Design in the junior year is a whole lot of how-to, both skills and design theory. Our theories are quite pragmatic, and the goal of the year is to make students fully functioning designers and thinkers by summer to make them valuable assets in internships.
A Few Projects
Panels in the banner above are 7 ft. tall sides of an exhibit about John Henry (the most recorded folk song in the world). The junior class created it for the West Virginia Humanities Council with a $15,000 budget. It traveled the state for three years, and had to be designed to be mobile and be set up by lay people. It won a national award. One project in GD3 is a site-specific design. Courtney Reed chose a set of concrete barriers to repurpose as cigarettes being extinguished. Her silkscreened label reads “74% of 18-25-year-olds would not kiss someone who had smoked a cigarette.” She was looking to reach a demographic not concerned about cancer in the distant future. At the right is a typographic interpretation of jazz music for a performance. Mastery of photography and photo-manipulation as illustration is a junior-level focus. Whatever the style, it needs to be confident. The hands are carefully lighted, and all objects need to be photographed by the students. Below is a project in which students selected a set of authors and books to be in a collection. They designed the covers to be in a set of three and developed a system so that others could be added with the same aesthetic. They designed a style guide to accompany the set, so that another designer could continue the series.
SETS OF BOOKS CURATED AS A SYSTEM
Process
Junior processes involve photography and lighting techniques, digital image manipulation and montage, editorial design and the development of publication design systems, developing diagrams, hand-coding web design and design theory. Many also take the book arts elective to totally break free of the computer.