Design Education

Teaching Design to Inner City Kids

By Delphine Hirasuna | December 10, 2009September 4, 2014

Design, particularly graphic design, is not a profession that most inner city kids consider, partly because many don’t know that such a profession even exists. In fact, the whole notion that somebody had made design choices about the size, color, typography, etc. of a simple sign comes as a revelation to some kids. Jessica Weiss, a student in the nonprofit Inneract Project program, explained her surprise. “I just thought, oh, someone wrote this sign. Someone wrote that sign. No, it had to be designed.”

This is exactly the lesson that Inneract Project founder Maurice Woods hoped to pass on. Woods, a senior designer at Studio Hinrichs in San Francisco, started the program in 2004 when as a graduate student in a University of Washington’s Visual Communication Design class, he got the assignment to “Use Design to Try to Change the World.” Drawing from his own experience growing up in the violent teen-gang and drug-plagued town of Richmond near San Francisco, Woods wanted to help young adolescents expand their awareness of the career options open to them.

Visual Merchandising

Urban Landscape – Hardware Window Dressing

By Delphine Hirasuna | July 15, 2009September 4, 2014

cole_5

In San Francisco, the best retail window displays can be found in one of the most unlikely places – a hardware store. With four locations in San Francisco, Cole Hardware has been serving local do-it-yourselfers since 1926. It lives by its slogan: “Hardware for the soul.” That soulful spirit is visible in its amusingly artistic window displays created by the two-women visual merchandising team – Noelle Nick and Dominique Tutwiler.

Nick, an engineer who once worked at Bechtel, and Tutwiler, who majored in illustration at San Francisco’s Academy of Art, have literally turned circular saws, toilet balls, rubber gloves and other utilitarian objects into works of art. One display, which they titled “Louvre,” presented ornately framed “recreations” of Van Gogh’s sunflowers made from yellow-rimmed circular saws in a yellow vase and Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” from the Sistine Chapel made from two rubber gloves striking an imitative pose. Benjamin Moore paint dribbled onto a canvas paid homage to Jackson Pollack’s abstract expressionist art. These window displays are not a departure from Cole’s hardware products. Nick says that they are made entirely out of products carried by Cole.

Posters

Lausanne Concert Poster

By Delphine Hirasuna | July 4, 2009September 4, 2014

Concept 2

Designer: After initial research, I focused on the oratorio theme of St. Francis. Here, the composition of the title expresses the particular cross in the shape of a “T”, called the Tau Cross, used by St. Francis and his disciples. I photographed this statue at Saint Francis of Assisi Church in San Francisco, where I live.

Client response: It is a happy musical piece, therefore, this dark brown color scheme is too sad. The vertical – horizontal type does not allow easy readability in the street. The subject should not be too esoteric.

Young people entering the design profession sometime think that the ideas of seasoned professionals never get rejected, that the design is immediately embraced by the grateful client who insists on doubling your fee because it is so awesomely good. In your dreams!! Design is not called a “process” without reason. More often, there is give-and-take, client clarification and addition of new (and often pertinent) information, analysis and refinement, and sometimes your favorite design isn’t chosen.

In this case, we asked Swiss designer Jean-Benoit Levy, who works for clients worldwide and is a member of the prestigious Alliance Graphique Internationale, if he would share the behind-the-scene reasoning of a poster he designed for a concert performance of Le Laudi di San Francesco d’Assisi for Choeur Faller in Lausanne, Switzerland. Levy has been creating the graphics for this oratorio choir group for the past three years, in collaboration with its president Jacques-Henri Addor. For this concert, Levy presented his first sketches in December of 2008 and after 16 different versions, a final design was chosen in March 2009 for the May performance. We picked five of the concepts he presented and asked him to summarize both his and his client’s response to each.