Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist: Christopher Fox
Mike Kamm
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02/10/2025
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Description
Fox is assistant professor and graphic design program director at Calvin University. His Not Design studio is a collaborative studio interested in focusing on projects that step outside the boundaries of traditional design. Fox is a typographic instigator blending tactile, digital and spatial experiences. He is fully immersed in the academic function while trying to maintain a deliberate creative balance. His work is often responsive and collaborative, intentionally sharing ownership of the process of making with others.
The School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series brings notable artists, scholars and designers to Nebraska each semester to enhance the education of students. The series is presented in collaboration with Sheldon Museum of Art.
Recorded 2/6/25
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- [00:00:00.000]Thank you for attending this evening's talk. Being here in the S. Abbott Auditorium at the Sheldon Museum of Art is a terrific opportunity, thanks to all who made this possible.
- [00:00:14.420]I met Chris Fox in 2014 in a design residency in Detroit, Michigan. It was organized by Design Inquiry, a non-profit educational organization that explores pressing issues in design and culture.
- [00:00:29.160]His enthusiasm for typography, letterpress printing, and printed matter was impressive, but what struck me the most was his love for teaching graphic design, and mostly working with others.
- [00:00:41.700]We talked then, really 10 years ago or more, about designing an opportunity for our students here, and today Chris engaged with students in the letterpress studio, exploring words as design and as art.
- [00:00:54.760]The collaborative process allowed students to step outside
- [00:00:58.320]traditional boundaries of printmaking and graphic design. It was an opportunity
- [00:01:02.560]to embrace what can happen when working together, which is the mission of his
- [00:01:07.260]agency, Think Not Design, and what he embodies as assistant professor and
- [00:01:12.060]program director at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Please welcome
- [00:01:18.120]Christopher Fox.
- [00:01:20.960]We're going to start with a couple of questions.
- [00:01:27.480]With a couple of things, this image is from a battleship. I want to talk a little
- [00:01:32.980]bit about, this is a battleship in New Jersey, it's docked in Philadelphia, about
- [00:01:38.160]the idea of overthinking and then not overthinking, and I think this is a
- [00:01:41.820]pretty good example of both of those things. If you need to find how to get
- [00:01:45.000]medical attention, you follow the arrow. This is exactly where on the ship you
- [00:01:48.440]are in case you need to tell somebody how to find you if you're injured. It's a
- [00:01:52.140]genius wayfinding system that is literally painted on the side of cast
- [00:01:56.640]iron walls in the middle of a battleship that if you ever want to go on a
- [00:02:00.660]battleship you should go to that one because you can go everywhere. I was
- [00:02:03.880]under an engine and you can go into every nook and cranny of that of that
- [00:02:08.340]ship which is an unusual opportunity. I also think there's going to be an
- [00:02:13.620]intermission to this lecture meaning that what we solved with our technical
- [00:02:18.260]prowess was to get us halfway through the slide lecture and the other half of
- [00:02:23.340]the slide lecture is loading on my laptop in the corner.
- [00:02:25.800]We may or may not get to experience the second half. I think it's gonna depend on
- [00:02:30.900]your your endurance as to whether or not we do that. So let's go. We're gonna start
- [00:02:37.160]with family photos. I don't know how long this is gonna play but I'm gonna give
- [00:02:41.140]you an outline first because I was gonna advance these. Chill, homie. I was gonna
- [00:02:45.240]advance these one at a time but I'm gonna let it play for a little bit and
- [00:02:48.780]then we'll get into things but we need to go back because I do we just keep
- [00:02:52.500]going that's fine. We're gonna go through family photos. We're gonna go through
- [00:02:54.960]letterpress for logo and then and then we're gonna go through the process so if
- [00:03:00.460]you wanted to know what you're getting into these are some of the things then
- [00:03:03.060]seven hours of me myself and my microphone which led us into
- [00:03:06.460]overthinking which is where the slideshow stopped which means when I
- [00:03:09.460]might miss out on me leaning my bike on stuff type is hype plus infinity and
- [00:03:14.640]then the bread and butter or the afterthought those were like the titles
- [00:03:18.780]of some of the sections that and then some advice which I can give you advice
- [00:03:22.260]without reading it off the screen this is what my mind looks like quite often
- [00:03:26.520]this is a installation actually it's not this is a critique phase of a
- [00:03:31.040]publication from one of my classes my graphic design 3 class they're designing
- [00:03:35.820]research publications and the idea is that when you're going to critique a
- [00:03:39.500]publication that is at the finish stage you print everything out in spreads and
- [00:03:44.460]you lay them out on something and you listen to it from beginning to end and
- [00:03:48.500]that's generally a very organized matter we generally use the floor because
- [00:03:51.360]there's not room on walls to like put a whole 80 phage pub in spreads out to
- [00:03:54.960]look at and then what happens inevitably when you're critiquing those things is
- [00:03:58.800]somebody comes along and walks through it which is what's happened and this is
- [00:04:02.740]pretty much what's happening in my head most of the time
- [00:04:07.240]hence the overthinking not overthinking what I've noticed in observing students
- [00:04:13.500]because my work is students and if I were to show you what I'm most proud of
- [00:04:18.540]it's it's the students that I work with
- [00:04:21.260]and it's what I've invested my my effort into but I've noticed there's a repose
- [00:04:27.180]that students have that I think adults have too and a lot of us had it I had it
- [00:04:31.220]a while ago it's the crossed arm this right which
- [00:04:34.580]suggests critique but also questioning and even if you take them to an
- [00:04:41.400]interesting person in an interesting place like Chicago that picture was of
- [00:04:45.900]some odd pilot in Chicago that's his name is Chris he
- [00:04:51.160]runs that studio and I took a group of students there and then the next week I
- [00:04:55.180]took another group of students there and they're standing here and listening to
- [00:04:58.480]him talk about the workflow that he's involved in he grew up the same time I
- [00:05:02.440]did I don't know him I met him in his studio but he's also influenced by the
- [00:05:06.760]Swiss grit design movement and the Bauhaus design style and these are
- [00:05:11.980]things that I would be doing if I wasn't teaching and so I'm envious of him but
- [00:05:15.220]also I am NOT because I'm doing what I want to be doing which is working with
- [00:05:19.600]students and teaching design
- [00:05:21.060]and getting my hands dirty with people and getting to meet students all over
- [00:05:25.200]the country when I get to work with them in workshops so even if you're in an
- [00:05:29.640]interesting space and you're listening to someone interesting talk about things
- [00:05:32.880]there is this repose that students have again this is family photos of the
- [00:05:37.340]crossed arms the quizzical I'm not sure that I'm buying into what you're giving
- [00:05:42.380]me even if you're taking photographs of your classmates the arms are still
- [00:05:45.960]crossed and then even if you're critiquing work in a classroom your arms
- [00:05:49.680]are still crossed
- [00:05:50.960]even if you're going to the West Michigan design archives and you're
- [00:05:53.900]learning from Barb Loveland and Linda Powell the history of the design through
- [00:05:59.120]the Herman Miller lens when everything was done by hand and these are some of
- [00:06:03.260]the stalwarts of the design community in West Michigan your arms are still
- [00:06:06.860]crossed and I guess there's a lot of pictures of Rodrigo in here with his
- [00:06:09.680]arms crossed but the other people also have their arms crossed what I found is
- [00:06:13.460]a way to get students to stop crossing their arms and being quizzical about
- [00:06:16.680]what you're saying is to feed them or to take them to where food exists and then they
- [00:06:20.860]become very happy and they dab the camera and give you a thumbs up so
- [00:06:27.280]that's one way to do it you can consider that manipulation if you'd like to
- [00:06:32.100]another way of doing it is to take them to design studios and
- [00:06:36.460]get them stuck in an elevator which is what's happening here so this is three
- [00:06:40.360]minutes into a five-minute stuck elevator we thought you should
- [00:06:43.480]memorialize it so anyway so they do smile
- [00:06:46.100]students can enjoy the design process and then you can also give them tactics sometimes
- [00:06:50.760]where you just make them point at random objects and what I had done before was
- [00:06:56.860]zoom into some of these faces to tell you who is doing this because they're
- [00:07:00.180]asked to who's doing it because they're supposed to and then who's doing it
- [00:07:03.660]because they're making fun of me and you can discern probably on your own who's
- [00:07:07.680]who so family photos anyway this is this is the things I do these are the things
- [00:07:13.640]I spend my time on these are the people I work with and so letterpress fur logo
- [00:07:20.660]that's the prompt here how do you take letterpress process and then turn it
- [00:07:24.440]into a logo sub art is the is the prompt sub art was an exhibition that we
- [00:07:29.540]curated for the first time this fall on campus and it was meant to suggest
- [00:07:35.500]subversive art or subterranean art really the sub was any prefix you wanted
- [00:07:40.100]to be what came after sub was up to you and that was true for the audience and
- [00:07:43.820]true for the artists and the students that participated so these are some
- [00:07:47.040]thumbnails of photography of letterpress that you can use to
- [00:07:50.560]play into the to the logo branding tactic and then here is an opportunity
- [00:07:55.600]to like push it into a poster application where we just don't have to
- [00:07:58.960]put ink into it we can just use the photography of the physical elements so
- [00:08:03.200]there's sub art running backwards with the content being legible with the
- [00:08:07.220]prefix suffix conversation happening in the middle you can fill in the blank and
- [00:08:11.380]that ended up being the thematically the approach that we took for the entire
- [00:08:14.720]show I'm gonna show a few pieces of the show
- [00:08:17.860]just for context of what was going on and there's another
- [00:08:20.460]version of the poster like in the space that's not involving letterpress and
