Whomever said high school were the best years of your life was obviously one of the people that peaked in high school and never did anything during rest of their life. High school, to me, was more or less one big blur of 4 years. Nothing really changed much at all those 4 years, I never really matured all that much, mentally or physically. I went to class, and I played a lot of video games, and then I graduated.

I didn’t bother applying to colleges until January of my senior year, about 5 months from graduation. I applied to a few colleges and was accepted into those which I had remembered to send in the applications. In the end, I decided to go to Michigan State University, which I was to attend for 2 years, from September 2004 to May 2006. I wanted to do something with graphic design and the web, and as such I was to major in Telecommunications, Information Studies, and Media in the Digital Media Art & Technology program. One hell of a long department title, we usually just shortened it to Telecom and DMAT respectively.

During my time at MSU I did a lot of walking. I met some great people. I got my first taste of tear gas from a post-basketball loss riot in Cedar Village. I began to find myself, and find out what I really wanted to do for my career and with my life. I started to get bored with classes, I was never learning anything in the classes in my major. And I was not liking the classes I was taking in the Studio Art department, which I was going to declare as a second major.

A younger a more unkempt me.

I decided to transfer. I was going to leave behind (almost) all the things and people I’d come to know and switch to a new school. The new beginning that people commonly write about in tales of journeys or self-discovery.

October 2005 was the month I sent in my application to the University of Michigan. By December I believe, I had been accepted for the Fall 2006 semester. With my transfer I decided to switch majors, mostly because the University of Michigan didn’t have a comparable DMAT program. That semester I became an official student in the School of Art & Design.

Michigan was a great school to attend. The shear amount of resources available to me was just amazing, from studios to libraries to rec facilities. It is a bit sad that I wasn’t able to make use of all those available resources. I found that the professors I had, all the faculty as well, in addition to the staff and studio coordinators were more personable and easy to form relationships with than those I had encountered at MSU. At Michigan I was able to explore other media pretty well, mostly due to their curriculum in which students were more or less forced to experience a wide range of media in their first two years at school.

I found I really liked bronze casting, which I was able to learn to do at the School of Art & Design.

Even though Michigan didn’t have exactly what I was looking for as far as classes went, I still managed to get what I wanted out of my time there. In high school I knew I wasn’t going to learn everything I needed no matter where I went to college, and most of the valuable things I’d learn would be things I did in my own time. I think it’s because of that very reason that I’m in the position I am now, and that I’m as self directed as I am. A nice thing about the School of Art & Design is that I managed to find a core group of students that were really into graphic design and didn’t want to stop learning, even if that meant going outside of normal school hours to learn more about design. It was for that reason that I joined up with the University of Michigan AIGA Student Chapter, which was organized and led by School of Art & Design students. This student organization is one that I would, a year later, become the vice president, and president a year after that. AIGA was a good experience to learn to talk to and lead a group.

There were a few negatives to the School of Art & Design as with any higher learning program in this country. One of those being that while there, I was subjected to some irregularity of the curriculum. Meaning that the curriculum had changed about twice in roughly five years, once while I was a student. The turbulence in the curriculum led to some confusion on the part of the professors on how and what they should be teaching. One of the most unfortunate things about the first curriculum change was that the number of graphic design classes there took a nose dive. The unfortunate thing about the second curriculum change was that it screwed up my requirements for graduation, partly because I was a transfer student, which is not something you want to worry about after 4 years in with 2 semesters till graduation. I believe the curriculum has finally stabilized for the meantime and there probably won’t be too many shakeups for a while.

The biggest of the big A&D follies in my opinion was the lack of graphic design related classes; there were about 3 a semester, 6 a year, and they were the same each year. After those 6 classes, you had taken what all they had to offer. The strange thing about the small amount of design classes is that the demand for these classes was very high, they’d fill up before any other class when scheduling started each semester. The demand was high but the offerings were low, low, low. The few available graphic design professors were stretched thin. Very unfortunate. In fact, the administrative avoidance to anything graphic design was that at one point the word “design” was not allowed in any class title, whatsoever, and this came down from the dean of the School of Art & Design.

Another negative of the school – and most likely true of every school out there – was that pretty much every class was taught to the lowest common denominator, save for one class, a persuasive visual communication class. That class was actually pretty cool in the way it was organized; it was split up into 4 small groups by experience and skill levels, so that each group was almost like it’s own little self-contained class. Otherwise every other class was taught, more or less, with the expectation that most of the students knew nothing about what the professor had to teach. Again, that complaint isn’t so much directed at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design, but more at how education is practiced in our country.

