Packet 1 due today

Trunk & tusks

Today I'll turn in my first packet. It will include four PDFs capturing what I've been working on for the past month:

• My reading notes, captured in a Josef Muller-Brockmann-style grid booklet
• A classical book design
• A modern manual design
• A book with the first 50 of 100 iterations of elephants that I have been working on

I have learned a lot through the work I have done so far. I wanted it to feel foundational, and it has. My big questions now are mostly about what comes next.

I'm inspired by a 1998 essay by Lorraine Wild in the Armstrong book, called "The Macrame of Resistance." Wild discusses craft as the combination of the theory required to understand concepts and the knowledge gained by accumulating experience and mastery.

"When craft is put into the framework of graphic design, this might constitute what is meant by the "designer's voice"--that part of a design that is not industriously addressing the ulterior motives of a project, but instead follows the inner agenda of the designer's craft. This guides the 'body of work' of a designer over and beyond the particular goal of each project."

Wild references a couple of writers, including Peter Dormer and Malcolm McCullough as well as artists like WA Dwiggins, Alvin Lustig, Imre Reiner, Sister Corita Kent (whom Matt quoted, movingly, in our convocation), Big Daddy Roth, and Ed Fella. I'd like to pursue learning more about these artists from a craft perspective and reading the Dormer and McCullough she cites, and see where that takes me.