Summer09 / And the livin' is easy

This summer began with days of sleep to catch up on, long lists of projects to complete and a few meandering lines across my calendar indicating exciting journeys. It was a time to get re-inspired and re-connected with life. One of my plans of attack to achieve this goal included revitalizing another passion of mine, photography. Check out my photoblog here to get a glimpse into my summer happenings, if you like. [...]

Summer 09 / NCSU Design Camp

My fellow classmate, Liese Zahabi and I (along with our awesome TA, Helen Dear) took on the challenge of introducing 80 high school students to graphic design (16 a day for 5 days) during week three of NC State's Design Camp this summer. What did I learn? Well, it is a whole lot of fuss... but definitely worth it.

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For three separate weeks throughout the summer NCSU hosts a Design Camp for high school students in the area and across the country. It is designed as a way to introduce students with interests in design (general or specific) to five varying design disciplines; Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Industrial Design, Animation and Graphic Design. The students in groups of 16 spend a full day exploring in each design discipline rotating through each by the end of the week.

The theme of this year's design camp was "The Music Industry" and activities and projects completed within each design discipline were to relate to this theme. For Graphic Design Liese and I decided to start the day off with an intro to graphic design as well as an visual intro into what happens when graphic design and music collide. Then we moved into a activity in which we explore how music can influence the visual. We played three different pieces of music and the students worked at one of three stations for the entirety of one song then switched to the next station. One station contained tools for creation using just typographic elements, another just image elements and the last just color.

Next we wanted to see how an existing visual design can prompt a whole new design through the art of mashing up different elements. Each student began with one of the compositions they had already designed in the last exercise. This time instead of responding to the music, we wanted them to respond to the visual design that they saw. They were to create a brand new design—using elements from other student’s work, elements from their original composition, and any new elements they wished to create using the tools from the previous exercise.

Critique and Lunch Break at the fabulous cafeteria (seriously we had soft serve everyday)

For our afternoon project the students were creating posters and album packaging designs for a fictitious band or music group. They began by pulling two random words out of a hat, then took some time for individual brainstorming involving a creative brief and sketching. Next they discussed their ideas in small groups to develop them even further then got to work utilizing the same tools we had provided for the mornings activities. The pieces were created by working directly onto a 11 x 17 sheet of paper then scanned in and the students had an opportunity to set type on the computer. They were printed and comped up for the following morning's critique. The work was truly incredible.

You can check out some pictures from my flickr set here.
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