I’m about 8 classes into giving a 12 class graphic design course. I’ve had a load of client work this week and haven’t got my lecture started for next week yet and I don’t have a clue what I’m going to talk about and do. Bah.
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Get them to do Brian Eno’s oblique strategies. Worked for me in the past when I’ve set one day projects as a visiting lecturer.
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Not stoked , was only there 2 weeks ago .
End of an era
Be there next week, was my local in BCN for over a year.
Did that in week 1, haha. I’ve gone with propaganda / PR / greenwashing and the importance of doing design work for social good. I think I talk too much though, hardly anybody answers questions with any level of confidence and they just kind of sit there in stunned silence. I have to shoehorn Factory Records, skateboarding and possibly Designers Republic in there at some point, as I’ve managed to drop them all in to every lecture so far, as subtle as a brick.
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Grid systems, Swiss graphic design from the 50s and 60s and the importance of neutral fonts with great clarity? Tell them about how and why those sans-serif fonts are used in most airports and for road signs?
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Ian Anderson lives round the corner from me.
[/Cool story bro]
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Little Parallel best of:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CzPNETDtVHY/?igshid=Y2NkYjk0MDhjYg==
Btw my Spanish mate who owns a shop there said it might not be as apocalyptic as it looks for parallel as the proposed revamp has loads of skate stuff in it 
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That’s good to hear , it is a bit of a homeless area at the moment, but not that bad . Will be interesting to see what they do if they keep it skating
You can’t beat a bit of Müller-Brockmann.
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Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir’s work on British road signs is always an inspiration. True to the ideals of modernism and beautifully humanist at the same time.
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I’ve really noticed this in the past few years of doing talks at art colleges. Students seem really passive and reluctant to have an opinion which makes crits excruciating. It feels more like a school-age pupil-teacher dynamic.
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One of best spots in the world
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Interesting all those extra areas , wonder if this is the plan for the future redevelopment of Macba and relocation of skaters to this new set up ?
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Thanks, but that’s all ABD!! Also went heavy into Otl Aicher and Munich 72 on another lecture, along with all the usual Swiss lads, such as Josef Muller Brockman and Massimo Vignelli.
Thanks for this, I’ll investigate for another week.
Hoping I can make it easy enough to drop in some classic Russian 1930s propaganda posters, Uncle Sam, Lord Kitchener, etc, along with Edward Bernays, Adam Curtis, Century of the Self, BP, Deepwater Horizon, Trump’s NFTs and all sorts of other stuff. Then they make a protest or propaganda poster.
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Definitely an idea for a later class. I’ve been avoiding logos as I suck at doing them or talking about them.
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Rather than concentrating on teaching the past and what has been done, you could definitely try to talk about the future of the students. A very open and free topic of discussion. Partial reality check and partial inspiration. Talk about trends, integrity, when to follow and when to trailblaze. What people expect in a commercial world and how to try and teach the commercial world that what they have to offer is viable. Not everyone has the capacity to trailblaze and make a mark and it’s ok to tread old ground and reuse. Both have room in the future of design and at various levels. Ai is still using human based ideas and will for a long time, even if they are seemingly creating something new. It’s not hopeless to be in design, not completely anyway.
Very generic idea, sorry… but I think it’s something people need to cover as well as teaching history. History can turn many people off unless they find that one style that inspires and then the conundrum of letting them explore that or nurturing what they might have already inside. There will be alot of lost people in that lecture, no idea who they are and what they’ll do with their ideas, if they even have any yet.
Babble!
What about talking about the opposite of those Swiss lads, I mean people who don’t know what they’re doing? Outsider art has evolved a lot in the last 80 years. Artwork that would have been considered outsider art at some point is simply art these days. The problem is money, once again, as those artists often have no proper perception of money or of the monetary value of their work, and often get robbed.
I wrote a thesis about the recognition artists with general learning disablilities get and the impact this recognition has on their lives as artists and citizens. It’s in French but I got about 8 pages about the evolution of society, art and outsider art during the last century. I could give you key points, there’s loads to talk about (evolution of our perception of mental disabilities, influence of national socialism, horror vacui, new ways to express political views in the 60s, influence of punk rock, Keith Haring, and so on, I even threw some Bourdieu theories in there) and you link that with graphic design.
