Teaching Graphic Design

So for the past month I have been hired by the Boys & Girls Club of Savannah to teach a workshop in Graphic Design. The summer camp for the kids ends this friday so I only had four weeks in which to teach kids ranging from grades 5th to 9th, graphic design. It has been fun to work with these kids on this but I did need to do a bit of reworking of the course once or twice to compensate for kids missing and needing to catch up and for computer problems. All in all the kids I feel got something out of it and understand graphic design to be more than the computer, which is good because I wanted them to realize that ideation is the most important point and that a computer is a tool not an answer. In this way if they cannot afford a computer they don't feel as if they cannot become graphic designers later. I had a friend in undergrad, Graham, that never owned a computer the entire time.

I taught the kids Brainstorming, Sketching, How to Make Type Feel, Drawing Symbols and from this we worked on Logos. I made them a deal, they can make the logo for whatever they want, a video game, a sports team, a restaurant, anything goes but I am giving them the word they must use for the name. Everybody got the word Vortex. A word I borrowed from Bob Newman's Logotype undergrad class here at SCAD. The results were interesting since most the kids didn't know what the word meant they didn't get hung up on making tornados and such. At about the second day into the project I decided to do the entire thing in 24 hours just to show the kids an example of exploration and sketching from my own work.

My favorite quote from this class came from one girl who said "And I thought school work was hard!"

Here are some samples:


An Online Community "Sims" Game by N'yeema Noble (5th grade)


A Cafe by Alexis Merritt (6th grade)


A Florist by Kristine Walker (7th grade), and honestly the best and most appropriate use of Curlz I have ever seen.


A Fast Food Chain by Monica Mayle (6th grade). Whenever a kid said their logo was done and showed it to me I told them to draw it again. Monica drew her logo over-and-over to cover 8 pages of her sketchbook, what she didn't know was I was counting on her getting tired of doing it so she began simplifying the mark to get done quicker, the more she did it the better it got.


A Shoe Company by Juwon Johnson (5th grade), this little one impressed me constantly, his mind is just in the right place when it comes to design and art. He was another that I had do his sketch over-and-over because he thought he had it down pat the first time but he needed to simplify it more. This kid could be amazing one day, but I swear he has a bigger ego than me!


A Skateboard Wheel Company by me.