- [00:08:24.160]then this becomes a vinyl installation that's backlit we had a project called
- [00:08:29.100]kick rocks which is more of a sculpture intervention than it is a graphic design
- [00:08:32.700]class mind you these are all graphic design students the reason this happened
- [00:08:36.340]is because you will get a group of people in any group of people who
- [00:08:38.760]aren't sure how to proceed and if those of you who came to the workshop today
- [00:08:41.620]you know who you are you're like I'm tentative I don't know what to do I'm a
- [00:08:44.820]little bit intimidated by the space I'm intimidated by the exposure of the
- [00:08:48.360]opportunity so I'm gonna
- [00:08:50.360]I'm gonna sit back and learn by watching totally fair also totally appropriate
- [00:08:54.120]this was the group of students that were in my class they just didn't know what
- [00:08:57.980]to do and they're like I can't proceed past the prompt so I said well you're
- [00:09:02.240]gonna collaborate with me right to the east of this barrier concrete or brick
- [00:09:08.940]barrier on the right as well as over the top in the back there is a pile of like
- [00:09:12.540]water garden bricks thousands rocks I mean thousands of rocks so we just
- [00:09:16.640]started curating rocks out of the collection and putting them in this
- [00:09:20.260]in this courtyard space that should have soft seating on it but instead has
- [00:09:23.640]nothing there were a couple trip hazards that happened we had a couple of people
- [00:09:28.780]come out of those double doors in the left and almost face plant on the rock
- [00:09:32.380]so we had to put some signs up like do not enter or watch out it's wet but
- [00:09:36.880]the exhibition allowed us to play with materials that we would also find
- [00:09:40.760]repurposeful it's one of the tactics from my design lens is that it's called
- [00:09:45.340]design survivalism which is what is in your environment I was a student and
- [00:09:50.160]I'm also just so you know I'm aiming this lecture at students because that's
- [00:09:55.840]who I work with and for so I appreciate everyone being here but this is
- [00:09:59.400]tactically aimed at the student body this is paper laying around in drawers
- [00:10:04.900]that people hadn't opened in probably ten years that we were gonna just
- [00:10:07.620]recycle or throw away it's illustration board and map board and then it's just
- [00:10:11.020]hand cut and then hung in a series of lenses to suggest the depth of the space
- [00:10:16.240]and to fill in a foyer that's hard to walk through so we could control the flow of
- [00:10:20.060]people into and out of an exhibition there's no letterpress in that but
- [00:10:24.500]there's a lot of hand cut paper there there's a heating vent installation
- [00:10:33.080]where we just the students cut and fold the paper into like half of these and
- [00:10:37.500]then stuck them in all the vents in this what used to be a cafe courtyard then
- [00:10:41.960]now it's sort of an abandoned space on campus that we're trying to take over
- [00:10:44.820]into a student gallery space and in the meantime it has a funky floor and it has
- [00:10:49.120]a funky roof
- [00:10:49.960]it's got bad lighting it's got bad brickwork it's got really bad tables so
- [00:10:53.860]in each of these heat vents they stuck these paper inserts and they put these
- [00:10:57.700]confess signs up along it so that people could write whatever they wanted to you
- [00:11:01.480]on this complete like forest or this complete installation of these tulip
- [00:11:05.120]like flower looking astra bright paper from again a leftover box of paper and
- [00:11:10.720]installed thousands of these things this is another collaboration project of
- [00:11:14.960]students who are like I don't know what Fox wants I don't quite know where to
- [00:11:18.160]start I'm sure they don't know how to end
- [00:11:19.860]so it became an installation and the confess was the prompt and and it went
- [00:11:27.900]over pretty well having an exhibition in a space that isn't usually shown for
- [00:11:33.100]exhibition space is one of the things that not design does quite often if
- [00:11:37.560]we're going to curate our work or student work into a space the not design
- [00:11:43.500]philosophy is that it's an extension of the classroom the classroom doesn't end
- [00:11:46.680]when class is over there are spaces
- [00:11:49.760]that you can access gain access to which are essential to your learning
- [00:11:54.740]methodology and I've been trying to provide that as a launch pad for
- [00:11:59.000]students who aren't quite done with school yet but they're not quite ready
- [00:12:01.880]to be professionals but they're surely somewhere in the middle and they would
- [00:12:05.060]get engaged heavily and not designed curatorially and if we get to that part
- [00:12:08.960]of the slideshow which it's on the second half so you might have to do what
- [00:12:11.960]the Internet's good at and go to the website which is think not design com
- [00:12:15.760]and you'll see lots of examples of what I'm talking about but
- [00:12:19.660]this is for current students and to get 60 70 people at a time into this strange
- [00:12:25.300]old cafe space and have fiber art and have you know cut paper installations
- [00:12:31.540]and have like an audio track being played was a coup for them because
- [00:12:35.840]they've never exhibited their work before and their graphic design students
- [00:12:38.500]and they should show their work and it should go on their resume and they
- [00:12:40.900]should be comfortable in a space that they've curated and you need those reps
- [00:12:44.420]because as a professional you're gonna be doing that all the time so they're not always
- [00:12:49.560]standing with their hands no exhibition is finished until you have a banana
- [00:12:54.800]taped to a wall somebody said that and then again just so you know like
- [00:13:00.840]students in my purview will be happy to get together sometimes with or without
- [00:13:05.580]food and I'm giving these guys credit I'm putting them on screen so this is
- [00:13:09.200]we've moved on from the family photo category but this is one last family
- [00:13:13.440]photo in that these are the students who struck that exhibition it's 11:30 at night they're
- [00:13:19.460]sitting around a coffee table in the printmaking studio with the letterpress
- [00:13:22.840]in the background and they're going through the confess sheets that people
- [00:13:26.780]submitted and they're deciding which ones they would like to document so they
- [00:13:31.640]can share them with other people to say this is part of our installation tactic
- [00:13:34.880]and then they're deciding which ones are going to destroy because they're too
- [00:13:37.340]personal a little bit of like self-awareness there from the group
- [00:13:44.260]this is what my letterpress studio looks like right now this is embedded in
- [00:13:49.360]the printmaking department at Kelvin University it's only been there for a
- [00:13:52.540]year it's had a garage space for a decade before and it's moved around
- [00:13:56.440]several times and you're you're seeing one of my TAs in the background named
- [00:14:00.320]Brenna I would hire her in a second to do anything that I needed done it from a
- [00:14:06.400]design standpoint she's a genius but she's also someone I as a TA can use for
- [00:14:12.080]teaching hours when we need programming planned or field trips planned or if I
- [00:14:16.620]needed someone to be on press with me if I'm doing some work
- [00:14:19.260]she's she's the wingman in the department she's really in charge she
- [00:14:22.500]got the nickname boss second class of the first class I taught with her I
- [00:14:26.280]could just tell by the way she walked around and talked like this lady's gonna
- [00:14:29.040]be in charge of everything she's gonna run for president if she wants to so I
- [00:14:32.760]put her in a slide because I know she's not looking at the camera but so this is
- [00:14:36.900]the process right it's um we have a theory we went to see some odd pilot in
- [00:14:41.320]Chicago when you're visiting someone you should probably leave them something
- [00:14:46.160]physical behind students I'm talking to you if you're gonna have an
- [00:14:49.160]interview you should leave something behind to let them remember that you're
- [00:14:51.840]there because we've went digital for so far that now we're moving back to an
- [00:14:55.880]analog tactic so if you can make a leave behind and leave it behind then part of
- [00:15:00.280]you is still there I think that's a really interesting tactic to promote
- [00:15:03.380]yourself in 2025 because most people aren't doing it so we started making
- [00:15:08.160]this broadside to thank Chris from some odd pilot for having us in twice once
- [00:15:13.120]under very short notice so darn it is something that some odd pilot studio works
- [00:15:19.060]on the the socks darn it socks they make those so we picked up some language from
- [00:15:23.680]him and then we started printing these eight page broadsides which are on
- [00:15:28.180]newsprint we found a pad of newsprint in a drawer that was mostly yellowed and a
- [00:15:32.140]little bit crispy but it peeled out of the binding well so we didn't have to
- [00:15:35.980]cut it so this was an efficiency decision right like I don't have to cut
- [00:15:39.060]this I can just peel it if you peeled one poorly you threw it out because
- [00:15:42.220]nobody wants this paper and then we start letter pressing on it so this is a broadside meaning
- [00:15:48.960]that it's a full sheet of newsprint if you fold it in half it looks like a
- [00:15:51.520]newspaper if you fold it in half again it looks like what you're used to seeing as a
- [00:15:54.180]newspaper and that's what a broadside is so the darn it and then the metaphor and
- [00:15:59.620]this was something that he said the metaphor is accept the fear and it
- [00:16:04.120]leaves I think that's a good way of thinking about things and then the back
- [00:16:07.180]page which is the darn it page is like we had to go but thanks you know for
- [00:16:10.560]your time then a list of all the students who who visited and there's two
- [00:16:14.300]classes worth of students in there we're gonna walk through a little bit of
- [00:16:18.860]these there's another one of the broadsides and we'll talk about why
- [00:16:21.980]there's a black square on there that's what the lockup looks like when we're
- [00:16:24.740]gonna get inky we use a lot of magnets on our proofing press that put things in
- [00:16:28.800]place it you can see how the infrastructure comes together those of
- [00:16:34.400]you who are with me today you saw a little bit of this as we were trying to
- [00:16:37.100]keep things in place but we were gonna make 20 of these broadsides so we
- [00:16:40.640]couldn't be quite as freeform with how we like lock things up and how we
- [00:16:43.740]printed
- [00:16:48.760]yep yep yep there it is oh we got a video in here that may have been causing
- [00:16:53.620]whatever problem that's how it opens and then that's the Thank You page if you're
- [00:16:59.080]trying to see them sort of as a sequence they said they love making red squares
- [00:17:03.380]red but we love ideas more so we put the black square on the other side of the
