8:00am–1:00pm / Rich Rose / Designing an identity and identity system is a critical skill practiced by today’s designers. In this course, students will create two identity systems: one for an arts organization and one for a socially constructive campaign. While a traditional identity system is defined as a logo and a set of rules for governing that logo's application across a range of media, the goal of this class is to expand upon the ways an identity can be conceived through the manipulation of language, materials, and audience expectation/participation.

1:10pm–6:10pm / Pouya Ahmadi / Building on a collection of texts at the intersection of language, identity, and societal conditioning, this course examines the extent to which typography can engage in world building and the production and dissemination of proposals for alternative systems. Through a series of parallel assignments including reading, writing, and making, we will individually and collectively explore different strategies and mediums through which we can activate a multitude of voices and approaches that comprise our complex world of many worlds.

8:00am–1:00pm / Brynn Trusewicz / This studio course is an investigation in the act of making. We’ll begin the semester by looking at performance theory, linguistics, ornamentation, and replication to explore the “act,” and simultaneously use digital fabrication, material research and hand craft to explore the “making.” You will further expand on these ideas by applying lenses of your choice to develop your own methodologies and frameworks to situate your work within a larger conversation about making and graphic design. While our primary modes of making will be within the realm of digital fabrication (using the resources at CoWorks), we will also incorporate other modalities to explore the tensions between presenting information/concepts and performing design. The class will culminate in a final project that will support, enhance or evolve your Graphic Design Degree Project or Thesis. Estimated Cost of Materials: $125.00.

8:00am–1:00pm / Richard Lipton / This elective is an opportunity for students to immerse themselves in the process of designing a typeface; to consider all the design decisions that are a part of this creative exercise, and to learn the finer points of letter structures and systems, serif and sans, spacing, kerning, and all the other details of execution which turn a roughly-formed idea into a more complete, rigorous and polished digital design. This course will provide a fundamental understanding of how typefaces work in addition to understanding a tool that can further your design goals.

1:10pm–6:10pm / Lois Harada / In this Graphic Design studio, students will learn the building blocks of book construction. In addition to handwork and bindery skills, students will work to set type, manually and digitally, to match their conceptual vision and learn to plan, execute and create well crafted book projects. The course will cover the history of the book from codexes and manuscripts all the way through modern zines to give us context for our technical work. We will study the medium of the artists’ book which, though rooted in traditional book forms, take on any shape and design that the artist can imagine. This medium has a rich history—we’ll study exemplars in the Special Collections archive and visit with contemporary artists in the field. Craft is essential to creating effective forms that tell the story of our design practice. How can the technical skills learned in traditional book binding be adapted to your vision and voice?

1:10–6:10pm / Tycho Horan / In this time of overlapping crises, as systems of domination insist we stay the course, it seems necessary to try everything differently. Publishers too need to reimagine their practice, not in pursuit of solutions but as a tireless process of experimentation. This studio will focus on the social and material practices that foster cooperative presses and collective publications. Students will learn prepress and layout techniques, introductory risograph, screenprinting, and bookmaking methods, such as saddle stitching, coil and perfect binding, as well as more experimental approaches to publishing. This studio will encourage students to be self-directed and work collaboratively to make a number of publications over the course of the semester. We will visit print/publishing studios in the Providence area and have guest critiques from the field. How do we make publications differently? Historians often imagine early print shops as rigidly hierarchical, directed by lone white master printers, churning out perfectly printed volumes, tightly bound, uniform, inalterable, and embossed with the gilded name of one author. Instead, we will propose a messier history and an alternative culture of publishing built on solidarity economies and cooperative modes of production. The archive is littered with pamphlets and propaganda by anonymous collectives, sold and produced cheaply, barely bound if at all, disseminating countercultural ideas even from the earliest days of Guttenberg. In this way, things like zines may have as much to tell us about publishing as “traditional” books.

8:00am–1:00pm / Minkyoung Kim / Web as Medium 2 is an advanced studio course for students who have been exploring browser-based technologies as a creative medium. Students will build on their critical understanding of code to investigate the cultural, social, and philosophical implications of the internet, culminating in the creation of self-driven projects as their responses. The course will provide a space for students to conduct in-depth experiments on the web, fostering active skill-sharing and knowledge exchange among peers. The course features student-led research/workshops as a point of engagement with relevant technologies and its discourse, along with self-driven projects that utilize the browser as a space to experiment and communicate. Prerequisite knowledge of or coursework in HTML/CSS/JavaSript basics is required — students are expected to have solid understanding of network technologies, including how to publish web pages to the internet.

1:10pm–6:00pm / Ernesto Aparicio / This course will cover all aspects of designing comprehensive art and photographic books. We will examine the use of type in layouts, editing images, grids, scale, and pacing. Particular attention will be paid to certain elements of design production, including the visual, tactile, and aesthetic qualities of paper, printing, binding, color separation, and advanced techniques in reproduction, namely duotone and three-tone in black and white photography. In the first part of the semester students will design the layout and the corresponding dust jacket for a photographic book. The material will include a number of original black and white photographs from one of the very well known French photographers. In the second part of the semester, students will be given the choice between designing a book based on their own interests and completing a book design project using assigned material.