The School of Art & Design was by no means a technical school. They didn’t teach all, most, or really any of the ins and outs of the commonly used creative software, that kinda thing was mostly left up to the student to learn themselves. But they did teach up a healthy amount of creative thinking and problem solving skills. It’s a fair trade. But still, it would have been nice to have some more technical skills taught to level the playing field in some of the classes and bring up the level of expectation in others.

Not to dwell on negatives, the best thing in my opinion about the School of Art & Design was the senior-level capstone course called Integrative Project. The class is a year-long course, one that accounts for half of the credit hours needed to be a full-time student, and most of the hours one would spend a week on school work, it was almost like having a full-time job just in itself. The class affords each student with their own studio space; less than a A&D graduate student would get, but big enough, clocking in at about 8 foot by 8 foot. Over the year, each student is able to work very independently and really spend lots of time on conceptualization, refinement, and production. Time management skill were critical for this class as it was very easy to get behind schedule significantly as a number of students did. This class is where you could tell who is going to be able to hack it in the creative industry. To my knowledge very few undergrad programs in art and design offer anything like this.

My studio – a complete mess – one week before the final show.

To this point college has been the best time of my life. Though, I’d imagine the most current part of my life will always be the best time of my life; things will just keep getting better.

Senior year for the University of Michigan Art & Design students means one hell of a long project. A year-long (really only 7-8 months) project that is supposed to be more or less the culmination of the 4 years students spend at the university. Myself, this is my 5th year in college, but only my third at the University of Michigan. The current curriculum is that of a very conceptual nature; “thinking outside the box” type stuff. This can be beneficial, but all the conceptual stuff comes at the expense of very little technical, skill focused classes. Unfortunate, but a reality. Those that care make do and learn what they need to know outside of class.

The year-long project I mentioned above is for our IP class, that’s Integrative Project for the unknowing. My initial ideas for my project were based off my main interests: continue developing my analog photoblog, do some infographics work, do something using code, furniture design, packaging, or something with computer generated designs.

I’ve spent my time here working in all variety of mediums; wood, plastic, ink, paint, steel, bronze, pixels, code, etcetera, etcetera, and now my final year is in it’s beginning stages. I was pretty set on continuing with my photoblog before the year began, but once things got underway I started to think about all the things I won’t have access to after graduation, mainly the printmaking studio and the sculpture/metals studio. I had to make a decision. I could either do something that I can do anytime or something that I have limited access to; easy choice.

With that said, my project can basically be summed up as a combination of new media processes and traditional, fine art finishings. What I’m envisioning as my final project is a series of prints, and a few bronze sculptures. The prints will be data visualizations from any sort of data set, a few from music, perhaps some sort of census data or what have you. The data will be processed with code that I write, in programs like Processing or Flash, then finalized as a digital illustration which I will take to a 4-axis mill to cut into some wood blocks, and finally I’ll use those blocks to pull some woodblock prints. I might also do some intaglio printmaking and screenprinting, but we’ll see about that. The bronze sculpture will be based on waveform from some sort of audio source. I plan on making two sculptures, one utilizing a laser cutter and the other using rapid-prototyping.

The final result of the project will be taking new media art which is generally considered “throw away” art, that is to say, it isn’t exactly desired or collectable as you see with the traditional mediums in the fine arts world, and then transforming it into something desirable. Basically taking digital art and giving it more “credibility” by transforming it into “fine art.” With this project I hope to further my knowledge of programming, data visualization, and the boundary between digital art and fine art.

Now is the time to let my inner geek shine through into this world paint, pencils, pigments, and metals.

A few weeks ago the University of Michigan School of Art & Design hosted the very impressive graphic design exhibition The Graphic Imperative, an exhibition covering posters for peace, social justice, and the environment from 1965-2005 from around the world. It was one of the first all-graphic design exhibitions I’ve been to, it was also the first shows I’ve been to where the theme wasn’t just art for art’s sake. It was a very powerful show indeed; each piece spoke to some very important world issue, everything from AIDS to tolerance to war.

Before the exhibition officially opened Elizabeth Resnick, co-curator and Associate Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, gave a little presentation introducing the exhibition.

The next day I went and sat in on a little early-morning coffee and bagels breakfast discussion with Elizabeth Resnick, two of my professors, a few grad students, and another undergrad. After the bagels had been eaten I had the chance to have a little portfolio review; I got some great feedback on my portfolio.

Pretty snazzy event overall!

Jeffery Zeldman hits the nail on the head with his latest essay. I really suggest that everyone take a few moments and read it over, even you non-web designers; it’s a smart article that while relatively brief, covers the important things about web design so that even those that don’t speak XHTML can understand things.

