Graduate Student: Joshua Benefield
During the course of this semester, for our Design Studio course, we were tasked with creating our own projects, to address some need in society. This in and of itself was a welcome relief to the mundane task of just completing a given assignment.
My chosen learning object was to have an impact on beginning graphic design students, who can be seen on campus, with their heads down in their phones, walking away from class as soon as they are dismissed. I wondered how these students could be reached, as well as how can I help them to become better graphic designers?
The main focus of this endeavor was to reinforce those small nuggets of information about the design process, which may or may not be stressed in a design class. They may be talked about briefly, but I wanted to bring extra emphasis to those points which are so important.
Through research of the design process and consultation with peers, it was determined that I could focus on five main topics:
These topics sound simple enough to experienced designers, but they are key pieces of information that are absolutely critical to the design process, and in many cases, a foreign idea to beginning students.
So now that I have my idea, I had to center on how these would be presented, in order to reach the target audience. With so many heads buried in phones upon walking away from class and down the halls, I came to the conclusion that there could easily be a graphic device placed on the floor, which would cause pause in the student’s travel, and direct them toward a hanging wall piece, which would display the message.
This message would have the be short, concise, and easily consumable to the student, as there is a two part engagement with the piece. First the floor graphic causes pause, and secondly, the message can be consumed through the briefest of pauses.
My next order of business was to figure out an aesthetically pleasing method for designing these posters to be hung on the wall. What better method to deliver a secondary bit of knowledge, than style each of these posters in a different graphic design style?
After careful consideration I chose the following different graphic styles:
Now I just had to combine those elements together, and I would have an awesome package, but I felt that this project still needed something extra, some additional level of engagement. So it was decided through our class that maybe the best course of action would be that of some sort of take-away, or collectable to reinforce the message, and to encourage the students to seek out the rest of the five learning objects, which would be distributed across Hammond Hall and the Carlisle Fine Arts Facility.
So the takeaways morphed into two-sided cards, one side displaying the learning object, the other side displaying one sixth of a type message, that when all are collected reads “Never stop learning.
