Above, top to bottom: James Dunphy’s exhibition graphics were designed to be assembled within the viewer’s eye with optical effects like foreshortening and reflection. Katie Richanbach’s campaign was inspired by the color interaction studies of Josef Albers. Alison Munn’s buttons and posters use optical after-images to reveal branding only after the viewer has passed it by.

Wikipedia reports the following:

In 1965, an exhibition called The Responsive Eye, created by William C. Seitz was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The works shown were wide ranging, encompassing the minimalism of Frank Stella, the smooth plasticity of Alexander Liberman, the collaborative efforts of the Anonima group, alongside the masters of the movement: Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley and the Italian Getulio Alviani. The exhibition focused on the perceptual aspects of art, which result both from the illusion of movement and the interaction of color relationships. The exhibition was enormously popular with the general public, though less so with the critics.

Suppose in honor of the show’s 45th anniversary, MoMA is bringing many of the original works back to the museum and placing them alongside contemporary examples from the worlds of art and design.

On the blog this week, propose several works you think the curators should consider as they make their final selections. In the meantime, design 3 or 4 headline treatments for MoMA’s outdoor advertising and prepare comps showing the headline treatments in place. Along with these treatments, plan to show the process by which you developed this typographic solution, including working drawings, mathematical models, optical distortion effects, etc.

This assignment is from the class Typographic Research.

Above: Yoshi Hozumi researched the ancient practice of salting the earth in her response. She presented her findings in a chapbook along with renderings of the barren strip she proposed salting at the outskirts of the site.

The following was broadcast on an NPR news report:

In 2002, [Desert Space Foundation Director Josh] Abbey created a design competition to find a permanent warning sign for the proposed nuclear waste site [in Yucca Mountain, Nevada]. The purpose of the competition, he says, is to find a universal warning sign which conveys that the deposit is highly dangerous. One caveat: the symbols have to work even if language or communication breaks down in the future. And the design has to last at least 10,000 years.

Take a moment to consider this design challenge. Then, respond to it in whatever manner you feel is most appropriate.

This assignment is from the class Typographic Research. It was inspired by several projects from the Long Now Foundation.

Above, top to bottom: Peter Murray’s poster adapted packaging used for generic milk cartons. Michelle Viau created a color-coding system for an event calendar based on the dual-ring lids of Ciao Bella gelato.

Go to the supermarket and take extensive visual notes on the typography you find there. Purchase any items you might require for further visual research. Sketch, sketch more, and then use your findings to design a poster for an upcoming event at the New School drawn from the University’s public event listings. The poster should list dates, times, prices, and all relevant event information. It should be sized A2 and posted somewhere on campus before class begins next week. Document your poster’s release.

This assignment is from the class Typographic Research. It was inspired by a similar assignment from Paul Elliman involving this scene from Jean Luc Godard’s Tout va bien. For more, check out this poster by Manuel Miranda.

Above: y=mx+b magazine project. Custom tote bag designed and screenprinted by Yelena Avanesova.

Above: A spread of Ryan Quigley’s well story, “The Future of Fashion,” from y=mx+b. Page through the whole magazine from Issuu below, or visit the website to order or download your own copy.

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Above: Christopher Miller created “A Gentleman’s Guide to the 21st Century,” a buying guide divided into three booklets: work, play, and love. Inside, the guides mixed a kind of email informality with a nostalgia for the classicism of centuries past.

Create a product catalog for an object from the future. This should be an object that you will desire, but it may be anything from an overpriced luxury item to an essential tool for surviving 10 to 20 years from now. Use your imagination. The market for this product will be an important consideration. Your catalog should be largely image-driven and should use minimal text. It should pursuade, convince, and seduce us.

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Above: Yelena Avanesova’s project focused on a book she decided to read for the class, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which imagines our planet after the last human has died off. Yelena’s underlined passages combined with imagery from vintage National Geographic magazines in this unique presentation of a world and text remembered. More + 10 to 20 projects below.

Above: Isaac Weeber’s book centered around sorting predictions about the future into three categories: plausible, possible, and impossible. These were color-coded and these colors showed up on the outer margins of all the content he chose to reproduce depending on his personal opinion.

Above: Yu Chung Lim’s book was a catalog of existing experimental architecture projects that she felt pointed a way toward the future of building and urbanization.

Generate a book about the future. This future should not be hundreds of years away, however: I’m interested in what you think about the immediate future, within your own lifetime, no more than 10 to 20 years from now.

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Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

These are slides from the lecture I gave to my publication design students on the first day of class. The first half of the lecture was focused on craft. I basically looked at Case da Abitare, a beautifully redesigned Italian home magazine, and then showed my students how to take it apart. (There is a great interview with the magazine’s creative director Tyler Brûlé, art director Kuchar Swara, and photo director Stephen Ledger-Lomas logged here on our class blog.) I started with a heavily-gridded page, the Index, and reveal the magazine’s basic 12-column structure. I went on to show how lines and rules are applied to the gutters and outer margins of that 12-column grid. Then I showed how the type is sitting on a p3.5 baseline grid which governs the placement of all horizontal elements on the page. Basically, the height of any element on Case da Abitare’s pages is a multiple of p3.5. Then I showed students how to guess at type sizes based on baseline reoccurrance, and finally I showed how all of these templated elements play out across a variety of grid schemes.

The second part of the presentation is a set of “Notes on Magazines.” First, I asked students to consider magazines as a publication form by contrasting them to other types of publications. (For the sake of simplicity, I definited a “publication” as any object with multiple pages made available to the public.) This included newspapers, journals, brochures, books, and blogs. Then we looked at various “toggles” within the magazine form itself. These included timing (or frequency), scope, length, number of authors, quantity of advertising, makeup of audience, and different strategies for distribution. Finally, I sketched a “garden variety” three-act magazine. This is what most lay readers learn as the magazine form proper: front of book, feature well, and back of book, with all the content-driven and stylistic assumptions that come with those sections. —RG

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Above: For her project, Joanne Chew researched a variety of different chess notation systems and synthesized them into a single place.

Typeset the sequence of 27 chess moves for Fischer vs Spassky (Game 5). You may either visualize the board or use chess notation, but your goal in either case should be to present the information as clearly as possible to a non-expert.

Resources

• YouTube commentary on Fischer vs Spassky (Game 5) explaining the game step-by-step
• Interactive version of Fischer vs Spassky (Game 5) showing board and chess notation with clickable moves
• Wikipedia on Fischer vs Spassky

This assignment is from the class Typographic Research.

Above, top to bottom: Ryan Quigley used Norman Foster’s new Hearst Tower as a modular grid for his series of letters. Debra Pitel modelled her letterforms after Jean Nouvel’s distinctive window voids used in his unfinished Landmark Lofts project.

Design a full alphabet (A–Z) in response to a well-known building. Prepare a 17”W x 11”H ring-bound presentation book that explains your solution step-by-step.

This assignment is from the class Typographic Research.

Above: Joanne Chew’s set was based on the form of a scissor with myrad variations and sizes.

Develop a non-alphabetic set of at least 26 formally-related objects and use these objects to design an A2 format specimen sheet showing the set in use.

This assignment is from the class Typographic Research. It was an adaptation and simplification of my own set project from the class Typography I.