ThawStudio’s Weblog
a resource for design students at mason gross school of the artsArchive for Design I B 2010
Summer Projects for Design II-A
Students completing Design I-B and planning to take Design II-A in Fall 2010, please download the Summer Projects sheet here.
Metropolis editor to speak
Be sure to attend this campus lecture!
Monday April 26, 2010, 7pm – reception following
Susan S. Szenasy
Editor-in-Chief, Metropolis magazine
Cook Campus Center
How tech-savvy, environmentally-conscious, community-oriented designers—the Next Generation—are changing the ways and means of our built environment at every scale.
Monday April 19
Due to illness, I won’t be in class today. Use the time to finish the layout and typesetting of your book, both text pages and cover. Read the TypesettingChecklist and apply each item to your book document. Use the HowToPrintBooklet to guide to creating a postscript file, opening that file to convert it to a PDF and then printing double-sided by manual feeding printed sheets into the printer.The Typesetting Checklist and How to Print Booklet are both in my Public folder, as well.
Have the entire book printed out for Wednesday. Email me if any questions. Sorry I can’t be there today.
See examples of colophons here.
Due Mon 4.5
Read the BookProject assignment. For Monday, create 5 samples spreads exploring page size, type selection and composition of page elements. Please print and trim out. Also use InDesign Help / Help Viewer: read ALL sections of the chapters called Layout and Text. Skip the section called “Masters” in Layout chapter (skip all info about Master pages and Styles for now).
Follow the guide to page size proportions and the guide to text block proportions in setting up these sample pages.
Book Project
The next (and final!) project is to design a book that delivers one, two or three short essays on technology by Virginia Heffernan, whose column “The Medium” appears each week in the Sunday NYTimes Magazine.
Find a printable version of the text here. (Next week, I’ll supply a raw text file you can use for typesetting the book. )
As background for the project, see online versions and the writer’s blog here:
Beep
Let Them Eat Tweets
Framing Childhood
For Monday:
Final Poster Crit (print to one of the 3 large format printer and trim out to 16×20)
Read Heffernan text. Read it again, exploring links/researching items of interest and generating ideas for book materials and page layout. Consider 2-D (page layout), 3-D (structure and materials) and 4-D (sequence) aspects of the book. Bring at least one book dummy (to show a proposed size for your book) and 3 pages of sketches/notes/references to present in small groups to the class. You may use a book map as a sketching tool and to present visual ideas for the book.
Design I-B Schedule
Wed Mar 10
Continue development on poster in class
Mon Mar 22
Interim Critique
One or more versions, tiled on 11×17 in color
Quiz 2 covering Letter and Text chapters of Lupton
Download review sheet here.
Wed Mar 24
First half of class: Work on poster refinements, print tests on Wide Format printers
Second half: Begin new project
Mon Mar 29
Final Poster Critique
Due: Reading handout and Lupton, GRID chapter
Poster Project
Before beginning your poster design, read about Design Observer here:
Design Observer 3.0
Look at examples of type-only work here:
Type-only Posters
Type-only CD Covers
Download the project description and NEW mandatory text for the poster.
Here is a step by step guide to setting up the document and tiling it onto two 11×17 sheets.
Text Project
Final Contrast and Concord work is due Monday Feb 22.
Also due Monday are drafts of the first two compositions for the Text Project. Download the Text Project here.
Grab the text here:
Print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did. Writing moves words from the sound world to a world of visual space, but print locks words into position in this space. Control of position is everything in print. Printed texts look machine-made, as they are. In handwriting, control of space tends to be ornamental, ornate, as in calligraphy. Typographic control typically impresses most by its tidiness and invisibility: the lines perfectly regular, all justified on the right side, everything coming out even visually, and without the aid of guidelines or ruled borders that often occur in manuscripts. This is an insistent world of cold, non-human, facts.
Quote adapted from Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982).
Snow Update
Here’s what’s due on Monday for my classes.
Design I-B:
All 8 Contrast Compositions, done by hand, cutting and pasting with found type. We’ll do the scanning and Photoshop clean-up in class. Also, read the next chapter of Lupton, called TEXT.
Design III-B:
Please email the lo-res PDF of your portfolio selections to your section teacher (Jackie or Leslie). Do this ASAP. You should be working intensively on your thesis project(s) right now. For next week, present the next development of your thesis in individual meetings.
This week and next
Remember, no class meeting on Wed Feb 3. Use the time to refine your symbols, review for Monday’s quiz and read the new reading handout, “Concord and Contrast”.
Due Monday Feb 8:
4 Letterform Symbols
Quiz on Lupton chapter 1 “Letter “, 17 typefaces from drawing exercise and class lectures.
Here is an overview of basic Illustrator tools we used in class; please make sure you know how to use them and get familiar with the short cut/key commands.
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