- [00:17:07.640]fold just to pick on the guy he may have said that he totally did that's plenty of
- [00:17:18.660]us I curated this really well what you also did is we inserted these spec pages
- [00:17:26.040]which were of the album project that we initiate which is called mixtape that
- [00:17:31.740]this maybe is to educators sometimes the students are right and sometimes the
- [00:17:38.400]students have an interesting idea or question and they might ask a question
- [00:17:42.160]like what's what's what's a mixtape which was a question from KCAD where I
- [00:17:45.700]was Kindle College of Art and Design is where I taught before I went to Kelvin
- [00:17:48.560]and when I went to Kelvin I didn't give you my background I just jumped into
- [00:17:51.440]this thing I was asked to start a program literally from scratch because
- [00:17:56.180]the gentleman who had ran the design program at Kelvin had retired after 25
- [00:18:00.860]years and he was a painting professor and he had had the vision and foresight
- [00:18:04.520]to say we should have a Mac lab and so we got a Mac lab this was 25 years ago
- [00:18:09.800]and then he taught graphic design classes but he had no training so he
- [00:18:13.980]would teach a graphic design and a communication design and a brand design
- [00:18:16.940]class that's what they were called they had
- [00:18:18.460]design classes and they were sounds so when I started it was we want you to
- [00:18:23.080]revolutionize this and do what you do and do it here and so there was agency
- [00:18:27.940]there to make a lot of decisions and to do a lot of things one of the things was
- [00:18:31.580]initiated was the mixtape project which is literally designing an album which
- [00:18:35.220]seems like low-hanging fruit with no rules which it sort of is but I instill
- [00:18:39.400]a lot of rules and then you include a cassette because the mixtapes were
- [00:18:43.520]cassettes so it's really an album design project but some odd pilot in Chicago
- [00:18:48.360]also is a record label they have their own record label and so we thought we should show them our
- [00:18:54.220]best record label designs because why would you not want to riff with somebody and the reason
- [00:18:58.520]that you talk to someone like that and then you send them examples of what you're doing that looks
- [00:19:03.280]good and then you stay in touch with them and then when they say hey these thank yous are amazing
- [00:19:07.160]that's really good how do you make that then you invite them to your campus so they can see your
- [00:19:11.480]workspace is because you want to do work that you want to do and you want to work with people that
- [00:19:16.580]you want to work with and when you identify those people that look like you in a mirror and he was
- [00:19:21.620]even wearing bright green socks in the photograph you saw them earlier I don't have them on today I
- [00:19:26.120]did bring bright orange socks I just didn't change my clothes I was gonna I was going to so you see
- [00:19:32.000]mixtape projects in there then you see some there's like several of them from the last couple years
- [00:19:36.200]and then there's also a couple of examples of the publications that we're designing because he's
- [00:19:41.060]self-publish his work so what you do is you find people who are working in ways that you want to
- [00:19:45.580]work and you make good friends of them and you do it because you genuinely and sincerely that's how
- [00:19:50.680]we packed it want to work with these people in the future but it also suggests that you're you're
- [00:19:59.320]gonna have a mutual benefit if you can give these people something to learn from and you can get
- [00:20:04.660]something out of it and give them something it's beneficial for both of you and I think
- [00:20:09.100]that's a good way of going about it okay so that's the process that's what the letterpress does we do
- [00:20:15.480]these things frequently those were broadsides letterpress to send to someone as a thank you
- [00:20:19.680]that hopefully we have a friend for life and a reason to go to Chicago more often and when we
- [00:20:24.660]do a place to go that's the motivation and also just to genuinely say thank you for being sincere
- [00:20:29.160]this part of the lecture was going to be called seven hours of me myself and my microphone because
- [00:20:36.540]when you are teaching lots of classes and you have a lot of responsibilities and you have a
- [00:20:41.640]house that leaks water into the basement and you have three kids and your car is getting old and
- [00:20:45.380]all the other things that life throws at you you need some levity sometimes so I applied for another
- [00:20:52.500]design inquiry residency which I found in October early October and it was for middle of December
- [00:20:59.660]and it was at Mill Run which is on the campus of Falling Water in Pennsylvania the famous Frank
- [00:21:06.960]Lloyd Wright house in Pennsylvania and they accepted me probably because I told them in the
- [00:21:15.280]prompt or the theme for the inquiry was entropy and I said let me tell you about that and then
- [00:21:20.260]also let me tell you about like atrophy and let me tell you about being rooted in a space and
- [00:21:24.420]feeling like you can't move and you know let me tell you about the idea that you get when you're
- [00:21:28.980]getting older that your ideas aren't any good and you don't know who wants to hear them those kind
- [00:21:33.580]of things seem to be pretty relevant so I wrote a bio description of what I was doing professionally
- [00:21:39.140]and that I needed a break from some of those responsibilities in a short amount of time
- [00:21:42.860]so this is an image of the education
- [00:21:45.180]center on the campus there up the hill from falling water and the reason I'm
- [00:21:53.900]showing this is because I got in my car at 5:30 in the morning and drove all the
- [00:22:00.120]way to Pennsylvania with the radio off with no music playing no podcast no
- [00:22:05.160]ticky-tockies playing in my ear no shorts none of that stuff
- [00:22:08.620]just silence I needed to think I needed to think like deep and I needed to talk
- [00:22:15.080]to myself which is one of the reasons I ride bikes all over the place is I can
- [00:22:18.200]talk out loud and nobody's around to hear it and this was a lot of that so
- [00:22:22.340]there's a little bit of me time a lot of it seven hours one way dead silence I
- [00:22:26.720]tried to turn music on when I got off the freeway and it felt like someone had
- [00:22:29.940]broken into my house so I stopped doing that but this is the building that we
- [00:22:35.040]were in I was sleeping in the room in the bottom left there with a gentleman
- [00:22:39.980]some of you might know his name is Krister Allegra and he's a painter and if you want
- [00:22:44.980]to know more about him I'll tell you more about him later he's a wonderful roommate
- [00:22:47.980]this is a common workspace there where people can work that's Chris he's from
- [00:22:52.480]UConn the other one was the was the kitchenette and the idea is that you're
- [00:22:57.220]communally eating you're also communally making and that's a shared experience as
- [00:23:02.480]you work your way into the design inquiry philosophy and then you spread
- [00:23:06.400]out and do work individually then you come back together and snap together and
- [00:23:09.360]collaborate and you're supposed to mix it up
- [00:23:11.480]there's a theme entropy was the theme but you don't have
- [00:23:14.880]stick to it and for people who've been through one of these retreats if you
- [00:23:18.060]call them or residencies and you go to another one you might go there with no
- [00:23:21.180]expectations of what you're gonna do which if it was your first time you'd be
- [00:23:24.240]terrified well I'm gonna go and I'm gonna make a chair or I'm gonna go do
- [00:23:28.860]you know some pinhole camera work and then you stay to your guns and you do
- [00:23:32.900]the thing you said you're gonna do and then in other situations it might be I'm
- [00:23:36.600]coming here to listen to the environment and figure out what I need out of this
- [00:23:39.880]and then I'll collaborate with people that's the right way and that was my
- [00:23:42.300]tactic that wasn't my first rodeo
- [00:23:44.780]and I don't think I would have done that if I had not been there before I
- [00:23:49.360]took a picture of this stump because it reminded me of this picture in this
- [00:23:58.300]picture is a geological geological survey map this is gonna be a tangent
- [00:24:05.260]just hang on just hang with me it will be it might be relevant we have the
- [00:24:10.940]repository on campus of a bunch of geological survey maps from
- [00:24:14.680]the u.s. survey from you lost your US Geological Survey and what happens when
- [00:24:21.220]those repositories get dismantled because everything's online is they get
- [00:24:24.640]rid of their stock generally they burn those things so they have to be destroyed
- [00:24:27.880]this government property that's the story the librarians are telling me they
- [00:24:31.200]knew I was a designer they knew I liked topography they knew I liked maps and
- [00:24:34.240]geography so they do you want these these survey maps and the answer was I
- [00:24:38.320]hadn't seen them yet but yeah let me go see what you have well what they had was
- [00:24:41.500]an entire gondola of racks of the
- [00:24:44.580]that was the width of this room in numbering the thousands that were all
- [00:24:48.040]destined to be destroyed so I went through and took all the plates that I
- [00:24:51.700]could find and some of the prints that come along with the plates to describe
- [00:24:54.840]them by the way so I have the geological survey maps of the plates of the moon
- [00:25:00.980]landings from like Apollo 12 so if it's fake I don't know where those drawings
- [00:25:06.840]came from because they show the moon map where things landed and it's like a
- [00:25:10.060]survey map so I feel like it'd be pretty hard to fake so if you're on that fence
- [00:25:14.480]I'll send you a map of the moon but this was a geological survey map of the
- [00:25:21.440]rock formations in Pennsylvania it's why I grabbed it out of my stash which is
- [00:25:25.120]organized by states and took all my Pennsylvania maps with me to see if
- [00:25:28.680]they're relevant this is a fascinating infographic and what it's doing is it's
- [00:25:33.980]talking about the mix of rock between sandstone mudstone and limestone and
- [00:25:37.760]it's basically a heat map of what is more relevant or more more more thorough
- [00:25:44.380]in different places and then the meter across here is percentages 80/20 50/50
- [00:25:48.640]20/80 there's percentages in the inner rings and if you're looking at how it's
- [00:25:52.260]drawn in the middle I was fascinated with this thing I didn't know what I was
- [00:25:56.380]gonna do I was pretty stressed out and I was also burned out and I decided I'm
- [00:26:00.100]gonna try to figure out how this map this heat map was drawn because it's
- [00:26:03.700]it's simple but it's sophisticated and so I tried to draw it without taking any
- [00:26:08.380]measurements that took about three and a half hours and I got nowhere because
