Upstatement is a digital product studio founded in 2008 that blends the skills of traditional storytelling with digital product development. 
Writing, art direction, and typography are as important as coding, prototyping, and shipping. Their cross-functional teams are like the best journalists: probing every angle and asking sharp questions of users and stakeholders. They work on projects that propel meaningful change; like ending gun violence, championing diversity, and greening the planet.

Lecture will be by Andy Pressman, formerly of Rumors and Verso. The lecture will be recorded and placed on the RISD GD Vimeo channel (no live stream).

This lunchtime gathering organized by the Illustration and Graphic Design Departments is intended to bring students and faculty interested in community centered public space projects. Amber Art & Design will show their work with an emphasis on their process of engaging community partners and residents.

Amber Art & Design is a Philadelphia-based artist collective that is dedicated to social engagement, historical research, and utilizing public art to connect and represent the voices of a community. The Amber team cultivates spaces for positive growth by facilitating dynamic interactions between artists, communities, schools, museums, institutions, and movements and more.

RISD Code Lab provides a space for inquiry into creative programming. This year, we are launching a new structure for Code Lab that features artist workshops as well as weekly sessions! These are open to all students.

Weekly sessions meet Wednesdays 5–7PM in Design Center 501 and will serve as extra office hours, where an instructor will be available to provide technical support for your projects. Marie Otsuka, Minkyoung Kim, and Adrian Tiu (GD BFA ’22) will be rotating sessions to help troubleshoot your code.

March 2, 9
April 13, 27
May 4, 11

Sign up at risdcodelab.org

RISD Code Lab provides a space for inquiry into creative programming. This year, we are launching a new structure for Code Lab that features artist workshops as well as weekly sessions! It is open to all students.

Halim Lee (GD MFA '23) will have a special workshop to demo how to make the AR posters she created for Code Lab.

Artist workshops feature a visiting designer, who will be hosting a special session related to their practice. We’re excited to have the following artists lead workshops this semester: Aarati Akkapeddi on Wed, March 16, 5:30PM, and Ryan Kuo on Wed, April 20, 6:30PM.

Sign up at risdcodelab.org

Aarati will give a brief artist talk and workshop that will explore the advantages and limitations of computational (and human) classification of images through participatory and technical exercises. We will discuss how formulating our own taxonomies for personal archives can cultivate new meaning and at the same time how classifications are always approximations and forgetting this can hold us back from noticing the wonderful ways in which archival materials complicate and resist the boxes we place them in. We will walk through some ways to manipulate images using facial recognition and python. Participants can bring in their own photographs (ideally containing ‘faces’) to work with (recommended to bring in at least 10 images, under 1mb, as jpg or png files). Learn more about Aarati at aarati.me. Also risdcodelab.org

Studio Yukiko is a Berlin-based creative agency specialising in creative direction, art direction, brand strategy, concepting and graphic design for commercial and cultural clients alike.

The studio produces award-winning work, unearthing narratives, telling stories of local communities worldwide, and immerses themselves in the trends of internet and youth culture.

Alongside to well known brands, Yukiko has collaborated with galleries, museums, architecture practices and cultural institutions world-wide.
With its research arm, Yukiko continually experiments with contemporary forms of visual storytelling and fosters a deeper understanding of the audiences with which its projects engage.

Yukiko's work has been awarded by D&AD, ADC Germany, TDC New York and Lead Awards. Its Flaneur magazine received Art Directors of the Year at the London Stack Awards as well as Magazine of the Year.

Non-GD students should register on eventbrite

Speaker Series identity by MFA 2023 candidates Sun Ho Lee and Lian Fumerton-Liu

Gemma Copeland, a digital designer and member of Common Knowledge, a not-for-profit worker cooperative, will join the Design & Politics course to discuss how designers work, the role of software in helping labor organizing and more.

The conversation is open to those in the RISD community. For Zoom link and additional context, please visit this Google Doc (requires RISD login).

This spring, RISD GD offers an incredible line-up: 14 electives and 5 workshops! These are spread out throughout the week and will accommodate many different kinds of schedules, from sophomores to degree project to thesis.

Read all of the course descriptions sorted by day.

Registration begins on Monday, Nov. 15. Offered for the very first time are new electives like Shiraz Gallab’s “Gathering: Language, Form, and Process,” John Caserta’s “Design and Politics,” (a graduate-level course), and a UI/UX Design 4–week workshop taught by Ilhee Park (MFA 2022). If you have questions about these classes, reach out to your advisor, or directly to the instructor.

Please join us for a Degree Project info session!

Attendance is required for those doing DP this spring; if you have a conflict, please let us know.

Graphic designer and a web developer Yehwan Song is zooming into Minkyoung Kim’s Graphic Design for the Web to share her work process. Open to GD students and faculty.

Lecture is on Zoom at risd.zoom.us/j/97737442659

More info on Yehwan Song at yhsong.com

Lynne Yun is a NYC-based type designer, educator and technologist who specializes in typography, hand lettering, and calligraphy. She currently teaches for educational institutions such as Type@Cooper, Parsons School of Design, and the Letterform Archive.

Lynne served on the board of AIGA NY and worked as a type designer for Monotype. At Monotype, she created custom typefaces for clients and a number of retail typefaces, including the Trade Gothic Display and Inline families. Lynne has worked with a broad range of clients, including Google, Samsung, Anheuser-Busch, and the World Trade Center. She holds a BFA in graphic design from the School of Visual Arts, a postgraduate certificate in typeface design from Type@Cooper, and a MPS from ITP in New York University. She is a proud member of Alphabettes.

Register for this event.

The GD Triennial, “Portals,” opens to the RISD community on Thursday, Oct. 28, 6:00pm–7:30pm at Woods-Gerry Gallery. The exhibition will be open October 29 through November 14, 2021.

Exhibition hours:
Monday — Saturday, 10–5pm
Sundays, 2–5pm

Woods-Gerry Gallery
62 Prospect Street, 1st floor
Providence, RI

See the triennial website at portals.risd.gd

Deem is a biannual print journal and online platform focused on design as social practice. Our beliefs: Design is the process of adding value. Design is a fundamental shared experience. Design is everywhere. Our intentions: Explore human-centric design frameworks independent of exclusive institutions and industry categories. Ask what design can do for communities by creating conversations that are transdisciplinary and intergenerational. Seek to uncover meaningful narratives, connections, and patterns that might help us better understand our histories and imagine our futures.

Register for this event.

New RISD GD faculty member Shiraz Gallab and Paul Soulellis invite GD students to a conversation about design justice, social practice, critique, and community. This can be an opportunity to get to know each other a bit more, to hear about student experiences here in the department, to share perspectives with one another, and to chat about what’s on your mind.

If you’re interested, please join us for an informal chat in the GD Commons on Friday, October 22, 12pm (for about an hour)!