I meant to write about this some time ago but things have been rather busy lately. Anyway, a few weeks back as part of the University of Michigan School of Art & Design Distinguished Visitor Series lectures (damn that’s a long title!) Ellen Lupton came to give a talk to the entire Art School body plus anyone from the public that was interested. Her lecture was entertaining, funny, a bit racy, and short (a welcome rarity among many long-winded, boring lectures). From what I hear the Q&A afterwards was even better than the lecture itself, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend due to another class coming up.

Anyway, Ellen Lupton recieved the AIGA Medal the previous night, in New York, for her fabulous contributions to the visual design world. And the day after the lecture, the Umich AIGA Student Group Board was able to obtain two or so hours to meet with Ellen to have a little portfolio review. To have a portfolio review with such a highly regarded designer is a rare event indeed.

We sat down with Ellen at 10am in the senior studios and talked a bit before delving into our portfolios; we talked of her newest book in progress and what it was like to receive the AIGA Medal. Three of us had a pretty well-rounded portfolio to show, one was just beginning to assemble her portfolio, and one was just there to take it all in. She had some pretty good, rather constructive, things to say about each of our portfolios.

Personally I had a decent reaction, but she did criticize the typography my business card as being “amateurish,” which admittedly it is. To be fair it is over 2 years old and I had never taken a typography class before this semester. Also, she commented that my portfolio website is rather plain and boring. I explained that it’s minimalist, but she said that I gave it a bit more depth it’d be a lot better. And guess what? She’s right. Not that that opinion was exactly rocket science but she hit the nail on the head. Goes to show outside opinions on projects are totally helpful, which isn’t that the whole point of a portfolio review to begin with?!

I was asked recently to introduce Helvetica to an auditorium of folk at the University of Michigan Helvetica Screening (sponsored by UMMA, University of Michigan School of Art & Design, University of Michigan AIGA Student Group, and AIGA Detroit). I happily agreed and last night I made my way through a completely packed auditorium (the isles were full as well and people stood outside the doorways in the halls to watch) to introduce myself, the sponsors, Craig Steen the president of AIGA Detroit, and finally introduce the film itself to get things rolling.

The movie itself is amazing; it’s very well produced. The interviews are very interesting, insightful, and overall extremely funny. These interviewees are leaders in their fields and while they are all respected for their work, a lot of them have outrageously contrasting viewpoints as far as typography and “good design” goes. It certainly is a group of very opinionated designers. Seeing two renowned designers such as Massimo Vignelli (whom I just wrote about) and Erik Spiekermann get so worked up over this one little ubiquitous font is really interesting, though I think Spiekermann would win if they came to fisticuffs over the matter (being 16 years his junior).

After the film we facilitated discussion to a smaller audience on the opinions expressed in the movie and on the movie itself. Some interesting points and questions were raised.

For our first UM AIGA Student Group event it was an amazing turnout and super successful. This movie is definitely a must see, but good luck finding it at your local Blockbuster.

The other night I had the opportunity to attend a lecture given by legendary modernist designer Massimo Vignelli. It was very interesting to hear this guy who’s been in the industry for over 50 years now talk about all the projects he’s been involved with, from when he worked with Venini in Milan to his work with Bloomindales, the National Park Service, American Airlines, and The New York Subway System.

Massimo divided his lecture into groups of 5 years, and the beginning of each section he had a cute little black and white of his wife and himself. Massimo really injects a lot of humor into his stories; his pretty strong Italian accent and old-man behavior lend to some funny on-stage happenings.

Over the two hours of lecture I jotted down some things that Massimo had said here and there. Here are a few of the notes I took; things he said, advice, and a few random out-of-context sentences. It should be noted though that Massimo is an unapologetic, opinionated, modernist and some of the things he says definitely aren’t for everyone.

I see graphic design as the orginization of information that is semantically correct, syntactically consistant, pragmatically understandable, visually powerful, intellectually intelligent, and above all timeless.

Don’t trust market research, do what you want.

How can people judge design if [they don't know|it never existed before].

If you can’t find it, design it.

Have imagination, have courage, be fast.

If you listen to the manufacturer you’ll still be making mickey mouse trays.

Stay away from miserable design.

The grid is a lion, and you are the grid tamer. If you stay too long in the grid, the grid will eat you.

Look at my pants!

Luck is very important, you should be lucky.

Never work with middle management, work with the president. Middle management is afraid of losing their jobs.

Adding is stupid, subtracting is genius.

At the end of the lecture I stayed behind for a few minutes to have a short word with Kely Salchow, the AIGA Detroit Education Chair, and of course, Massimo. I had also brought along Massimo’s book, Vignelli: From A to Z, which I had a copy of in my library in the hopes that he’d be so nice as to autograph it, which he did.