- [00:26:11.440]things wouldn't sync up I couldn't get the angles right
- [00:26:14.280]so then I started taking measurements and redrawing it it took me nine hours
- [00:26:17.200]and two days to read to reverse engineer this drawing and make it so I had my own
- [00:26:22.020]version of it I'm not gonna show you that drawing because it's not really
- [00:26:26.220]relevant it was really like I just needed to be in the mind space like I
- [00:26:30.960]needed to unpack things so we're talking about thinking and overthinking this is
- [00:26:34.660]an example of way overthinking something the other example the letterpress the
- [00:26:39.720]visceral response to what needs to happen between two formal shapes where
- [00:26:42.520]you can communicate with somebody who's from
- [00:26:44.180]a different city because you want to be friends with them is not overthinking
- [00:26:47.180]that's just doing right that's not design this is overthink how do you be
- [00:26:52.640]ambidextrous and do both one of them is the analog one of them is the digital
- [00:26:56.240]right students you should be ambidextrous build your hand skills
- [00:27:00.500]working your digital skills smash them together be unique in the marketplace
- [00:27:05.060]if you have drawing skills and illustration skills as you had damn well
- [00:27:09.140]better amplify them because you will be unique when you're trying to find a
- [00:27:12.740]location to work
- [00:27:14.080]or you're going to be self-directed as a creative for as long as you'd like to be
- [00:27:18.160]I don't think we hear that enough as creators specifically design students
- [00:27:22.660]you don't hear that enough and I'm not throwing shade at anybody but I think a
- [00:27:26.260]lot of my colleagues than the places I've worked don't feel that way it's
- [00:27:29.320]like we're all it's AI now and it's going to be animation and you're going
- [00:27:32.680]to be using more digital interfaces and I think we should be juking instead of
- [00:27:37.720]jiving so anyway so this is the example of overthinking the slideshow may crash
- [00:27:43.320]to a stop here
- [00:27:43.980]in a second let's see what happens if we advance this any further so I redrew
- [00:27:48.940]this took a long time and the way I'm gonna and here it is doing its stuff
- [00:27:53.820]right there here's the heat map talking about those stratas in different
- [00:27:56.760]locations between other plate maps it's very Buckminster Fuller ish this is an
- [00:28:04.720]example of a Buckminster Fuller drawing talking about the minimum system of
- [00:28:09.580]universe from critical path trajectories and crossings crossings and open
- [00:28:13.880]openings and openings and minim system universe or structure how you develop a
- [00:28:17.720]volume it's the same drawing is that geological survey which happened to also
- [00:28:23.120]be the same stinking drawing that was in the end papers or the Frank Lloyd Wright
- [00:28:26.720]house that's at falling water these are the end papers of one of the books about
- [00:28:30.680]falling water that's the same drawing dude it's like it's it's there it's
- [00:28:35.120]right there so these people are all riffing on the same thing and I stumbled
- [00:28:38.300]upon it because I was sitting in a freezing garage with a bunch of other
- [00:28:40.880]designers who are sitting back trying to figure out how we're gonna
- [00:28:43.780]spend four days in Pennsylvania and this is what you can get into if you
- [00:28:49.520]give yourself a chance to think about things and that's that's that's my
- [00:28:55.240]observation I started seeing that map everywhere here it is in the woods and
- [00:29:01.740]then here it is again this may be the last slide we know we don't we get a few
- [00:29:06.300]more examples of the woods and in the shape yeah so the shape and the implication
- [00:29:13.680]was in many different places throughout the architecture of this space so you
- [00:29:17.180]just kind of keep getting repeatedly inundated with that idea the bike lean
- [00:29:22.800]if you are a bicyclist you lean your bike in places around places that you go
- [00:29:28.140]one of my motivations for the seven-hour drive and why I took my bike with me was
- [00:29:32.160]so that I could actually get back on the bike I generally ride several thousand
- [00:29:36.260]thousand miles a year I'm not like that's not a lot to some people but for
- [00:29:40.560]me it is and last year I got
- [00:29:43.580]halfway through the year and then my I couldn't things came up couldn't get on
- [00:29:47.300]the bike couldn't ride so this was in the middle of November opportunity for
- [00:29:50.300]me to get back and put miles on in places that that I had never been before
- [00:29:54.860]so leaning my bike against things for me was essential it also puts the other
- [00:30:00.740]things in life in context so be interested in things go places do the
- [00:30:05.900]things you want to do when you go to Fallingwater
- [00:30:09.580]maybe I'm more interested in the interface of the house than I am the
- [00:30:13.480]house itself this is my favorite photograph of over the house is the
- [00:30:18.440]thermostat and these plugs these switches I don't know why I do know why
- [00:30:22.120]you know why if you did the letterpress today also who the story behind why
- [00:30:26.880]there is a cutout table with a window that slides through it because the
- [00:30:30.460]architecture couldn't be changed but they didn't want to give up the surface
- [00:30:32.740]area of the table and it's like one person who thinks this way
- [00:30:37.680]the pool is a letter form what letter form is it y'all it's an A or a G
- [00:30:43.380]You can make it what you want.
- [00:30:46.500]It's just, these are the perspectives of the house
- [00:30:48.400]that I wanted to remember.
- [00:30:49.920]Okay, so overthinking, bike-ling,
- [00:30:54.520]those are images that I like looking at.
- [00:30:57.080]Okay, so type is hype.
- [00:30:58.600]Okay, if you're thinking about what to get excited about
- [00:31:00.620]for a student, you should be excited about typography.
- [00:31:02.800]You can't avoid it, can't get away from it.
- [00:31:05.180]We didn't have a program logo for Calvin.
- [00:31:09.760]It's upside down, it's supposed to be upside down.
- [00:31:11.640]And in case you haven't noticed,
- [00:31:12.600]there's not an orientation to letterpress most of the time.
- [00:31:14.900]There is no up or down.
- [00:31:16.940]That's true in design too.
- [00:31:18.360]You can set type in a formal study in a square and an angle,
- [00:31:22.480]and then you can rotate it 180 degrees
- [00:31:24.180]and have it be upside down and we'll read it just fine.
- [00:31:25.960]We know what those shapes of those words
- [00:31:27.260]are supposed to mean.
- [00:31:28.620]So quite often when you're on the press,
- [00:31:30.400]you're working across from the baseline, not on the baseline.
- [00:31:33.240]So I'm working, I shot it from my perspective.
- [00:31:35.380]This is how I was setting up.
- [00:31:36.740]But now, we set this up, put some score lines on it,
- [00:31:39.920]and now we have the Calvin Graphic Design Program logo,
- [00:31:42.900]which shows up on our emails
- [00:31:44.200]and probably on our newsletter,
- [00:31:47.360]and in some signage that we're creating,
- [00:31:48.920]and a brag book that's been under development for six years.
- [00:31:51.680]But again, this is Type is Hype.
- [00:31:55.080]Not overthinking, right?
- [00:31:56.980]We just thought a lot about going to Pennsylvania
- [00:31:58.980]and finding reasons to ride a bike in solitude
- [00:32:01.120]and thinking about the things you need to do
- [00:32:03.040]and thinking about opportunities like this
- [00:32:04.600]on to and from in a car,
- [00:32:05.820]'cause this was in our wheelhouse already then in November.
- [00:32:08.940]And it's like, how do I give a presentation about this?
- [00:32:11.220]And what do you wanna do with students you don't know?
- [00:32:12.980]And how do I get to Nebraska?
- [00:32:14.080]And all the things.
- [00:32:15.200]And then this isn't overthought.
- [00:32:16.620]This is just cleaning the type of the ink
- [00:32:19.600]that we're using to build an ink library.
- [00:32:22.020]And then you make this model print
- [00:32:25.700]and someone sees it and says,
- [00:32:27.380]"How did you do that and why are you doing it?"
- [00:32:29.200]And then you get to talk about the potential
- [00:32:31.300]of the mediums that you use
- [00:32:33.140]and that things that are quite often thrown off
- [00:32:35.400]or no longer necessary become very valuable
- [00:32:38.220]for very relevant reasons.
- [00:32:40.660]And there's another example of,
- [00:32:42.160]we call these cleaner prints and not design,
- [00:32:43.960]I don't know, Dan, you had another name for them earlier.
- [00:32:46.880]You wanna?
- [00:32:48.200]- Ghost prints?
- [00:32:49.040]- Yeah, ghost prints for when you're bringing
- [00:32:50.280]a second print as you go through,
- [00:32:51.580]you do a main print, then a second print.
- [00:32:53.480]And there's a couple other references.
- [00:32:55.440]They're monoprints, meaning that's the only one like them.
- [00:32:57.800]They're overprints 'cause you keep printing one thing
- [00:33:00.000]over another thing, over another thing.
- [00:33:01.960]And we dumbed it down and called them cleaner prints
- [00:33:03.640]'cause we're literally cleaning our type off
- [00:33:05.820]so it's not so hard to clean up with a rag.
- [00:33:08.160]It's to just get the ink on paper instead of wipe it off.
- [00:33:11.100]We did an exhibition of these several different times.
- [00:33:13.840]And we have some of them in collections.
- [00:33:18.140]Quite often they're mashups
- [00:33:20.020]of several different print settings or sessions
- [00:33:22.480]over a long period of time.
- [00:33:24.080]And it's again, some of you today, when you're composing,
- [00:33:27.300]knew when to say when,
- [00:33:28.540]knew when to stop putting content on the paper.
- [00:33:31.020]And this is an example of knowing when to say when.
- [00:33:32.760]When do you stop intervening?
- [00:33:34.260]So this is type aside.
- [00:33:39.800]The word there
- [00:33:43.720]is fancy because we have a type library of ink
- [00:33:48.340]we use in the letterpress studio.
- [00:33:50.140]And we had never cataloged it or put it into a library.
- [00:33:54.600]So Brenna and I, the student, made this library of ink
- [00:34:00.060]so we could do a brayer wash to show you
- [00:34:02.980]what full saturation looks like and then
- [00:34:04.540]a few other brayer washes to show you
- [00:34:06.040]what less saturation looks like.
- [00:34:07.600]And then we named them.
- [00:34:08.860]This is an example of not overthinking something.
- [00:34:10.960]Just respond to the space that you're in.
- [00:34:13.600]Names of inks just were the first things that came to mind
- [00:34:16.000]or they seemed appropriate.
- [00:34:17.040]I love you red being the first one
- [00:34:18.520]because it looks like a valentine.
- [00:34:20.020]It's pretty easy.
- [00:34:21.320]Not 200 is because it's PMS-199.
- [00:34:24.360]It's a premixed ink.
- [00:34:25.300]So it's close to 199, but it's not.
- [00:34:27.520]So it's not 200.
- [00:34:28.760]You thought that's a reference to lots of things.
