Creative Engagement
Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon
Drawing Feminism: Women in Graphic Design during the 1960s Countercultural Waves View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Juliana F. Duque
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of women graphic designers within the American 1960s countercultural movements. Often neglected, the work of women such as Bonnie MacLean, Mari Tepper, and Donna Wallace-Cohen, contributed profoundly to the outcome of psychedelic graphic design. Their compositions evoke a deep connection with transcendental experiences, trance states, shamanic rituals, and mother earth, combined into innovative pictorial languages. The many posters and flyers addressed not only the west coast music scene but also brought awareness to the political and social issues of the time, including those specific to women, such as the access to birth control pills. This research explores how women navigated an environment that, although countercultural and revolutionary, was somehow conservative in what comes to gender, being mostly dominated by male figures. The methodology reflects a qualitative approach conveyed through literature review, documentary research, and content analysis. The study suggests that the work of some of these women is sometimes still misattributed or left behind, especially when comparing it to the better-known male counterparts. However, their work was able to challenge the praxis of graphic design while enhancing the power of women through creativity.
Profitable Typography: Involvement, Playfulness, and Unexpected Outcomes View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mohammad Shahid
Typography is playing a major role in modern-day communication and dressing up the languages and individual thoughts as per individuals' desires and need. In bookish terms, we call it expressive typography. Designers and typographers have used this aspect to exaggerate the meaning and impact of letters. Sometimes, because of the different treatment given to the letters, one may hear, test, smell, see and feel the typography using different sensorial organs. To achieve the same, designers and young students are experimenting in all possible ways by playing with letter form, colour and texture. The unconventional approaches have also provided lots of opportunities to make typography learning more playful and engaging. Through classroom experimentation and available case studies, this study shows how typography can be made an interesting subject of enquiry for school children, and undergraduate and postgraduate students, making it engaging for both instructors as well as students.
Why We Are Delivering Stories Differently: Authors as Writers, Artists, and Designers View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cindy Shearer
For years, as a writer/artist, I have been curious about the evolution of the book—and, as technology requires us to be more fluent visually, there are more books of text and image published, graphic novels and memoirs, but also hand-made books, works from small and independent presses, and, more recently, in commercial publishing. I often experience these books as microcosms and mirrors of our cultures, and I see them as blurring the boundary and/or further linking the relationship between art and design. Some are telling us stories in new ways, and, I believe, are also a response to our need for them to be delivered to us differently. About her book Radioactive, writer, artist, designer, Lauren Redniss says she “designed everything: front cover, back cover, spine, endpages, all the pages in between. It was important to me that the design of Radioactive be as carefully considered as the written narrative and the artwork—to echo the story’s themes and to layer the book with meaning.” In my presentation, I’ll draw on work by Redniss, Jona Frank, Marian Bantjes, Maira Kaman, Christian Marclay/Steve Beresford, Siglio Press and others. I suggest that as technology makes us more visually aware and dependent, the joining of art and design in book-making offers us new ways of engaging stories relationally and (a) helps us integrate the reality of our multi-faceted, multi-layered lives and (b) gives us moments of tangible relief from the ongoing, unrelenting intangibility (and the insecurity it evokes) within our everyday experience.
