Assignment: Designer’s Cookbook

Influences + Lineages Beyond the Bauhaus

Over the next three weeks, as you work on your Research Presentation, we will explore the evolution of contemporary design and add to the lineage with voices often missing from the history books.

We will start by looking at the evolution of graphic design (from the Avant-Garde to Post-Modernism) by reviewing the western canon for context and weave in underrepresented designers, movements, and influences, as well as contemporary influences. The goal is to explore/develop your own design aesthetic.

Why are you drawn to one visual aesthetic over another? What are the ingredients (influences) that make up your visual style?

Together let’s make a Designer’s Cookbook (or suggest another name for this).

Over three weeks, each week you will share a 200-word post about an artist, designer, philosopher, or movement that has been left out of design history. And with example images, demonstrate how they are part of your design lineage and aesthetic.

Choose three designers or design movements that speak to you. Choose one from each time period: 1900s-1940s, 1950s-1990s, 2000s to Today. Start with some of the examples below (unless others have already taken them) but even better, find others! Then write about them for your (3) Designer’s Cookbook posts.

*For this project, please focus on commercial designers rather than visual artists.

Format

Give an overview/intro with relevant info (dates, location, significance, images, etc) and write about your selection in relation to your own work, design aesthetic, or creative ideology . See if you can locate visual lineages or connections in your own work. If you wish, include images of your work and theirs for comparison and demonstrate how they are part of your design lineage.

Create a post called “Your Title”

Add the category Student Posts > Designer’s Cookbook.

Resources

Books/Resources

• Revision Path Podcast highlighting black creatives
• BIPOC in Design, OpenLab OER by Prof. George Larkins
• BIPOC Design History
• Inclusion & Exclusion resources from COMDTheory OER
• Hispanic Women and Their Typographic Legacy
• Silas Munro, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America”
• Centered : People and Ideas Diversifying Design curated by Kaleena Sales
• Racism Untaught by Lisa E. Mercer and Terresa Moses
• An Anthology of Blackness edited by Terresa Moses and Omari Souza
• Design Social Change: Take Action, Work Toward Equity, and Challenge the Status Quo by Lesley-Ann Noel
• Searching for a Black Aesthetic in American Graphic Design, Sylvia Harris, 1998
• Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook by Dori Tunstall
• Recognize a design anthology featuring Indigenous people and people of color
• Celebrating the African-American Practitioners Absent From Way Too Many Classroom Lectures by Madeleine Morley, Eye on Design, 2018
• The Lasting Mark of Black Creatives, Emotive Brand 2021
• Where are the Black Designers 2021: Designing and Organizing for Black Liberation 2021 Conference Day 1
• Where are the Black Designers? a volunteer-run, nonprofit design advocacy organization.
• The Black Experience in Graphic Design (1968/2020) Dorothy Jackson (Print – original)
• Black Designers: Missing in Action Dr. Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller 1987 
• Why is Graphic Design 93% White? Dr. Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller 1991
• Black Designers: Still Missing in Action? Dr. Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller 2016
• Design Gets More Diverse by Alice Rawsthorn, NYTimes, 2011
• Where Are The Black Designers? Video presented by Maurice Cherry 2015