- [00:34:31.840]The so good blue we liked, I don't
- [00:34:35.380]know why we called that giant blue giant blue.
- [00:34:38.480]This every other blue looked like every other blue we had.
- [00:34:41.320]They're so similar that we couldn't tell them apart,
- [00:34:43.480]but we called it every other blue.
- [00:34:45.820]That's a bad ass green, we thought it was good.
- [00:34:48.340]Cheese dip yellow is a huge fan.
- [00:34:50.100]People like the cheese dip yellow, we use that all the time.
- [00:34:52.900]And then that's getting installed in the printmaking
- [00:34:55.800]studio on a pillar, so you can look at the ink references
- [00:34:58.940]and you can see how they operate,
- [00:35:00.280]and you can pick your color based on what we called it.
- [00:35:02.440]And then another piece of the label went on the can.
- [00:35:04.600]We're talking about package design,
- [00:35:06.040]but it's also information design.
- [00:35:07.460]It's also signage that you're creating out of cards
- [00:35:11.140]that we were given from a paper source that was going
- [00:35:13.360]to throw it all away.
- [00:35:14.380]So nothing there cost us any money at all.
- [00:35:16.840]It's just like this ink we bought for $2 a big can,
- [00:35:19.720]and the paper was going to be pitched.
- [00:35:21.640]So let's put it into practice.
- [00:35:24.400]So there's some tactical decisions
- [00:35:26.080]when letterpress starts acting like signage.
- [00:35:28.960]So we're going to talk about it just--
- [00:35:30.520]we're going to get into some of the work,
- [00:35:31.860]and we're going to move pretty quick because there's
- [00:35:34.580]a bandwidth here.
- [00:35:36.020]But this is for an outside installation that's
- [00:35:38.160]for a calendar of events that's going on
- [00:35:40.600]in an outside pavilion that's a collaboration
- [00:35:43.240]with Sight Lab.
- [00:35:44.440]And again, the internet does its job.
- [00:35:46.180]If you want to see what Sight Lab is,
- [00:35:47.800]you should go to their website.
- [00:35:49.140]And Paul Amenta, who's the director there,
- [00:35:51.180]isn't really doing Sight Lab anymore.
- [00:35:52.680]Just like my non-design affiliations,
- [00:35:54.440]I've become much more academic and less professional.
- [00:35:57.160]But this is an example of what's going
- [00:35:58.780]to happen on this outside forum over a series of days.
- [00:36:02.900]And this is during the ArtPrize initiative, which
- [00:36:05.040]was happening in Grand Rapids for several years.
- [00:36:07.440]And again, we could talk about that, but not in this bandwidth.
- [00:36:13.120]But Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday times live performances.
- [00:36:17.180]And these are the people performing on those days
- [00:36:19.300]and in those times.
- [00:36:20.520]So we set up the press outside, live printing.
- [00:36:24.100]And you have people submitting quotes they'd like you to print.
- [00:36:27.360]And then those prints get printed in real time outside
- [00:36:29.720]while they're there.
- [00:36:30.700]We make two copies.
- [00:36:31.660]We staple one to the display wall.
- [00:36:33.120]We hang the other one on a dry rack, which
- [00:36:35.240]gets made on the back of the wall.
- [00:36:36.820]You'll see those strings in the background, possibly.
- [00:36:39.700]Maybe not.
- [00:36:40.360]And then at the end of the night,
- [00:36:41.320]they come get their prints that they
- [00:36:43.000]want to print on the wall.
- [00:36:44.540]And this is how the calendar works in real time and scale.
- [00:36:49.800]I meant to put a video in here, and I just forgot.
- [00:36:52.420]So apologies.
- [00:36:53.800]But this is how we use Braille washes
- [00:36:55.960]to cover the background, how we create signage.
- [00:36:58.420]And it's not designed to see it all day.
- [00:36:59.800]But these people over here on the right
- [00:37:01.420]are going to be here to perform at certain times.
- [00:37:03.500]But we're always there.
- [00:37:04.800]And that's what we want to say.
- [00:37:06.300]And you can follow us on Instagram
- [00:37:07.540]if you want to, because we're easy to find.
- [00:37:09.160]And the people walking up to this venue,
- [00:37:10.960]and the numbers of hundreds in this public space
- [00:37:12.880]are between several other skyscraper office buildings,
- [00:37:17.560]and church, and a few other buildings in this courtyard,
- [00:37:20.260]sort of a space without a space in the city.
- [00:37:23.720]And then you activate that space.
- [00:37:25.140]And then people come to a parking lot
- [00:37:26.640]and have a concert, and it's a live event space
- [00:37:29.500]for four days in a row.
- [00:37:30.860]And then after that weekend, we move
- [00:37:32.540]to another location in town.
- [00:37:34.080]And then after that location, we move
- [00:37:35.620]to another location in town.
- [00:37:37.300]So this is a nomadic intervention system.
- [00:37:39.700]And this whole entire stage apparatus can
- [00:37:42.760]be disassembled and then reassembled in another place.
- [00:37:45.580]So that's what it would have looked
- [00:37:46.960]like during the performances.
- [00:37:48.340]What you're seeing on the space on the face of that wall
- [00:37:51.580]is a projector projecting a video,
- [00:37:54.340]and then another camera aimed at that wall
- [00:37:57.620]to capture that video, and then another projector projecting
- [00:38:00.220]the camera on top of it.
- [00:38:01.280]So you get a parallax.
- [00:38:02.280]You get things moving in two or three locations
- [00:38:04.280]at the same time.
- [00:38:05.080]It's really good when you're trying
- [00:38:06.580]to make visuals to accompany musicians who are organic.
- [00:38:11.140]And so there's a DJ on stage right
- [00:38:12.640]now, you can see their silhouette on the right.
- [00:38:15.700]This is Pink Sky.
- [00:38:17.680]That's the band that's performing at this time.
- [00:38:22.280]And then the next day, after it's been out overnight
- [00:38:24.580]in the rain, these aren't precious items.
- [00:38:27.800]We staple them to the boards, and then we cut them off
- [00:38:30.620]with X-Acto knives, and we put them in a box.
- [00:38:32.440]And they're in that printmaking studio I showed you earlier.
- [00:38:34.900]The point being is that, man, art can do this.
- [00:38:39.180]There's a guitar in the middle of the wall made out
- [00:38:41.820]of letterpress.
- [00:38:42.520]This is a guitar.
- [00:38:43.320]Maybe it's a violin.
- [00:38:44.520]I don't know.
- [00:38:44.940]It's a stringed instrument, this thing right there.
- [00:38:47.900]And then there's a lot of work here
- [00:38:49.600]that was made in response to the performers.
- [00:38:51.480]And there was requests from people in the audience.
- [00:38:53.760]And there's things that we wanted
- [00:38:55.100]to say to respond to what the artists were saying
- [00:38:57.220]as they performed.
- [00:38:58.360]And it allows for it to grow every day we're there.
- [00:39:00.900]So this would have been after the first day.
- [00:39:02.680]So this was probably after the Friday or the Saturday
- [00:39:06.940]performance on the Sunday with more performances to come
- [00:39:10.320]as we kept growing this wall out.
- [00:39:12.400]Walls are different every time.
- [00:39:14.240]And this is the week one art prize one.
- [00:39:17.620]Quickly, the other side of this, the yin and the yang.
- [00:39:21.280]It's the analog.
- [00:39:22.120]It's the digital.
- [00:39:22.900]It's the overthink it.
- [00:39:24.080]It's the not design.
- [00:39:25.360]Don't think about it.
- [00:39:26.240]Just do it.
- [00:39:28.340]I curated a typography exhibition on campus.
- [00:39:31.060]And it was a retrospective of the work
- [00:39:32.620]that we had done since I had been there.
- [00:39:34.740]Really, we brought it down to the last three years.
- [00:39:37.460]And this was up in the gallery last November through January.
- [00:39:42.280]So not this year past, but '23 into '24.
- [00:39:45.400]And it was an exhibition of the publication work
- [00:39:48.360]that we've done.
- [00:39:49.660]Some of you who are doing the intro to graphic design level
- [00:39:52.360]stuff, type one, there's two letter form exercises in here.
- [00:39:55.360]There's progressive, expressive typography exercises in here
- [00:39:58.520]that are sophomore level work, where you really understand
- [00:40:01.240]how the typography medium can be used expressively.
- [00:40:05.900]Again, this is student work in a professional gallery curated
- [00:40:10.000]into this space and then hosted like any other exhibition
- [00:40:12.160]would be.
- [00:40:14.260]And this is the intervention that moves through the space.
- [00:40:17.680]I'm just going to show you a couple of the pieces in here
- [00:40:20.160]without talking about them, because I
- [00:40:21.360]want to get to this piece.
- [00:40:22.780]And this is the credit wall.
- [00:40:26.120]And this is a vent on the wall that
- [00:40:29.360]is blowing air in your face.
- [00:40:31.360]And then the vinyl installation just
- [00:40:33.100]picks up on the same riff.
- [00:40:34.220]That's the vinyl installation.
- [00:40:35.760]And then the pattern for the names inside
- [00:40:38.800]of the credit wall start with the people
- [00:40:42.040]who had the most responsibility on the bottom.
- [00:40:44.500]So I'm just curating.
- [00:40:45.940]And then Hannah Gaffner and Grace Glass
- [00:40:47.680]were the co-curators.
- [00:40:48.500]Those are two of my seniors.
- [00:40:49.580]And they were TAs at the time, so they had a heavy lift
- [00:40:51.940]in getting all this put together.
- [00:40:53.320]And then as you move up the wall,
- [00:40:54.740]you get other people's names being more visible because
- [00:40:57.300]of what they contributed.
- [00:41:01.040]And then some other people's names
- [00:41:02.500]aren't as visible because they thought they contributed a lot,
- [00:41:05.320]but they kind of skirted what we needed them to do.
- [00:41:08.320]So Horacio, who I love dearly, who's about to graduate,
- [00:41:11.920]and it's the name above Brenna's,
- [00:41:14.440]kind of left me hanging a couple of times.
