EXPERIMENTING WITH APPROACHES TO IDEATION
Susan C. Merritt
California State University

During the spring 2002 semester, I taught an Experimental Topics course that focused on typography. My goal was to use various approaches to reinforce innovation and to help students generate ideas and develop unique concepts to typical assignments. Different writing exercises were introduced in three different assignments in order to bring an individual perspective to the work by connecting students with personal experiences, emotions, and their imagination: 1) writing about memories; 2) completing a story begun by someone else; and 3) defining an unfamiliar phrase and developing content based on the assigned meaning. A tape recorded reading of the writing allowed students to hear the tone and inflection in their voices and to later code the text based on these oral cues, much like an actor prepares a script. This analysis required that students assign visual emphasis and hierarchy to the text before determining the form of the solution and expressing meaning through typography. Students were encouraged to think of the letters and words as actors on a stage and consider visual dialogue, point of view, characters, and setting. I would like to present the results of three assignments from this class and share student reactions to this approach, as well as my observations on the affect of this methodology: 1) typographic solutions to a personal narrative based on a memory; 2) book dust jacket layouts whose stories are based on posted announcements found within the everyday environment, such as a flyer stapled to a campus bulletin board or a hand-rendered garage sale sign on a piece of cardboard box, all of which were produced by non-designers and often used vernacular language; and 3) a 12-page plus cover booklet whose content derives from the phrase "Typographic Landscape."

 

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