This course will explore the relationship between books and archives in the context of contemporary design practice. The course will be a studio-based investigation of the typologies of designed analog/digital books through the examination and critique of real specimens and the collections that house them. Throughout the semester, we will be asking: What are the formal qualities of well-designed books? How is a book a unit of information, and what is its relationship with systematic forms of organization? What do archives and their systems of organization represent? How do books serve as a repository for design knowledge? How do collections of books (and collections in general) serve as a foundation and/or extension of one's creative practice? Scheduled guest presenters and visits to archives will be planned. Students will be expected to research and curate collections that support their visual making and creative practice. The course will culminate in a designed, independent project.

Contemporary advertising Art Directors are creative hybrids. They must work strategically and express ideas through design, film, photography, typography, motion, and writing, This course considers the contemporary history of art direction and provides an ideas-first perspective on the practice. Through a series of hands-on assignments students will hone their visual storytelling skills and creative thinking skills as they apply to advertising. Emphasis will be placed on concepting, the presentation of ideas, and strategic thinking.

In this course we will examine and explore communication design not only as a means to offer solutions for an existing reality, but as a generative storytelling tool to shape an entirely new one. In an emergent world, increasingly taken over by automation and algorithmic design, it is more critical than ever for designers to be able to offer what artificial intelligence cannot — story and emotional engagement. We will also consider various modes of auteurship, from video games and film to fashion and music, as well as at the work of numerous studios and design practices which are evolving the discourse around speculative design and design fiction. The most successful brands and products today create comprehensively designed graphic identities, weaving a narrative that the user/consumer wants to partake in, and thus, evoke desire. This process, in part, happens by reversing the way in which we create — not merely by designing in response to the existing conditions around us, but by inventing new conditions that generate an entirely unexpected yet logical response. This course will act as a laboratory for experiments in these alternate realities. As such, throughout the semester, we will continually ask ourselves not what should this (poster/package/book/etc.) look like? Instead, we will ask what could this (_________) be? Studio work will be supplemented by critical discussions of brands and products today. Research and writing will be an integral part of the creative process, however, the ultimate output of the course is expected to be visual, or ‘designed’ in some form. Students will be expected to produce and develop work on a weekly basis, advancing rapidly from proposals to prototypes and to finished pieces. Each project will build upon the last, and the final oeuvre of work will likely be media-agnostic and synesthetic, considering communication design as a holistic experience.

This course will examine the history of poster design and howit has transitioned over the years. The poster was one of thefirst tools of visual communication of the modern era, spanningacross political to advertising platforms as a way to convey an idea or transmit information to the public. Over the yearswith the access of different tools and technologies the outputof posters has taken different forms. This course will explore these different techniques by understanding and applying thefundamentals of design to various posters through the unique attributes associated to each medium. In this class studentswill produce a series of posters in different mediums, starting with paper and expanding into other materials and fabricationtechniques and moving into video animation, projectionmapping, augmented reality and beyond.

Computer programming is a powerful tool for creating and manipulating form and has long been used to by artists, designers, and composers to explore new aesthetics. In this class, students will continue this tradition of experimentation by creating and processing images, animation, video, sound, and 3D forms completely with code. This class will build on existing programming skills by introducing a variety techniques, programming languages, and tools related to procedural generation. Topics will include: creating raster and vector images with javascript and p5.js, synthesizing audio in javascript, and using OpenSCAD to create models for 3D printing. In this class we will make things that make things.