Calling all Degree Project Proposals
plus PIZZA

Please join us for our yearly Open Studios evening! Bring work to GD Commons by mid-day Friday, see your student representatives with questions!

Check out our lineup of RISD GD electives slated for this spring: 13 electives and 6 workshops. These are spread out throughout the week and will accommodate many different kinds of schedules, from sophomores to degree project to thesis.

Browse the full list

Join Mohawk Paper, Kirkwood Printing, and Taylor Box for coffee and inspiration! Attendees will see our latest materials and swatch books. This will include our Collections kit, the Beautiful swatch book and our New Sustainable printed samples. There will be Paper Basics Guides, bindery examples, and Taylor box will share packaging ideas!

Hello everyone signed up for Degree Project this spring! It's hard to believe, but planning for Degree Project 📕 is about to start. If you're doing DP this spring 💐, please join us on Zoom for a kick-off discussion 📽️ about the upcoming semester. We will have a short information session to explain the process this year, attendance is required; please let us know if you can't make it.

https://risd.zoom.us/j/5829756233

In this workshop students will participate in a crash course of methods employed by UX professionals. Bringing a user centered mindset students will explore techniques such as user interviews, usability testing, design thinking and rapid prototyping. This one day intensive will give students interested in the UX field a chance to try and test out real world techniques. The workshop follows a talk the night before which students are strongly encouraged to attend.

Materials Needed: Bring something to write with, and a notebook

sign up here

Come listen to Chief Design Officer Stephen Schroth of KeyBank share his thoughts on shaping and building design organizations, and how design can be a change agent for large companies. Aaron Simmons, Sr Design Strategist and RISD faculty will interview Stephen and invite a larger discussion with students about the role of design in current professional practice.

Public Trust
The fight for America’s Public Land

Q&A Following film showing
with Prof. Angelo Baca, Diné / Hopi Tribal Nations, HPSS
Open to RISD Community.

As an extinction crisis looms and climate change continues to be one of the greatest threats our planet has ever faced, America’s 640 million acres of public lands support biodiversity and carbon sequestration. It’s essential that we fight for their protection by preventing the slashing of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, fighting the potential permanent destruction of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness
in Minnesota, and stopping the de facto
sale of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
—one of the last wild places in America.

Directed by David Garrett Byars

Polymode is a studio that leads the edge of contemporary graphic design through poetic research, learning experiences, and making cool shit for clients in the cultural sphere, innovative businesses, and community-based organizations. Our specialties include books, curation, education, exhibition, identities, interfaces, publications, visual design, websites, workshops, and writing. We operate between the complexity of designed systems and lived experience—our core principles of visual expression, media adaptability, and typographic function. As a bi-coastal, LGBTQ+, and Minority-owned studio with offices in Inglewood, California, and Raleigh, North Carolina, Polymode ignites change to create social and sustainable impact. We operate with the ethos of Studio as family.

This lecture is open to all current RISD students and faculty.

Vanessa Zúñiga Tinizaray is an Ecuadorian designer. Her curiosity and passion for learning about the ancestral cultures of Latin America have led her to investigate and play morphologically with the visual signs of indigenous cultures. With one foot in the past and the other in the future, the visual universe she designs is continual evolution, sharing through this universe traditions and oral expressions, elements that continue to give new life to ancestral cultures.

This lecture is open to free and open to all via Zoom (sign up link coming soon).

Talia Cotton is a designer, coder, and educator specializing in the intersection of branding and technology. She leads the design and development of data-driven and algorithmic brand identities at Pentagram with Michael Bierut and Giorgia Lupi, and teaches Advanced Interaction at Parsons School of Design. Her practice is focused on pushing the boundaries of traditional graphic design through the use of algorithms and programmatic practices as an accessible design tool.

This lecture is open to all current RISD students and faculty.

Announcing an open call for New Spaces in GD: Reading Room, our department's contribution to Inauguration Weekend (Oct 7–8)! This is a community installation, and I am asking everyone in the department to contribute something to the 2-day installation in the GD Commons in honor of the historic inauguration of President Crystal Williams.

What are new spaces in GD? in design? in education? in culture, in technology? Our hope is that this reading room will push us to stretch, think broadly, and have conversations that challenge us to go beyond where we’ve been. Choose materials that provoke and reflect your ideas about the future. You are welcome to submit anything that visitors can read and enjoy and reproduce in the reading room (the installation will include the collaboratively-assembled library, a photocopy machine, risograph printer, craft table for making your own readers, couches, seating from RISD Furniture, coffee, and snacks!).
🌱🌱🌱
You are lending your materials to the reading room for Inauguration weekend, so please pick up your items in the Commons after October 8.

In this talk, faculty member Anther Kiley will present work produced during a two month stay in Belgium last spring. Surface Read: Antwerp is a series of high resolution composite photographs of building facades from around the city of Antwerp, manipulated to remove perspective and surrounding context. Flattened and isolated, the facades appear as visual artifacts whose forms and textures can be read, revealing clues about the values that produced them and the histories that shaped them. The work (and talk) explore the complex nature of facades as political and aesthetic forms, existing uncomfortably between 2 and 3 dimensions, between aesthetic ideals and messy realities, and between the desire to make beautiful and the impulse to mark boundaries, obscure, and exclude.

Work on view in the GD Commons through Sept 23. Talk on Wednesday Sept 14 at 4:30pm

RISD GD BFA Undergrads, Faculty, and Staff — JOIN US in GD commons on Tuesday September 6 from 3:30–5PM to say welcome back : ) with ice cream and smiling faces. Come say hi and see us for the first time in a long while (or your first time ever)!

Sophomores 3:30–4PM
Juniors 4–4:30PM
Seniors 4:30–5PM

[MFA Grads — welcome back meeting at CIT in grad studio, same day, 1PM]

Before the Graduate Hooding Ceremony, RISD GD is hosting a breakfast and coffee reception in the GD Commons to celebrate all graduating students (and returning alums), friends, family, faculty, and staff (outside on the canal if the weather's good)!