Designing with Time
For a “Visualizing Information Space” graduate project, each Design CMU grad student was asked to visualize the information space of a different artifact…some of us received a page from the Wall Street Journal, a game board, or a book. The artifact that I was given was a 45 minute, interactive, CD-ROM that contained a lecture Dan Boyarski gave in 2002 when he was awarded the Muriel Cooper Prize by the Design Management Institute. The title of the lecture was “Designing with Time.”
Kinetic Type :: Catch 22
Design students in Carnegie Mellon’s Graduate Typography II course were asked to choose and then interpret a dialogue across two mediums—a digital kinetic typography movie, and a 16-page printed book. Issues of type selection, legibility, space, pacing, duration and placement were also to be considered in both deliverables. My dialogue was pulled directly out of the book “Catch 22” by Joseph Heller.
Discovering Typography
For this graduate Design project at CMU, I was inspired by the beauty of the Bauer Bodoni typeface, so I selected it as the basis of my research for my project. The project asked me to reach back into the typeface’s historical context, researching the use of type and the trends of communication design relative to the time of the typeface’s creation. The research was to inform our use of grid systems, hierarchy, type as image, points of entry, and appropriateness…as well as to inspire us.
Type as Voice :: “She Surrenders”
Our “Graduate Typography” class was presented with a verbal rendition of a short story that was told by Jackie Jonas, a professional storyteller. That was our raw material…from there, our goal was to convey our interpretation of the story using type as something not only to be read, but also felt and heard.
Nature as a Model
All designers know that there is much inspiration to be found in the natural world around us. Using the organizational stucture of either a natural artifact or process, our “Graduate Typography” class was asked to tap into this inspiration, then organize and visualize 44 random names from 20th Century to bring context and meaning to the data.