- [00:41:16.180]And I almost had to cut his piece from the show
- [00:41:18.100]because I was going out to lunch.
- [00:41:20.200]And he's like, hey, I'm going to come with you.
- [00:41:21.940]And I was like, actually, you're going
- [00:41:22.660]to go finish your installation.
- [00:41:23.980]I'm going to pull your whole wall.
- [00:41:25.480]And you're going to do it right now.
- [00:41:27.640]Because he had to, because we're opening at like 6:00
- [00:41:29.860]and it's like 2:00.
- [00:41:31.240]So I had already put this on the wall
- [00:41:33.220]because he had already kind of been on that side of me.
- [00:41:35.260]And the same thing was true for Jenna Brooks.
- [00:41:37.320]Those two were also TAs.
- [00:41:38.920]And they had left me and Brenna and Grace
- [00:41:41.800]and Lucy and a bunch of other people
- [00:41:43.260]with a lot of work to do.
- [00:41:44.340]So their names got minimized.
- [00:41:46.460]And that was just mathematically placed.
- [00:41:48.160]And they don't know that, so don't tell them.
- [00:41:51.080]My answer was, this is mathematical,
- [00:41:52.720]and this is the way that it is.
- [00:41:54.700]But if you go up the wall, there's
- [00:41:56.040]people way up on top of the wall because they
- [00:41:58.540]didn't do anything.
- [00:42:00.400]That's what you get.
- [00:42:03.700]So some advice-- now, this is the last slide.
- [00:42:08.020]Work that you want to be doing is what you should be doing.
- [00:42:11.680]How do you get work that you want?
- [00:42:13.720]We just talked about that.
- [00:42:14.800]The work's the people.
- [00:42:16.540]Relationships-- you want to build relationships
- [00:42:19.240]because they last forever.
- [00:42:22.240]And if that's a client, then that's fine.
- [00:42:23.940]You want a client relationship.
- [00:42:27.000]Don't make money your motivation.
- [00:42:29.180]You're going to be in a weird spot
- [00:42:30.580]if money is your motivation.
- [00:42:32.800]I think most of us who are in academia
- [00:42:34.440]or who are academics who are teaching for a profession,
- [00:42:37.000]whether you're teaching preschool or third grade
- [00:42:39.040]or kindergarten or high school history, you're probably not
- [00:42:41.560]doing that because the pay is what you want it to be.
- [00:42:46.120]We were talking about job searches
- [00:42:49.000]and looking at professional adjacent responsibilities
- [00:42:53.000]in the design field over the last several months
- [00:42:56.920]and looking at job posts you find on Indeed or whatever.
- [00:42:59.540]And you find that there's a creative director position
- [00:43:01.960]that you're probably qualified for,
- [00:43:03.420]and they're making well over six figures.
- [00:43:05.980]And you're thinking, I could do that job.
- [00:43:09.100]But then you're like, do I want to do that job?
- [00:43:11.440]Not really.
- [00:43:11.980]I mean, I'd rather talk to you, to be perfectly honest,
- [00:43:14.880]and not get paid as much money.
- [00:43:17.060]So don't make that your motivation.
- [00:43:18.520]What you're going to be doing there
- [00:43:19.520]is you're going to be frustrated because you
- [00:43:20.600]don't have enough of it.
- [00:43:22.620]You don't need much money to do a lot of these things.
- [00:43:25.260]So don't make it your motivation.
- [00:43:28.660]Always say yes while learning to say no.
- [00:43:32.560]I invited a few people to present at a design symposium
- [00:43:35.460]I hosted a few years ago at Calvin.
- [00:43:37.400]And the first person who presented was--
- [00:43:41.320]his name is Pablo.
- [00:43:43.120]And he teaches at Michigan State.
- [00:43:44.800]And I forgot his last name.
- [00:43:45.940]And he was a student of mine.
- [00:43:47.140]And now he's a professor there.
- [00:43:49.000]And he works for Ford.
- [00:43:50.380]And one of the first things he said was, say no.
- [00:43:53.100]Say no.
- [00:43:53.960]You need to know how to say no.
- [00:43:55.720]The next presenter, his name's Tylan Davis.
- [00:43:57.980]And he's a former student of mine.
- [00:43:59.580]And he's a self-taught developer in UI/UX.
- [00:44:03.160]He was a really good type set--
- [00:44:05.200]he was a really good type designer and editorial designer
- [00:44:08.540]and brand designer when I had him as a student.
- [00:44:10.660]And then he just--
- [00:44:11.200]he just taught himself how to code, and now he's a developer.
- [00:44:14.200]And the first thing he said was, always say yes.
- [00:44:17.260]So you had these two people mixing messages
- [00:44:21.040]within 10 minutes of each other.
- [00:44:22.580]And what's true is that they're both absolutely right.
- [00:44:25.480]You should say yes to everything if you're
- [00:44:27.400]given opportunities to do stuff.
- [00:44:28.960]And then you should learn how to say no while you're doing that.
- [00:44:31.660]Because some people you have to put barriers for,
- [00:44:34.620]and some opportunities aren't good opportunities.
- [00:44:36.820]And then other people, when they're talking about,
- [00:44:38.980]hey, do you want to fly across the country and letter
- [00:44:41.080]press with people in a space we haven't used a letter press
- [00:44:43.320]before?
- [00:44:43.820]And I'm like, just put me in a bus.
- [00:44:45.680]I will drive out there and do that,
- [00:44:47.180]so I can bring my own things.
- [00:44:48.940]And then I'll make a mess of the presentation, if you don't mind.
- [00:44:52.240]So yeah, always say yes while learning to say no.
- [00:44:56.300]And you'll have to figure that out,
- [00:44:57.800]because there's no way for you to take my word for it.
- [00:45:00.640]But always say yes while saying no.
- [00:45:04.420]Take showers to get away from people.
- [00:45:06.420]You can't always drive to Philadelphia or Pennsylvania
- [00:45:08.720]for seven hours, but you can get in the shower.
- [00:45:10.960]That's where most of this presentation was built,
- [00:45:13.800]was in a series of showers where there's not a kid
- [00:45:16.540]getting at me, the cat doesn't want food,
- [00:45:18.580]there's not a distraction, my phone's not in my pocket,
- [00:45:21.200]TikTok's not on, I got blocked on TikTok
- [00:45:23.580]because they dropped it, and then I downloaded it,
- [00:45:25.640]or offloaded it, and now I don't have it.
- [00:45:27.460]Hallelujah.
- [00:45:28.960]It's such a better use of my time not being on it,
- [00:45:30.980]but I wanted to create content.
- [00:45:32.360]But there's no phones in the shower,
- [00:45:34.240]so just get in there, get clean,
- [00:45:36.220]and then spend 10 minutes thinking about the things
- [00:45:38.320]I gotta check off the list, 'cause you're focused.
- [00:45:40.520]You're clean, you feel good about yourself.
- [00:45:43.260]So take showers to get away from people.
- [00:45:45.420]Sincerity, it's a strong trait
- [00:45:49.580]if it's one of your personality traits,
- [00:45:51.160]and I suggest you consider making it a trait of yours.
- [00:45:54.400]It's a mix of seriousness and honesty,
- [00:45:57.120]or in doses of patience, compassion,
- [00:46:00.040]kindness, and being truthful.
- [00:46:02.080]If you are working sincerely with the people around you,
- [00:46:06.180]they will know and they'll respect you for it,
- [00:46:09.820]and they'll appreciate you being honest and being truthful.
- [00:46:13.100]Like I said, this is advice.
- [00:46:16.140]And then last, the last piece of advice
- [00:46:17.660]from Buckminster Fuller.
- [00:46:19.220]The minute you choose to do what you really wanna do,
- [00:46:21.940]it's a different kind of life.
- [00:46:23.440]Again, the students are the audience here,
- [00:46:28.260]and then the others of you, I appreciate your patience,
- [00:46:30.860]and your attention, and your engagement.
- [00:46:34.000]But to the students, you can do that,
- [00:46:38.060]or you can pick your own route,
- [00:46:39.120]and do the things you want to do.
- [00:46:41.280]You don't know what that means yet, 'cause you're 20,
- [00:46:43.740]but you do have those options.
- [00:46:45.080]So the minute you choose to do what you really want to do,
- [00:46:47.320]it does set you up for a different kind of life.
- [00:46:49.600]That's it, thanks.
- [00:46:51.240]- Thank you for your presentation.
- [00:47:00.680]I was wondering, because you came from a Swiss background,
- [00:47:05.000]like using the grid and everything,
- [00:47:06.480]and you use these sort of,
- [00:47:08.420]sort of funky found like typefaces,
- [00:47:11.920]like, where did you sort of make the switch
- [00:47:16.300]or kind of go that direction?
- [00:47:19.340]- Yeah, it's a really good question.
- [00:47:22.040]They're symbiotic, they're both at the same time,
- [00:47:27.240]if that makes any kind of sense.
- [00:47:29.000]If you wanted me to set a very pristine donor wall
- [00:47:32.860]for someone who built a new building on campus,
- [00:47:35.340]that's all in Helvetica and it's all,
- [00:47:37.720]it's all 28 point and it's all gonna be cut out of vinyl
- [00:47:40.640]or whatever your size restrictions are,
- [00:47:42.560]I can do it and I'll love doing it.
- [00:47:44.280]And then I'll like shake out the muscle memory
- [00:47:47.720]and then go letterpress something
- [00:47:49.140]that is the goofiest thing that you could imagine doing.
- [00:47:51.860]I think they need each other.
- [00:47:53.660]It's sort of like peanut butter and butter.
- [00:47:55.600]I know that maybe you think peanut butter and jelly
- [00:47:57.440]is the right thing to eat on a sandwich,
- [00:47:58.720]but it's actually butter.
- [00:48:00.100]Butter goes in everything and the grid is in everything.
- [00:48:02.420]You can't avoid it.
- [00:48:03.640]It's in the background of the letterpress, right?
- [00:48:05.660]It's because they're blocks
- [00:48:07.020]and they're not biomorphic shapes
- [00:48:09.420]and they don't have round edges.
