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Graphic Design 2 students were asked to target a specific audience and a specific voter issue... and then create a compelling graphic that urges the audience to respond by voting on November 4th.
Links to a gallery of student posters AND downloadable PDFs coming soon...
Reflections about the assignment can be posted below...
more about the Get Out the Vote Assignment...
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/jrock2/rockblog/140923.html
For more thoughts about the gender gap in design read this commentary >
Alice Rawsthorn: Object Lesson - New York Times
Silent Majority
Is Design Still a Boy's Club?
By Alice Rawsthorn
Sept 28, 2008 in Sunday's NY Times Magazine
Or read this article by Michael Bierut from 2006
The Graphic Glass Ceiling
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=20303
Crown Fountain gargoyle
If you are one of the UMD students who attended the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) Student Conference in Chicago, Please post your reflections about the trip to the comments below...
UMD was very well represented with over 40 attendees. It was terrific to see our students make the effort to get themselves to Chicago for this mid-week event. Please report on your travel adventures, workshops with famous designers, and impressions of the conference overall!
students drawing in Millennium Park with Seymour Chwast.
from the conference website:
On September 23-28, 2008, over 1000 of the world’s top designers, students, educators and graphic arts professionals will converge in Chicago for the 2008 AGI Congress and AGI Student Conference. Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) will bring their annual Congress to America for only the third time in fifty years. Billed as the global design event of 2008, the event will present lectures, exhibitions, and a host of unique interactions with the world’s most notable leaders from the design profession.
http://www.agichicago.org
Francois Robert purchases this pepper spray with face from a student in his seeing and noticing workshop.
ALSO>>> Check out the Sappi Blog 24-7DesignHeaven for more comments about the AGI conference!
http://24-7designheaven.com/24-7dh/index.php
Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) is a club of the world’s leading graphic artists and designers. There are about 350 members from 27 countries
http://www.a-g-i.org/about/about_who.php
The designers belong to this fraternity by invitation only. (This is very different from the open membership of AIGA.) Perhaps this explains why so few women designers were represented on stage during the student conference. (Perhaps AGI will be discussing ways to redress the lack of diversity in their membership... ?)They were put on the spot with a few embarrassing questions from the audience, and no one seemed prepared with an answer as to why there wasn't more diversity on stage. The one woman on the stage was Jennifer Morla. She remarked that there seems to be a lack of interest in public speaking among women designers. She urged more female students to build skills in this area.
speakers included
paul sahre
john bielenberg
niklaus troxler
victor ... (for gabriela rodriguez)
michael vanderbyl
jennifer morla
nicholas blechman
steff geissbuhler
leonardo sonnoli
christoph niemann
expert workshops with
rick valicenti
paula scher
seymour chwast
francois robert
stephen doyle
AND chicago design office tours:
unique and behind-the-scene tours of your favorite design firms at Crosby Associates, Leo Burnett USA, Gensler, or Bruce Mau Design
ETC
Students please post about your experience in Chicago!
Please post your reflection on one of the Persuasion essays from the book Design Literacy by Steven Heller...
See links to more info on the essay topics below
National Portrait Gallery | Ballyhoo! Posters As Portraiture
view online galleries
Great show of historical posters at the Smithsonian
http://www.artofdemocracy.org/posters/posters.html
Art of Democracy is building a network of exhibitions and events that will all take place in the fall of 2008. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, Puerto Rico, Muncie, and several more locations are planning exhibitions.
poster by frances jetter
For guidelines on making your own poster go to http://www.artofdemoncracy.org/posters/poster-guidelines.html.
Midwest exhibits:
http://www.artofdemocracy.org/galleries/midwest/art_exhibitions-midwest.html
This event is highly recommended for my GD2 classes. We will be working on the Global Water Crisis > Designing Water's Future project in October, so this fits right in. Please attend!
Great Lakes Water Wars:
The UMD Center for Freshwater Research and Policy will host 2008 Distinguished Aquatic Speaker, Peter Annin, the director of the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources, at 7 pm on Wed., Sept. 24 in the Weber Music Hall. Annin, an environmental journalist, is a former correspondent with Newsweek magazine, and author of The Great Lakes Water Wars.
http://www.d.umn.edu/cfrp/special_events.htm
Graphic Design 2 students will begin the semester working on Get Out the Vote posters.
View the AIGA poster project
AIGA invites designers from across the United States to create nonpartisan posters—and YouTube submissions—that inspire the American public to participate in the electoral process and vote for a presidential candidate in the 2008 general election.
Assignment: Focus your efforts on a specific audience and a specific voter issue. Create a compelling graphic that urges your audience to respond by voting in the November election.
Also: don't forget to read all the essays on Persuasion in the Design Literacy text.
click image to view full panorama of Duluth
For an HDR image, you take several frames of one shot, bracketing your shots out like this: 2 1 0 -1 -2. This will capture every detail in every shadow, and will bring those bright highlights into full color. It creates a very surrealistic almost painting like image. For each panorama, I did 25 different shots. I have a program that runs the HDR merging, but getting the settings just right for each one was a task. Also in shooting HDR, it’s helping me see light better. With HDR images, the lighting has to be perfect with a high contrast. In normal photography, you normally want to stray away from that to get the full color range.
-artwork and comments by Laramie Carlson
Spring 2008 Digital Studio Project
Working with the project, I found that my tripod isn’t very good for staying in one spot. Aligning images is a major pain in the program I work in, and some of the movement can be seen in the print. I’d love to go back and shoot these on my own time with a way better tripod.
This is a project that has been brought to me via the internet. It involves taking a bunch of pictures, running them through 4 or 5 different programs, and then printing the final project. This is digital as it can get without going too overboard.
I believe this project has come out great. I can’t wait to experiment more and more with it. I just need to figure out how to display the final product.