Great Graphic Design

So half way through this last quarter I shared this formula of mine with a class of my students and was asked about it recently. I've never really shared this with anyone else before but here is how it goes. This scrawl from above is the first page in my moleskin and is usually redrawn at the beginning of every sketchbook I make.

While I was in graduate school I was constantly picking apart what design is (or for that matter what makes up Great Graphic Design). I see it as a system almost of checks and balances between three major parts. The Concept, The Content and The Application. I went on further to create this venn diagram of my formula, mainly because I have this odd obsession with venn diagrams.

I think the only confusion for some would be that I use Concept and Idea as separate entities. This is because a concept may be a theme, a word, a sentence, some ambiguous thing floating in the ether until it is combined with content to create an idea. An example would be my holiday cards for this season, the concept was to be able to interchange words to create new ones but I could have done that with any set of words. When combined with the Content of different holidays it became the Idea for my Holiday cards (the cards were the application of the Idea to create Great Fucking Design).

A Lesson on Typography

Dribbble Dis

So I love the idea of Dribbble. Especially since it plays upon my idea that design needs to be more about community over competition, sharing ideas and inspirations rather than worrying about others stealing them. As an educator I find it to be really bad in the heart of design education so I encourage my students to share and share alike. It doesn't matter it someone has the same idea as you, they won't execute it the same way as you because they are NOT you. That being said I decided to dribbble here a bit, since well...I don't have a dribbble account (you need to be invited, oh well someday maybe :] )


A new poster/shirt print illustration. Enjoy!

What kind of mood are you in?

image from Courtney, posted on Design Work Life

So I'm a big fan of creating mood boards for projects. I was first introduced to the concept by Joe Duffy when he and his son Joseph came to speak at SCAD while I was there for graduate school. The above picture is from a similar presentation that Joe did for the How Design Conference 09. The following links are some other sources of mood boards and how they can be applied to the design methodology.

Getting in the Mood
When a Picture Really is Worth A Thousand

Tips for Better Ideas

Rethink Scholarship at Langara 2010 Call for Entries from Rory O'Sullivan on Vimeo.

The Rethink Scholarship is an $18,000 scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College's Communication and Ideation Design program. This video in incredibly made as well as inspiring while communicating solid tips for every designer student and professional alike. :)

Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity.

Snagged from Scott over at PVP Comics. A must watch!

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.