk now just to hop backwards to where they started at in typography one we do a one class in class assignment called word manipulation this happens at the point of the semester just after they have gotten finished drawing letter forms for an extended amount of time to understand all the nuances of the different letter forms to understand the system that exists within um a typeface as well as just to understand the weights and everything of the letter forms reading the same and at this particular time they're still working on an assignment where they're just beginning to understand rules of typographic setting uh type size to line spacing uh line length what causes for readability and legibility and a lot of that is on the computer and they're doing it again and again trying to enhance the legibility and quite frankly they needed a break and so while we have this thing that's very rigid and has a lot of rules to enhance legibility I still wanted to bring up this arm of risk taking and experimentation so we did this in class activity where they could take different typefaces and they needed to develop a new typeface with it and some of them at the end of the assignment started to build their own new typeface just out of some of the different materials that were brought in class so to move that forward in the senior year in this workshop we did the same type of experimentation they were using the letters g r c d and they were doing whatever they wanted to it the thing I can notice from working with the freshman and the seniors there is much more risk taking happening in the senior year when they did this assignment versus when they did it um in the freshman year uh some of the outcomes that were happening is one such one that looks like this this one oh again um whatever they were making here also had to uh visually communicate some of the narratives some of the things that were going on in the narratives that they created at the beginning so this one talks about a computer glitch and then the laptop died right before the project was due um so some other tragedies that happened that uh this one the students felt like from their time adapt they got bent um and twisted in all kind of ways and so um whatever they made physically then they had to ultimately scan into the computer and they reversed out and so we start to see some interesting things happening there um the third step they were building a process poster now this process poster needed to visually communicate the narrative that they had written as well as include all of the process work that they had used in the steps prior um it had to completely be composed by hand and they built it at a half scale um eventually they scanned that into the computer and added text for the narrative but just to hop backwards for the second when the spirit of do it again we were looking in this stage for them to remember some of the things that they had learned in their early on design aesthetics class we uh recall to their memory this idea of repetition and progression how ordering systems get layered on top of each other and how typography can play with inside those ordering systems again we talked about typography two and typography two they build poster series and this particular example here it was for a poetry slam and they were taken on po dumb bar in ginsburg and at the top here they were just experimenting with how type and image can integrate together and in some other of uh examples of posters how type can be image and then they came back and added some of that pragmatic text now um here are just a few of the outcomes that happened at the senior level after they have pushed this idea of risk taking experimentation um they form this narrative and then you can see like the end of the narrative is structured back in with the small type down there another case study here this guy is talking about an experience that happened to him while he was on co-op uh he went to the beach to watch the surfers uh surf and while he was there um a fire happened and so he saw this nice like juxtaposition between the water and the fire that he was seeing um so that's what's being communicated there some of them talked about just their overall experience of being in the program um the gentleman over here again he was on co-op out in california took a weekend trip where he was viewing the like rule scenery and so he brought that back in with the typographic letter forms um some of them talked about standing in line to get to a jimmy filing show and something happened while they're at the show um others of them talked about them feeling like a blank slate with the blank page over here at the beginning and then they were kind of the gaps were getting filled in as to what they were doing and i think it's interesting towards the end here you can't fully read letter forms because they're still figuring out yeah they're about to graduate but they're still putting the pieces together if you will so um the range of different types of experimentations or outcomes that happen from these posters spread the gamut and just so we can uh mention it again they did all of this in four studios over three weeks with 55 students so that's three different sections of our senior class there's still one other section that didn't participate in this workshop so fairly big um find this a slide interesting because again we're showing um how they started off in their early years of doing this basic fundamental stuff and maybe they didn't understand why completely but bringing it back in in the senior year right before they go out we can see like because of the experience that they've had in co-op because of the other knowledge that they've gained while in school and even the structural things that they're learning through the research what those outcomes look like when you do these activities again and then i just wanted to pair john's workshop poster up against his capstone project because this was a poster that he created which was a data visualization that was showing um how different news stories are reported in different media so this was both created in that same semester for his senior show thank you