booksartlanguagelogicambiguityscienceteaching

cover of issue 02 of BALLAST (1985)

actual frame from a silent film

Question: So how did BALLAST begin?  

Answer: In the late 1960s, when I (of all people) was drafted into the US Marine Corps, I found that some of the officers, while cruel and unusual, could also be terribly funny. One of my favorites was a height-impaired captain, a George Gobel look-alike, who was the company adjutant when I was in Hawaii. He was hilarious—always. One day a top-ranking officer came to our company (a Marine general), and this adjutant sent word that I should report to his office immediately. As I stood frozen at attention (awed by the mere presence of such a distinguished warrior), the captain turned to him and said, “General, the sergeant here is a very curious specimen. He is college-educated, and, as a result, is completely unable to answer any question with a simple yes-or-no answer.” And then, turning to me, he asked, “Isn’t that true, Sergeant?” After a measured pause, I slowly and thoughtfully answered, “Well, not entirely, Sir. You see, there’s this and that and that and that…” and of course, to his delight, I droned on for a couple of minutes. more>>>

cover of issue 01 of BALLAST (1985)

Tony Drehfal Engraving | Braiding Sweetgrass

Braided Sweetgrass © Tony Drehfal

Above In recent years, an old friend and fellow artist, Tony Drehfal from Nashotah WI, has become a devotée and skilled practitioner of one of our favorite art forms, wood engraving. He recently produced an image of strands of sweetgrass that had been braided by his wife, artist Jeanne Debbink. By the fortuitous meeting of minds, it has now been used as the cover of the Japanese edition of a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, titled BRAIDING SWEETGRASS: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (as shown below). You can learn more about Tony and his extraordinary prints at various online sites, including this one, and this one, and this one as well. And of course on Instagram.

Cover of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Designer Jessica Barness Is e'stäneSHiNG

Jessica Barness, Kent State University

Jessica Barness is prolific and e'staneSHiNG. See site above. Latest publications include special issue of Visible Language (Critical Making: Design and the Digital Humanities) and Emigré Magazine Index in July 2016 issue of Design and Culture: The Journal of the Design Studies Forum.

Talk by Robert Abbott | Context Digital

Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa

Talk by Red Bull Filmmaker Nick Schrunk

Bald Eagles Galore Right Here in River City

Photo © Mary Snyder Behrens (2015)

Above We live on a small five-acre "farm" in northeast Iowa, with the nearest river about 15 miles away. Yet, we have bald eagles almost daily now, perched in the trees along our back property line, away from the road. One per day is common, but for the past several days, we've had three at a time (mature, with white heads), sitting atop the trees all day, and sometimes throughout the night. Here's one, photographed from the moving car, which was feeding on a rabbit in a ditch beside the road. About 90 minutes northeast of here, in Decorah IA, is a popular online "eagle cam."

UNI Graphic Design Portfolio Night | 2014

Poster © Sara Heffernen 2014

Above Poster and information about this year's annual Graphic Design Portfolio Night at the University of Northern Iowa.

•••

Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being. New York: Van Nostrand, 1968—

I learned from her and others like her that a first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting, and that, generally, cooking or parenting or making a home could be creative while poetry need not be; it could be uncreative.

Amazing Game Parodies

Copyright © Andy Snitker

Copyright © Aaron Van Fossen

Copyright © Mackenzie Pape

Copyright © Rhiannon Rasmussen

Copyright © Rob Bauer

Copyright © Travis Tjelmeland

A few days ago, in two sections of a course called Graphic Design I, at the University of Northern Iowa, we had an initial critique of the students' solutions to a game parody problem. The problem was essentially this: Using the rules and game components of the code-breaking game called MasterMind, design a new version of the game that has some kind of narrative theme.

Shown above are a few of the finest designs, solutions that I find amazing. Remember that this is only the second problem in the course, and in some cases the students have had very limited computer experience and even less in graphic design. 

About thirty students submitted their work, and a number of others were also very strong, but needed some further adjustment. Everyone now has an additional week to make those adjustments and/or to go back to the drawing board.

Student achievements at this level make teaching well-worth all its challenging days.

Jorunn Musil | Juicebox Interactive

Book cover design (2008) Jorunn Musil

I have often wondered: what would I prefer to be, a teacher or a parent? Having taught for more than forty years without having been a parent, I think I prefer to be what I am. Parental commitments are never-ending, largely under-appreciated, and all too frequently painful (unbearably so at times, for sure).

In contrast, teachers are so fortunate. Our commitment to any one student is brief, while the illusion of having contributed to a young person's success—when and if a student excels—can remain in ones memory for decades, and in fact can even continue to grow, if a former student then moves on to other, greater accomplishments on his or her own.

I have so many memories of that kind. And in part they remain vivid because I also have thousands (thousands!) of slides, prints, publications, and digital image files of work that was made by my students in class.

Above is one example: it's the front cover (dust jacket) of a book by Geraldine Schwarz (pertaining to Norwegian immigration in Iowa) titled Our Natural Treasure: Genevieve Kroshus (South Bear Press, 2008). Not just the dust jacket, but the entire book (every aspect of it) was designed and prepared for printing by Jorunn Musil, who was at that time an undergraduate in one of my graphic design courses at the University of Northern Iowa.

There were twenty students in that class, each of whom submitted a proposal for how they might design the book, inside and out, and in the end, Jorunn's design was selected. Later, she went on to many more achievements (including a long list of student awards), earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2010, then embarked on a highly successful career as a web designer.

