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GD 216 Design Stories
Mon/Weds 12:30-3:10, Hardie 307
18 January — 8 May 2006 (28 meetings)
John McVey, instructor
office hours Mon/Tues 10:00 - 11:00, or by appointment
jmcvey@montserrat.edu
A studio/seminar investigation of the nature and practice of design as a story-telling and framing activity. Within this context, attention is devoted to episodes of design history, to the ways that history has been told, to the ways that any design tells stories about itself, and to design practice as a rhetorical activity. Participation involves research, development and presentation of ideas in seminar papers and in design exercises.
format
- readings, discussions, lectures, research/writing/design exercises
- Some exercises will end up on the course website
- we will get through much of Meggs, and assorted other readings
- We will meet on occasion in 292, where a collection of design books and other materials is located
themes
- definitions
- emblems (motto + allegorical image + longer text)
- sprezzatura (the art that conceals its art)
- ornament/decoration (and the 20th century aftermath) : wallpaper design
- Nineteenth Century printing technologies, and the emergence of graphic design as a profession
- information design (what is / are meant by this expression ? Sutnar, Lönberg-Holm and C. Theodore Larson; Sweet’s Catalogue ; "clarity" )
- trends in the design blogosphere (please monitor designobserver, voice.aiga )
- flows : timeline, visual flow
- rhetoric (persuasion, written versus spoken word, Plato's Phaedrus)
- organization and finding (describing and classifying objects)
required text
- Philip B Meggs, Alston W Purvis. Meggs' History of Graphic Design (Fourth Edition). Wiley 2006.
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