Insight
View this photoset on flickr.
Just before winter break, five designers including myself put up a show in the College of DuPage Wings Gallery (located on the first floor of the SRC) called "Insight." Each of us created a poster that posed a question, and in front of each poster was a podium with a pad of paper and a slot into which anyone could drop their answers. Now that school is back from break, we've taken the answers and created books full of our interpretations of the answers.
The question I asked was "How can I be happy everyday?" This is an important question to me because I always feel driven to discover new things and seek out new experiences in life, and I enjoy discussing somewhat philosophical ideas that have real-world applications in everyday use. I felt that this question would also open up the audience's answers to a wide range of interesting and personal prescriptions that would also reflect their own lifestyle choices.
This was a very important and personal question to me, so I chose to create a self-portrait. This also helped draw in people, as I hoped all of my student friends and coworkers at the school would be ensnared by the familiar sight of my big dorky glasses and beard staring out at them from the gallery. When you get close to the poster, however, the portrait dissolves into a series of colored squares that make up a calendar of 2010. My hope was that this would facilitate some real thinking as people walked up to the podium and considered, what do we do every day that makes us who we are?
As a graphic designer, I spend a lot of time in front of a computer, and my work usually winds up passing through or being created entirely in one piece of software or another by Adobe. This is fine, it's certainly faster than the process used to be before everyone had a glowing icon of an apple in their laps. Recently, though, I've felt that there's a limitation in using this software, and I've seen a lot of homogenization in the design community's collective work. Our teachers demand that we do all of our concept work with paper and pencil, and then we can move to the computer to create the finished version, but I wanted to explore an avenue that had as little to do with the computer as possible.
I like to try new things (which usually means things I'm not very good at), but the answers I received seemed to justify, even encourage this stepping outside my comfort zone. For the answer book, I combined two things I have little to no talent for: origami and calligraphy. I folded sixteen original designs from single sheets of origami paper, wrote the answers on them with a somewhat uncooperative calligraphic fountain pen, and photographed the resulting works against various textures in and around the school. We printed them out, bound them, and voila! "Analog" graphic design.
Thanks to the contributors of answers to our show, you really blew my expectations out of the water and gave me some great words to chew over. I hope the answer book gives you something to think about as well. Thanks also to Grace Blevins, Chris Walker, Jake Albaugh, and Ogi for inviting me to be part of this inspiring show.
If you'd like to see the show in person, it should be up in the Wings Gallery at the College of DuPage's SRC building at least through the rest of January.
Labels: design, illustration
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