And now she has taken an even more ambitious step—earlier this year, she and a couple of partners launched their own, new digital design agency in downtown Des Moines, called Juicebox Interactive. Here is the company website, as well as a feature on Jorunn herself.

Schedule Posted for UNI Design Conference

Click here for complete schedule

Available online is the complete schedule of events for ENVISIONING DESIGN: Education, Culture, Practice, a two-day series of presentations, panels, films and exhibits for design professionals, design educators, students and alumni. Events begin late Friday afternoon and evening, April 26, and continue throughout the day until 4:00 pm on Saturday, April 27, 2013.

Keynote speakers include designer Sang-Duck Seo, graphic design professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who will focus on various aspects of his experiences in design and design education (7:00 pm on Friday), and Claudia Covert, research scholar and librarian at the Fleet Library, Rhode Island School of Design, who will discuss that school's collection of 455 WWI dazzle camouflage plans, made by designers and artists (11:00 am on Saturday).

All events will be held in the Kamerick Art Building on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls. The conference is open to the public. Everyone is invited, and there is no charge for attendance. For complete information click here.

Book Review | Graphic Design Process

Cover of Graphic Design Process (2012)

Graphic Design Process: From Problem to Solution
by Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell
Laurence King Publishing, London, UK, 2012
192 pp., illus. Paper, £19.95
ISBN: 978-1-85669-826-9.

...
 
A solution to a design problem (a poster, book or web design) is a noun: it is a tangible, knowable thing. But the process it develops from is closer to a verb. It is made up of constantly flowing events (like William James’ “stream of consciousness”) and is typically so faint, non-linear, and elusive that we hardly know it’s going on, much less how to grasp and define it.

While its authors admit to the challenge, this book makes a valiant attempt to shed light on the perpetually “moving target” of problem solving in design (a subject that’s closely related, of course, to innovation in any discipline), and it does so in a clever way. It does it by purposely looking aside, not unlike how stars appear more clearly at times by looking at them indirectly. It introduces 20 case studies, by discussing the widely varying work of design teams and designers from throughout the world, by talking with those designers (about their influences, work strategies and beliefs), and by looking for evidence of the process itself, however that might be discernible from thumbnail sketches, experimental studies, preparatory models, and revision proofs.

The works in the book are highly diverse, in part because graphic design is no longer as tightly defined as it was. Today, as the authors remind us, it “spans many media, offers exposure to endless subject material, and reaches into countless other disciplines for inspiration.” Even more distinctions arise because “there is no single way to conduct a design practice” and “every project demands its own way of working.”

The structure of this book reflects the often-bewildering manner in which problems progress toward solutions, sometimes by loopy, meandering routes. The book begins by focusing on two widely shared initial concerns, “research” and “inspiration” (which can and do take many forms), and concludes with “collaboration.” Propped up by these structural bookends are four other sections that deal with more specific means for exploring potential solutions: “drawing,” “narrative,” “abstraction,” and “development.”

What struck the authors (they are teachers as well as designers) is how seemingly little agreement they found among the 23 designers, whose primary zones of concurrence were three: “[T]he busier a designer is, the more ideas mix in the mind for inventive solutions; ideas usually come when a designer least expects them; and exposure to visual art at a young age, through a relative, teacher, or friend, opened a path to design.” more…

Versluis | Behrens Collaborative Bugs

Yellow Jacket Digital Collage (2012) © David Versluis & Roy R. Behrens

Many months ago, coincident with the New Year 2012, my fine friend David Versluis (a Dutch Master) and I decided to try something. He has a collection of Iowa bugs (dead ones) of which he made exquisite scans at high resolution. He began to send me the scan files, one at a time, with the challenge that I should respond to them by beginning to build a digital montage, using Adobe Photoshop. I could do whatever I liked. Then I would pass that back to him, in response to which he'd make a move—and pass it back to me again. And so on, usually with five or six back-and-forth turns, until we mutually came to suspect that the work was finished. So that's how we proceeded—with a beetle, a cicada, a dragon fly, and other creatures, including (here) a hornet (which, in the end, was discovered to be not a hornet but a yellow jacket wasp). I can't recall how many of these montages we made, but in a few short weeks we ended up with a substantial and interesting series. Posted above is a gif (pronounced jiff) animation of the stages in our process for the collaborative yellow jacket (the stages are not in the order, I think, in which the piece evolved). The final stage for this montage (which was recently selected for a national juried exhibition) is posted here.

The Wonderful Woman I Live With

Mary Snyder Behrens on Etsy

James Watson: Avoid Dumb People

Dust jacket of Mastery, designed by Bill Stanton

From an interview with Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist James D. Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) in Joan Evelyn Ames, Mastery: Interviews with Thirty Remarkable People (Portland OR: Rudra Press, 1997), p. 69—

My chief piece of advice to a young person is go to a place where people are bright. That is, avoid dumb people—those people who can't give anything to you—and turn to people who are brighter than yourself.

Spot Check

Here, an especially curious note from Henry Miller, To Paint Is To Love Again. New York: Grossman, 1968, p. 7. See also Miller's thoughts about book design at A Tribute to Merle Armitage—

What is more intriguing than a spot on the bathroom floor which, as you sit emptying your bowels, assumes a hundred different forms, figures, shapes? Often I found myself on my knees studying a stain on the floor—studying it to detect all that was hidden at first sight.