Design School Confidential

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Job:05-11998/12412 Title:RP-Design School Con dential

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(RAY) Text

Job:05-11998/12412 Title:RP-Design School Con dential

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project brief

Assuming the role of curator, the student will as-

semble (and create) a series of historic artifacts.

The eras are predetermined and may range from

the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Next, a

written narrative will be developed that briefl y

introduces a central protagonist in a story. He or

she comes alive through the prose as well as the

evidence left behind from the printed ephemera.

The documentation includes journals, billheads,

personal artifacts, photographs, studies, maps,

letters, and invitations. Once the initial artifacts

are completed, all of these elements and docu-

ments will be designed into a twenty-two-page

handmade, hardbound book. This book must be

appropriately choreographed to the written nar-

rative and consistent with the character’s story.

The telling of this historical fi ction raises ques-

tions about representation as well as truth and

the designer’s power and responsibility with in-

formation. The student must assume three iden-

tities in this project: those of the hero, the curator,

and the designer.

project goal

This layered novel will also function as a portfo-

lio showcasing all the design basics. Taking in-

spiration from Renaissance paintings, students

will do a series of “master” copies or studies. By

exploring historic design through re-creating pe-

riod artifacts (down to the aged look), the class

will address aesthetics and the relationship to

technology and culture. The main purpose of this

course is to study typography and design history

as it relates to our present condition. Typography

is a phenomena of our language that is infl u-

enced by cultural perspectives—this determines

the methods of visual communication and writ-

ing systems. Ultimately, the infl uence of design

as a modern media is revealed as a powerful tool

of infl uence in society and culture.

Class: Advanced Typography

Faculty: Don Pollack

Level: Senior or Graduate

Duration of Project: One Semester

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois, USA

Undaunted Courage

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Undaunted Courage, The American Frontier

Student: Salome McCaskill

My project was about a fi ctional nineteenth-

century typesetter living in the Rocky Mountain

territory of the American West. The artifact de-

signs were original constructions based on post-

ers, letterheads, and 130-year-old receipts from

the special collections of the Chicago Public

Library. All of the landscape scenes in the book

are original photographs I took from locations

in Colorado. This project was a perfect set up

for me to further explore the traditions of letter-

press and typesetting.

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Job:05-11998/12412 Title:RP-Design School Con dential

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Job:05-11998/12412 Title:RP-Design School Con dential

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clockwise from top:

The London Times, Late War Edition,

November 13, 1916 (2007), 19.25'' × 14''

(49 by 35.5 cm)

Passport of Dr. Yu Tsun, 1914,

(2007) Photograph of Captain

Richard Madden, London, 1915 (2007)

Photograph of entrance to the

home of Dr. Stephen Albert

Handmade book, The Garden of

Forking Paths, by Jorge Luis Borges,

8.25'' × 5.25'' (21 by 13.5 cm)

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Undaunted Courage,

Jorge Luis Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths

Student: Mark Addison Smith

I did a visual retelling of Jorge Luis Borges’s story The Garden of

Forking Paths, as a means to understand narrative structure, char-

acter development, tone, and typographic nuances rooted within

the historical context of World War I. The process began with a

critical reading and collage interpretation of Borges’s text, set on

the eve of the Battle of the Somme when an agent of the German

empire assassinates a famous Sinologist to convey the name of

a city to be attacked. A visual and typographic breakdown of the

story resulted in tangible hand-rendered pieces of “evidence,”

including aged photographs, passports, teaching certifi cates, train

schedules, and newspapers from the early 1900s, which would

become visual examples to accompany the fi nal text. The com-

pleted book was case bound, part short story and part exhibition

catalog with artifacts.

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