- [00:48:10.600]They have to touch each other
- [00:48:11.980]and there's spacers that you put in between them
- [00:48:13.880]that are made out of lead.
- [00:48:14.740]That's where leading comes from.
- [00:48:15.780]It's why we call leading, leading.
- [00:48:17.840]And those things give you your letter spacing
- [00:48:20.440]and your word spacing and your infrastructure.
- [00:48:22.780]And so the Swiss grid is informing all of those things.
- [00:48:26.220]And it's all about white space and counterbalances
- [00:48:28.600]and grouping and proportions.
- [00:48:31.160]It just doesn't look like it.
- [00:48:32.740]I had a student, a former student who now runs restaurants
- [00:48:36.320]in South Bend.
- [00:48:38.540]His name's Tim Tinker.
- [00:48:39.680]And he asked me one time, he's like,
- [00:48:41.540]how do you get away with this?
- [00:48:42.620]Because you're just being irreverent.
- [00:48:43.760]Like, you have letters everywhere.
- [00:48:45.100]And you have broken letter forms in here.
- [00:48:47.060]And you're using U's as N's.
- [00:48:48.680]And you're using Q's as O's.
- [00:48:50.960]And you're using exclamation marks as I's.
- [00:48:53.420]And what is this ampersand doing here?
- [00:48:55.580]And this isn't any of the rules.
- [00:48:57.080]I'm like, sure it is, man.
- [00:48:58.760]It's just a riff on the rules.
- [00:49:02.600]But if you take it apart, the infrastructure
- [00:49:04.040]is underneath of it.
- [00:49:05.620]And I think, you know, even the brayer washes, which we showed a couple of those, there's a way to do it.
- [00:49:10.460]And I get all my students about it.
- [00:49:11.700]Like, there's a way to do it correctly.
- [00:49:12.740]And it's like the brayer is a certain distance from the edge and it's proportionals.
- [00:49:16.640]And then you drag it in a direction.
- [00:49:18.060]Then you leave a little gap and you do it in the other direction.
- [00:49:19.960]And if they touch, you can't use it.
- [00:49:21.760]And that really goes right back to the proportions that you think about in any design tactic of, like, margins are bigger than gutters.
- [00:49:28.500]Right?
- [00:49:28.880]Gutters are bigger than leading or line spacing.
- [00:49:31.500]Line spacing is bigger than word spacing.
- [00:49:33.740]And word spacing is bigger than letter spacing.
- [00:49:35.640]And it gets incrementally smaller as you go.
- [00:49:37.720]And that's embedded in all of these things.
- [00:49:40.280]So I think it's a symbiotic.
- [00:49:42.060]It's also back to the idea of being ambidextrous.
- [00:49:45.040]There's the left side analog and the right side digital.
- [00:49:48.260]There's a left side overthinking, the right side not thinking.
- [00:49:51.160]And how can you get that vibration to work?
- [00:49:53.860]And that's that tension point.
- [00:49:55.280]And that's true in sculpture, too.
- [00:49:56.560]Like, that thing's going to fall over.
- [00:49:57.700]What's holding it up?
- [00:49:58.940]Or can I get my hand under it?
- [00:50:00.380]Can I walk under it?
- [00:50:01.180]I was going to show some three-dimensional letter forms from this semester's projects,
- [00:50:04.480]and they just didn't make the cut.
- [00:50:05.700]But all that conversation is about visual attention.
- [00:50:08.280]And I think there's a lot of that DNA in both of those.
- [00:50:10.960]Hi.
- [00:50:25.360]Thank you for your presentation.
- [00:50:27.460]What is some, like...
- [00:50:30.860]artistic things that you
- [00:50:33.040]were into before
- [00:50:34.460]digital design or
- [00:50:36.900]letter making, or has that always
- [00:50:39.260]been your passion?
- [00:50:39.920]No, it was...
- [00:50:42.480]I thought I was going to be an architect
- [00:50:43.680]until I realized that the math load was not
- [00:50:47.140]what I wanted to think about.
- [00:50:48.420]I remember going into undergrad,
- [00:50:50.440]and actually junior college first,
- [00:50:52.240]and shaking the math out of my head.
- [00:50:54.100]Literally, like, I can't do it.
- [00:50:56.300]I just don't want to do it.
- [00:50:57.240]So it was definitely architecture
- [00:50:58.940]and
- [00:51:00.540]MC Escher was
- [00:51:02.140]where I started. I didn't
- [00:51:04.040]understand it then, but
- [00:51:05.340]a lot of his woodcuts are
- [00:51:08.200]data, it's data
- [00:51:10.000]nerdery, right? Like, this is infographics,
- [00:51:12.060]really, the way you look at the way
- [00:51:14.100]he's putting tessellations together,
- [00:51:15.440]and it's really smart math application.
- [00:51:18.260]So MC Escher is where I started
- [00:51:20.140]with my visual sort of flow.
- [00:51:21.820]It's printmaking. I didn't know what that was
- [00:51:24.080]back then. It's rowdy.
- [00:51:25.880]It's biomorphic. It's this
- [00:51:28.060]really interesting combination of math and
- [00:51:30.220]biology. I'm not smart
- [00:51:32.060]enough to do biology or chemistry.
- [00:51:34.060]Like, that's not, I can't do
- [00:51:36.080]that. But I could definitely understand the
- [00:51:38.060]visual implications of the way he
- [00:51:40.100]was making stuff work and the fact that you have
- [00:51:42.200]point perspectives that don't make sense
- [00:51:44.000]in the real world, but they make sense on paper.
- [00:51:45.680]Fascinating. So I started
- [00:51:48.020]with MC Escher, and I honestly started
- [00:51:50.260]being a fan
- [00:51:51.980]of, like, logo design and
- [00:51:53.940]brand design when I was about five.
- [00:51:55.900]When someone,
- [00:51:57.020]when those of you who are
- [00:51:59.020]my age or older,
- [00:51:59.900]do you remember, like, Pepsi Free
- [00:52:01.620]or any of the Pepsis that came in glass
- [00:52:04.000]bottles when we were kids?
- [00:52:05.000]And there was a
- [00:52:07.320]promotion in the
- [00:52:09.860]80s, early 80s, where when you
- [00:52:11.820]popped the lid off, under the lid cap, there was
- [00:52:13.940]NFL helmets in one color,
- [00:52:15.860]black on gray.
- [00:52:17.100]And if you collected the helmets of a
- [00:52:19.820]division, you could send it in for a Pepsi hat or something.
- [00:52:21.960]You got some whatever. It doesn't matter.
- [00:52:23.540]And looking at some of those logos,
- [00:52:25.660]specifically the Kansas City Chief logo,
- [00:52:27.560]which is how I became a Chief fan,
- [00:52:29.580]it was just a gorgeous logo
- [00:52:31.700]inside of a helmet that was a
- [00:52:33.540]one-color solution.
- [00:52:34.720]I still have that cap.
- [00:52:36.540]It's in a drawer in my office.
- [00:52:38.860]It was just like, man, this is so simple, but it's also
- [00:52:41.700]so specific. And it's a helmet, and helmets
- [00:52:43.800]are cool, because I'm a five-year-old kid
- [00:52:45.720]who wants to run into stuff,
- [00:52:47.660]whatever.
- [00:52:47.900]I didn't know it then, but looking
- [00:52:51.600]back on it now, I got into
- [00:52:53.300]the fascination with
- [00:52:55.140]pretty shiny logo objects when I was
- [00:52:57.600]a very little kid. And I traced
- [00:52:59.260]it all the way back to that bottle cap.
- [00:53:00.860]So yeah, logo design,
- [00:53:03.000]color theory, uniform
- [00:53:05.440]design. I still get really
- [00:53:07.300]nerdy about uniform design. By the way,
- [00:53:09.140]you've got to nerd out on stuff.
- [00:53:11.080]Typography, I'm a nerd on typography,
- [00:53:13.700]but I'm also a nerd about professional
- [00:53:15.480]uniform design, specifically
- [00:53:17.020]NFL uniform design. And that
- [00:53:19.400]started with that helmet when I was a little tiny
- [00:53:21.360]kid. I have all kinds of theories.
- [00:53:23.540]So yeah, architecture,
- [00:53:25.440]uniform design,
- [00:53:27.340]logo design,
- [00:53:28.940]those are the places. MC Usher, that's the
- [00:53:31.480]zenith. That's where things started.
- [00:53:32.680]I noticed with the piece you
- [00:53:45.480]did
- [00:53:45.800]where you named all the different kinds of inks,
- [00:53:49.500]what was it, like an inkscape? I forget.
- [00:53:50.980]I really
- [00:53:53.360]liked how it was almost sort of
- [00:53:55.360]like a playful relationship
- [00:53:57.380]between you and your material
- [00:53:58.620]and I just wanted to ask
- [00:54:00.320]about your relationship
- [00:54:02.200]with your medium, like how much
- [00:54:04.520]does your medium affect what you make and how
- [00:54:06.640]much, I guess, like how much choice goes
- [00:54:08.600]into what medium you use
- [00:54:10.340]to produce what you make?
- [00:54:12.120]That's a great question.
- [00:54:14.500]I think some
- [00:54:16.600]of the ethos of the not design
- [00:54:18.100]philosophy is that you
- [00:54:20.360]use what is available.
- [00:54:21.700]So the concept of design
- [00:54:24.400]survivalism is
- [00:54:26.040]like
- [00:54:26.360]I
- [00:54:28.300]didn't have money as a student. I don't have
- [00:54:30.280]a large bankroll now. I can't
- [00:54:32.180]afford to do the things that I want. I can't
- [00:54:34.560]hire somebody to laser cut
- [00:54:36.260]all these amazing objects for me.
- [00:54:37.660]So what do you do if you can't do that?
- [00:54:39.380]Well, then you
- [00:54:41.360]get a table saw or you get a
- [00:54:44.040]circular saw and you figure out how to contour
- [00:54:46.100]things and you make it really big so that
- [00:54:47.940]you don't miss the fact you don't have a router
- [00:54:49.800]or whatever. So it's really
- [00:54:52.000]about being opportunistic.
