Resiliently quirky consistency
An essay…
My students just finished designing a typeface. The level of satisfaction varied as the project progressed. Some were able to see the inevitable inconsistencies that developing a system entails and others were ever so slowly working on them. With every project assigned to the students their design skills sharpen though not often at the speed and/or sharpness they desire. It is a process. For some it is also a discovery that they might not be made to become designers. The learning process is as much an emotional experience as it is intellectual. There are many factors that would make a lesson null in our minds and hearts one day and the next day we can suddenly say, aha! Especially true if we like or we don’t like the professor. How easy it is to learn from someone we respect, admire, and enjoy and how hard it is to learn from someone we do not.
One of the biggest criticisms towards academia is that students graduate with no transferable skills for the job market. Or other times, former design students lash out at their education for not learning x or y. As an academician, former junior high school teacher, and a professional, I often find these remarks unfair. Most academic programs are the product of excruciating hours of deliberation and balancing acts between the job market needs and students needing to learn how to learn. The market is over permeated with technological requirements that change faster than we can account for. Often it is hard to predict what new technological features will be developed the next day.
When I went back to college to become a designer, I did not know any of the programs my classmates were using. Those were the days of Pagemaker, Quark, Fontographer, Macromedia, and Freehand to mention a few. Add to that, coding a couple of years later. At that time, there were no tutorials, books, videos, no social media with these fun and quick how to’s, etc. I learned the programs by banging my head against the wall or the computer, calling my computer lovely names, and researching, reading, and a lot of sketching.
In graduate school with no background in coding whatsoever, I became one of two web designers at the College of Design at Iowa State University. When I said that I did not know how to code, my professor and boss handed me a book and said to learn it. Thankfully my friend, Shanshan Cui, knew a lot about coding and graciously helped me. These were also the days of creating web layouts with tables and white pixels to create spaces. It seems so long ago and yet, it is not. In little over twenty years or so, technology has creeped into our lives in a way that many of us could not have predicted. Today, some of the programs I just mentioned do not exist anymore and coding has evolved significantly. There it is again, technology changing what we need to know.
Yet, even in the seemingly unstoppable speed of technology, the most fundamental requirement to learn remains the same: learning anything is a personal and almost obsessive quest. Having the right content, readings, tutorials, resources, textbooks, and professors will do little or no good if there is not a personal and uncompromising commitment to that which we want to learn. This has been true for me. It is true for my students as well. In general, there seems to be two type of students: the ones who are laser focused and the ones who are not. Both are sitting in classes receiving content from great minds, and not all of them take advantage of it. Intellectual curiosity is not cultivated enough. Intellectual hunger is satisfied with too little. There are those who come to class as if their lives depended on it. They want more and are willing to engage their energy cultivating that curiosity and hunger. Of course there will always be external factors that in some or great measure will affect this process. However; external and/or even internal obstacles are often no match to resilience.
Resilience is a tricky attitude to teach. It is also a a tricky attitude to embrace. I want my students to love, to really love the process of making, of creating. But I also want them to fail and fail big. Because when they decide to bounce back, they have learned the value of trying again. In the course of the duration of any project, there are critique sessions and feedback. The typeface project was a lesson for them and for me. The group I have this semester enjoys large group critiques. They love to talk and to discuss things. They are taking notes. They are making efforts. I have enjoyed seeing their progress. Some even started from scratch half way throughout the project. This particular student’s work was infinitely better because of it.
Due to time constraints—we only have one semester of Typography—the typeface design project is limited to one font weight in caps along with the numbers, some typographic symbols, and punctuation. Limiting the elements of the typeface prevents the students from getting lost in the rigidity of developing a system for their typeface. Thus, they have a little more freedom and can design a quirky typeface. The caveat is that the design can be quirky but it needs to be consistently quirky.
In order to make the process less daunting I buy the students licenses to FontSelf. It is a very popular plug in for both Photoshop and Illustrator. Franz Hoffman, the founder, graciously joined us on Zoom for an orientation. I can’t overstate how much the students enjoyed this project. Even when it is only all caps and one weight, they have great satisfaction when they see their work on the screen as I am typing words (usually in a different language).
I think if I had to call this project by any other name than the Typeface Design project I would call it Resiliently quirky consistency. And because I know you want to see some examples, I am showing you a selection of this semester’s typefaces.
Warmly,
Alma
Thanks for the tip on Fontself!