1:10–6:10pm / Ron Pearl / This is a course about design and motion, filtered through the lens of real-world, graphic design applications. From film titles to animated gifs, design installations to handheld applications, motion is an important consideration in 21st century graphic design. This course combines disciplines of graphic design, animation, storytelling and sound design. Through a series of in-studio and multi-week assignments, students will create animated projects that include real-world assignments as well as experimental exercises. Short weekly lectures will discuss historic and current works of influential Motion Designers, Animators and Directors. Adobe After Effects will be the primary production tool for this class. Through the sequence of assignments, students will become fluent with the software.

1:10–6:10pm / Gabriel Drozdov / How do you turn an object, such as a flat, digital screen, into something people can interact with and understand? This question underscores the field of user interface and experience (UI/UX) design, which aims to create legible, meaningful experiences for virtually everything we interact with. In this studio elective, we’ll study UI/UX from a digital perspective, exploring the interface design of various mediums including apps, websites, operating systems, video games, appliances, exhibitions, and more. Instruction and projects will focus primarily on using Figma to create mockups and prototypes, with digressions into practices for user experience research. While this is not a coding course, lectures and exercises will explore the relationship between designers and developers. Familiarity with graphic design and typography is recommended but not required.

8:00am–1:00pm / Doug Scott / This course will focus on the following: • a critique of an existing exhibit • conceptual thinking • experiential creation • materials and model-building • exhibition typography • exhibit as narrative • three-dimensional spatial planning. These projects, which will result in the creation of scale models, are relevant to all exhibition projects and experiential installations; and relate to exhibits at zoos, science centers, history and natural history museums, national parks, and art museums. Students will design exhibits in these content areas: architecture, history, and animals. The studio work will be augmented with slide lectures on the history of exhibition design, stage design, and store window design.

1:10–6:10pm / Doug Scott / This course introduces basic concepts, methods, and procedures of information design with focus on visualizing data and information. It investigates visual systems and information structures such as maps, graphs, charts, and diagrams. We will discuss the use of marks, icons, color, and typography. Emphasis is placed on the exploration of conceptual and visual solutions, and on the creative process of organizing, visualizing, and communicating information. The objective is to examine design solutions that make complex information easier to understand by specific audiences. The course will be delivered as studio projects, individual and group critiques, a history of information lecture, discussions, and readings. Students will design information visualizations in these content areas: a map of three journeys; depicting a process of making something; a visualization of a chapter of a work of fiction – showing characters, place, and interactions; and a complex set of infographics about a country – its geography, trade, agriculture, population, climate, etc.

1:10pm–6:10pm / Fri / Tycho Horan / This workshop will use the ideas from Risograph (RISO) printing to combine practical pre-press skills, encouraging experimentation formmaking. The aim of this introduction workshop is to teach students to consider the craft and value of well-planned files to produce high-quality outputs that can be replicated and shared. Students will work within a series of technical constraints that will require creative solutions as well as an understanding of this particular printing process, color, paper, and file preparation.

1:10–6:10pm / Fri / Franz Werner / Photography plays an important role in the field of graphic design—within publications, posters, electronic media, etc. Because of the camera's availability and fairly inexpensive cost, photography has become one of the most popular hobbies in the world. Although he/she is in possession of such a device, the average person is not entirely aware of certain image manipulations and other concepts used by the graphic designer. This four-week workshop introduces designers to the lighting studio and the many uses of the camera in creating design artifacts.

1:10–6:10pm / Fri / Ed Brown / This workshop will introduce students to the foundational tenets of digital 3-dimensional modeling through the lens of the graphic designer. Using 3D-modeling and sculpting software students will learn strategies for creating virtual forms in different contexts. Once comfortable with modeling students will be introduced to the various elements of rendering including shaders, lighting, and the virtual camera. After successfully rendering scenes students will learn to composite their renderings with 2D graphic design work as well as create animations for video and motion graphics.

8:00am–1:00pm / Fri / Julia Gualtieri / This workshop will focus on establishing a basic understanding of a variety of screen printing techniques and how to make use of those techniques in making your projects. Through in-class demos and out-of-class assignments, this workshop will encourage interplay between screen prints and digital prints. The class will start with simple paper stencils and move quickly into making screens from images and text generated digitally. No previous experience required.

1:10pm–6:10pm / Fri / Jay Marol / This workshop combines the tactical skills needed to structure web pages with a looser, more playful compositional mindset. Students are introduced to the structural elements and properties of HTML and CSS through hands-on demos and take-home assignments. Tight technical HTML drawings in week one give way to looser, full-screen abstract compositions in week two. Weeks three and four make use of animation and interactivity using CSS3 and jQuery.