Category: briefs

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briefs

Create a music label

In every school, there are certainly some students who produce their music, play in a band, are MC-ing, are “bedroom composers” in different music styles.

This exercice aims to develop an in-school music label that showcases those young artists and their music.

Possible outcomes:

  • Label name and brand identity
  • Logo and visual style
  • Artwork templates for releases across several formats (digital, audio cassette…)
  • Artwork templates for different release categories: album, single, EP, compilation…
  • Web presence on different platforms (Bandcamp, Soundcloud…)
  • Design a label compilation
  • Other types of media: flyers, stickers, event posters, animations for social media…

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briefs

Make a New York Times op-ed illustration in 210 minutes

An assignment posted by Rob Dobi (editorial illustrator, designer and photographer) on threads app, February 16 2026:

on my first day of teaching contemporary illustration at
RISD yesterday i had my students embrace the pure chaos timeline of making a new york times op-ed illustration within a few hours. I emailed their briefing at 1:30, sketches due at 3, finals due by 5. Everyone survived, here are a few selects.

Categories
briefs ideas

Portraits for Wikipedia

Students have to create portraits for personalities in theirs city. The portraits are to be released under an open license on the Wikipedia Commons platform, so they can be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles.

In order to find suitable persons, a search can be done on Wikidata. For instance, this query searches for living persons born in the city of Lausanne, aged less than 85 years, that have a Wikipedia page but do not have a picture.

SELECT ?personne ?personneLabel ?dateNaissance ?age
WHERE {
  ?personne wdt:P31 wd:Q5;         # être humain
            wdt:P19 wd:Q807;       # né à Lausanne
            wdt:P569 ?dateNaissance.  # date de naissance

  # Ne pas avoir d'image
  FILTER NOT EXISTS { ?personne wdt:P18 ?image }

  # Avoir au moins un article Wikipédia
  FILTER EXISTS {
    ?article schema:about ?personne;
             schema:isPartOf ?wiki.
    FILTER(CONTAINS(STR(?wiki), "wikipedia.org"))
  }

  # Exclure les personnes décédées
  FILTER NOT EXISTS { ?personne wdt:P570 ?dateDeces }

  # Exclure les personnes de plus de 85 ans
  BIND(YEAR(NOW()) - YEAR(?dateNaissance) AS ?age)
  FILTER(?age <= 85)

  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "fr,en". }
}
ORDER BY ?personneLabel

PS: this idea is quite similar to the existing Wikiportraits Project.

PPS: there’s an article by the BBC about the project, that also made me discover @badwikiphotos on Instagram.

Categories
briefs historical

Design a record cover

A historical design assignment by Tomás Maldonado, at the Ulm School of Design, presented in 1963 in the magazine Ulm 8/9.

In the second quarter of the academic year 1962/63, Tomás Maldonado set the following exercise to the first year students of the Visual Communication Department: to design a case for a 33 1/3 r.p.m. gramophone record. The students could choose from records by
Mauricio Kagel (Transicion I, Transicion II, Antithese), by Karlheinz Stockhausen (Zyklus) and by Franco Evangelisti. If prefered, however, they could design a case for a record of their own selection. The cases
could be designed either in colour or in black and white – as also the circular labels in the centres of the records.

Some of the resulting works by students:

Design: Zlatan Medtugorac (1963)
Design: Hermann Ay (1963)
Design: Hermann Ay (1963)
Design: Joseph Breuer (1963)
Design: Lothar Spree (1963)
Design: Harmut Kowalke (1963)
Design: Hansrudolf Buob (1963)
Categories
briefs historical

Ulm Exercises

Some historical design briefs from the legendary Ulm School of Design (1953-1968) were presented during a study project at the Cologne International School of Design in 2002/03, supervised by Gui Bonsiepe (who was editor of the Ulm magazine).

A website was put online in 2002/03. It is still available via the Wayback Machine. Some briefs:

Otl Aicher : Schematische Darstellung komplexer Sachverhalte

Gui Bonsiepe : Einführung in die visuelle Semantik

Tomás Maldonado : hüllen für schallplatten (ulm 8/9)

In this exercise (1962/63), students have to create an album cover for an LP. The works assigned are by composers Mauricio Kagel (Transicion I, Transicion II, Antithese), Karlheinz Stockhausen (Zyklus), and Franco Evangelisti.

Josef Müller-Brockmann : Firmentypografie (ulm 8/9)

Gui Bonsiepe : Perforationen, Topologische Übungen (ulm 17/18)

Categories
briefs historical

write a radio-play

This assignment was reverse-engineered from a project description in issue #2 of “Ulm” (1958), the magazine of the Ulm School of Design. The short article describes a team-writing experiment, that was broadcast as a radio-play.

  • Make comprehensive preparatory studies in order to shape exactly the characters of the play.
  • Compose detailed biographies, diaries, letters, dreams, and scenes of everyday life of the characters.
  • Plan the scenes.
  • Compose the material into a satiric crime story.
Categories
briefs

Bring an object

Jarret Fuller, designer and teacher, writes on his blog:

I was inspired by my conversation with Sam Jacob and adapted a framework he’s used in the writing classes he’s taught. For the first half of the class, the students had to bring in a single object, that cost no more than $30, to write about. Each week, they wrote about their object through a different lens: aesthetic/formal qualities, historical and contextual, and finally ideological. We weren’t too interested in voice yet, just how to talk about these objects and what they can tell us about design, culture, economics, etc. In the second half of the class, we used what we learned and added a variety of writing tricks to them: thinking about voice and tone, how can we play with structure, tell a new story. Throughout the semester, I was continually impressed with what the students brought — they took these objects they didn’t think they could write about and suddenly we were talking about immigration, class, identity, race, sustainability… It was so fun.

Categories
briefs historical

Recreate a label from scratch

An assignment by Inge Druckrey, described in the movie “Teaching to See” (minutes 7:04 to 8:30):

I had collected over time some beautiful old labels. So I distributed them among the students, and asked them to create a new edition. They had to:

  • recreate the letters on the label.
  • draw any image that appeared on the label.
  • prepare color-separation to have hot metal plates done.
  • mix the ink.
  • print the labels in proper registration on a small letter press.

So they learned about designing letters, they matched the letters on the original label, they designed the marks from scratch, carefully matching the same quality. They learned about color separation, how to get the individual colors on separate hot metal plates, about ink mixing, and the printing itself.

And the students loved the project, because it had a clear goal.

Note: the assignment was done before computers became available.

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briefs

Create a BookTok video

Students get assigned a literary work, and have to create a short promotional video. The aim is to get viral and improve book sales.

Note: BookTok is a subcommunity on the app TikTok that focuses on books and literature.

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briefs

explore a WordPress pattern in seven ways

This assignments is based on a blog post by WordPress theme designer Rich Tabor: Exploring WordPress as a design tool (December 2022). Rich writes:

Last week I challenged myself to take one pattern, from one theme, and morph it multiple times — only using the design controls block editor. It’s kind of like CSS Zen Garden, but without CSS — just out-of-the-box WordPress block design tooling. 

One theme. One pattern. Seven ways. No additional blocks, nor custom CSS between scenes — just designing in the good ol’ WordPress block editor.

Every font family/size, color, border, radius, image, video, and spacing value were are all added in-editor.