Abstract
Perhaps the most challenging part of being a graphic designer is the anxiety one feels when facing a blank page. How does one teach a new designer to effectively and reliably come up with ideas? I developed a process for teaching ideation to graphic design students that can be applied to a wide range of design projects. This process is inspired by my personal design practice, the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse drawing game, and Skolos-Wedell’s form-to-content method for designing posters. We begin with an exciting collaborative collage exercise, involving an enormous selection of unconventional tools and materials, leading to spectacular and complex sculptural creations. Each sculptural collage is altered by each and every participant. Next, students photograph the sculptures to create two-dimensional images that we then mine for ideas, similar to how a miner would chip away at earth to reveal valuable gems. In a matter of hours, students generate hundreds of ideas, each with corresponding examples of design elements such as typography, grid, texture, color, and image. Then, I lead students through a flexible morphology that teaches them how to take these raw ideas and expand them into applied pieces of graphic design. Students are able to take this process with them into their careers and future work, ensuring that they will never again face designer’s block. In this paper I illustrate exactly how this process works, with real examples of student work, and explain how this innovative pedagogy could be applied to a wide range of design problems.
Presenters
Anna JordanAssistant Professor, College of Art and Design, Rochester Institute of Technology, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Graphic Design, Ideation, Iteration, Collage, Process, Typography, Design, Pedagogy, Morphology