- [00:54:53.740]People give away
- [00:54:56.180]or throw away or set aside things
- [00:54:57.980]that are plenty useful
- [00:54:59.700]quite often, specifically within dorm
- [00:55:02.060]rooms or on campuses or anywhere
- [00:55:03.920]else. And those things are useful.
- [00:55:06.140]It doesn't mean to go jump in all the dumpsters that
- [00:55:08.000]you find because there's things in there
- [00:55:10.060]you don't want to touch. But just look for
- [00:55:12.100]the what ifs, what abouts,
- [00:55:13.660]offshoots. And so
- [00:55:15.940]it's as much about
- [00:55:18.100]the feel of those items as it is
- [00:55:19.840]their intended purpose. And I think
- [00:55:21.720]a lot of it is giving something that is no longer
- [00:55:23.960]useful in another
- [00:55:25.960]way. And the relationship there
- [00:55:27.660]is exploratory. I don't know what
- [00:55:29.860]your story is, object, but I'm going
- [00:55:31.760]to give you a new purpose doing this
- [00:55:33.820]as object B.
- [00:55:34.960]That's offset ink that we're
- [00:55:37.900]labeling in the printmaking studio.
- [00:55:39.840]It's not made to be
- [00:55:41.820]used in relief printing the way we're doing it,
- [00:55:43.900]but I was able to get it from a printer
- [00:55:45.740]that was going out of business for $2 a can
- [00:55:47.660]instead of $30. And so I have a large
- [00:55:49.900]library of it that I'll never use. And some
- [00:55:51.780]of it's never been opened, and when you open it, it smells
- [00:55:53.860]a certain way. And some of it's been used so
- [00:55:55.760]much that it's almost gone, and it's crusty,
- [00:55:57.420]and you wish you could get to the gold, like,
- [00:55:59.440]one more time.
- [00:56:00.060]I don't know. I'm emotional about
- [00:56:03.660]a lot of things, specifically
- [00:56:05.300]nostalgic stuff, and I
- [00:56:07.460]don't want to see things that I think are valuable
- [00:56:09.380]destroyed or thrown away, so
- [00:56:11.500]I'm right there on the edge of hoarding
- [00:56:13.540]materials as
- [00:56:15.080]a whataboutwhatif, and having
- [00:56:17.600]like a really concise library that
- [00:56:19.480]would be useful to a lot of people, and I'm
- [00:56:21.900]oscillating between those two things.
- [00:56:23.180]I'm way more in the hoarding
- [00:56:25.540]discombobulated space.
- [00:56:27.180]But yeah, if there's
- [00:56:29.720]things that you come across
- [00:56:31.560]that should have a new purpose, then
- [00:56:33.580]give them a new purpose. A good
- [00:56:35.640]example are those maps that came from the library.
- [00:56:37.860]If I wasn't into
- [00:56:41.060]topography, and I wasn't into
- [00:56:43.180]orienteering, and I wasn't into
- [00:56:45.480]geography and travel
- [00:56:47.420]and knowing how things fit together, and
- [00:56:49.400]having studied that and thought
- [00:56:51.500]about how people are like and dislike,
- [00:56:53.400]then the
- [00:56:55.180]librarian wouldn't have known I would
- [00:56:56.940]like them because I wouldn't have talked to her yet.
- [00:56:58.440]And so, since she knew I existed
- [00:57:00.740]and knew that we had already talked about maps
- [00:57:02.580]out of context for one reason or another,
- [00:57:04.360]she offered them to me first
- [00:57:06.360]instead of anyone else, or
- [00:57:08.460]really she offered them to me instead of no one else.
- [00:57:10.440]And so I now have my
- [00:57:12.580]favorite wall in my workspace,
- [00:57:14.660]which is in the printmaking studio, is
- [00:57:16.580]that library of maps that
- [00:57:18.680]I curated by state, and it's just a
- [00:57:20.660]pretty 1960s
- [00:57:22.580]pale blue and goofy manila
- [00:57:24.540]fuller color, full of maps that nobody
- [00:57:26.700]else cares about, but I care deeply about them.
- [00:57:28.700]What
- [00:57:38.580]would you say to keeping
- [00:57:40.260]this craft and skill
- [00:57:42.420]alive when most of it can
- [00:57:44.560]be done digitally?
- [00:57:45.260]Yeah, that's a good
- [00:57:48.520]question.
- [00:57:48.980]There
- [00:57:52.460]are things that you can do
- [00:57:54.380]viscerally with your hands that
- [00:57:56.460]you cannot do digitally.
- [00:57:58.200]There are
- [00:58:02.000]tactics you can use in Photoshop that
- [00:58:04.260]replicate the letterpress. There's a typeface
- [00:58:06.300]release just a few weeks ago that's called
- [00:58:08.040]something or other letterpress, and
- [00:58:10.220]it looks like it's distressed like letterpress,
- [00:58:12.500]but it's not random enough.
- [00:58:14.220]The blisters are in the wrong place. The dents
- [00:58:16.380]are in the wrong place. It's clearly a filter.
- [00:58:18.420]You shouldn't use it.
- [00:58:20.360]You should go
- [00:58:21.980]into, is it woods? Tell me where I'm at.
- [00:58:24.280]We should go into woods and letterpress it there.
- [00:58:26.220]Then you'll have real blisters and real dents
- [00:58:28.240]and real misprintings and real underinkings
- [00:58:30.420]and real overinkings. These are
- [00:58:32.220]conversations you can't have when you're in the digital
- [00:58:34.260]platform. What you
- [00:58:36.280]should embrace is, well, what if
- [00:58:38.280]we do things digitally and then do them
- [00:58:40.160]analog and then put them
- [00:58:42.200]back in the digital platform and work on them
- [00:58:44.160]some more and then make them analog again and
- [00:58:46.180]work on it some more and then go back to the digital
- [00:58:48.040]platform and just keep doing that
- [00:58:50.100]until you've got something that's distinctly yours.
- [00:58:51.920]Maybe every time you go to the
- [00:58:54.080]digital platform, you put it in a different medium
- [00:58:55.980]so start in Photoshop and then go to
- [00:58:58.180]Illustrator and then go to InDesign and then
- [00:59:00.140]animate it and then you
- [00:59:02.160]have something that's uniquely yours.
- [00:59:03.520]It's access to the process
- [00:59:08.480]for me.
- [00:59:09.180]There's a barrier to the technological
- [00:59:12.200]access and as students in university
- [00:59:14.160]that barrier is brought very low so you can get
- [00:59:16.180]into the things and do the things but when
- [00:59:18.240]you're putting
- [00:59:20.000]printmaking in a public
- [00:59:22.280]space
- [00:59:24.100]adjacent to
- [00:59:25.740]a cellist
- [00:59:26.780]or spoken word poet or the poet
- [00:59:30.000]laureate of Grand Rapids or whoever it is
- [00:59:32.220]that you're standing nearby while they're doing
- [00:59:34.160]their thing and you're doing their thing, your laptop
- [00:59:36.100]isn't in that game. Nobody's
- [00:59:38.200]watching you type things up on a keyboard
- [00:59:40.340]but they're going to walk right up to you
- [00:59:42.240]composing type on a press and be like who even
- [00:59:44.180]are you and why even are you here
- [00:59:45.600]and what is this medium about
- [00:59:47.840]and this is typography and here's your drawers
- [00:59:50.300]and we can make a print and you
- [00:59:52.180]got them. It's ownership, right? It's co-ownership
- [00:59:54.200]because they got to participate
- [00:59:55.500]they then own the experience
- [00:59:57.580]and that's empowering to give people ownership
- [00:59:59.680]so the keyboard and the laptop
- [01:00:02.340]doesn't do those things
- [01:00:03.400]it's an extension of yourself but I think
- [01:00:06.120]it's really important to extend yourself into other
- [01:00:08.200]people and that's where I think
- [01:00:10.180]this medium is
- [01:00:11.700]perpetual and I think
- [01:00:14.280]a lot of
- [01:00:15.480]letterpress artists that I've run across don't think
- [01:00:18.320]of it that way and they're
- [01:00:20.200]surely not putting their presses
- [01:00:22.080]outside under an umbrella
- [01:00:24.460]in the rain so
- [01:00:25.260]they can like collaborate
- [01:00:26.320]with a poet
- [01:00:27.900]for an hour and a half and making work
- [01:00:30.380]in response to them I think that's not unique
- [01:00:32.340]to our tactic but it's like rare
- [01:00:34.060]and it's one of the tactics that we
- [01:00:35.580]like explore
- [01:00:36.760]just like they said that print was going to die
- [01:00:40.420]you know 20 years ago
- [01:00:42.300]30 years ago 10 years ago
- [01:00:43.980]and you've seen publications kind of vanish and become
- [01:00:46.460]websites that no one goes to
- [01:00:48.120]and then they became social media threads that are curated
- [01:00:50.340]but not well
- [01:00:51.000]you're
- [01:00:52.900]this is self
- [01:00:55.020]expression like the press is still the press
- [01:00:57.120]you can do whatever you want if you've got
- [01:00:59.080]enough content or you can carve it into a block
- [01:01:01.120]or you can
- [01:01:01.720]then you can make thousands of them like once you have one
- [01:01:04.880]you can make millions of them if you want to
- [01:01:06.700]that's empowering
- [01:01:07.880]that's the freedom to express yourself
- [01:01:11.140]so I'm not too worried about
- [01:01:12.320]the digital element infringing
- [01:01:15.160]on the analog
- [01:01:16.060]and there's just things that you can do analog
- [01:01:18.600]that you can't or it'd be inefficient
- [01:01:21.040]to do it digitally so you've got to learn
- [01:01:22.980]both sides you've got to use them both
- [01:01:24.780]exquisitely
- [01:01:26.240]applause
- [01:01:27.340]applause
- [01:01:27.880]applause
- [01:01:28.420]Thank you.
- [01:01:28.960]Thank you.
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