Category: historical

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briefs historical

One-Sentence-Briefs

Some of the assignments presented in the book Taking a Line for a Walk (2014) are extremely short and consist in just one sentence. Here are some of them:

Surprise
Design and make a book from any material that couldn’t/wouldn’t/shouldn’t be used to make a book.
Neil McGuire, Glasgow School of Art, 2014.

Identity
Design stationery for your own graphic design office.
Alvin Eisenmann, Yale School of Art, 1982.

Poster problem
Choose a theme and design a poster for each of these categories: graphic poster / typographic poster / photographic poster.
Kohei Sugiura, HfG Ulm, 1964.

A new skill
Your assignment is to learn a new skill. Present your process and/or outcome in class in printed form.
Yotam Hadar, Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, 2011.

Sustainable information
Inform us about a company that claims to be green, but is actually “greenwashing”.
Joshua Trees, Central Saint Martins London, 2011.

Printing Machine
Design a drawing/printing/image-making machine, then use your machine to make a set of drawings or prints about a subject of your choice.
Unknown author, Central Saint Martins London, 2004.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
Prove this visually.
Rebecca and Mike, Central Saint Martins London, 200o.

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briefs historical

Collaborative short film on Photography – HfG Ulm

This assignment is taken from the student publication «Output», which was created by students of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm.

In the year 1961-1962, starting in October 1961, the school launched a curriculum centered on film, inside the sector «Visual communication».

The brief

On the first day, the students received the task of creating a short film on the topic of “photography”. The film is divided in 5 parts, which have each a duration of 2 minutes. Each sequence is made by one or two students. The duration of the whole film (with start/end titles) should be 12 minutes.

  • Sequence 1: It started with Daguerre. Development of photography, from the beginnings until today. Not a history but a depiction of the progress made.
  • Sequence 2: Light and shadow. The attempt to observe the original meaning of photography: “to paint with light”.
  • Sequence 3: The fixed moment. The opposition between a subject in motion and a fixed image.
  • Sequence 4: Extremes. Photography allows to visualise areas that aren’t accessible to the human eye (x-rays, ultraviolet or infrared photography). The use of composition, lighting and camera angles to create subjectivity.
  • Sequence 5: Manipulations. Photography as an instrument of power and influence, for political or commercial motives.

Schedule

  • October-December: writing of the script. Preparations of the shooting: a) Search for subjects. b) Reproduction of material from books and magazines. c) Gathering of props and models. d) Organisation of the schedule.
  • January–February: setting up the shooting plan. 3 weeks of shooting, at Kodak/Stuttgart, in the observatory/Heidelberg, at Zeiss/Oberkochem, and at the German Museum/Munich.
  • March–June: 1) shooting of the titles. 2) Raw and final cut. 3) Sound recordings: a) Sound effects. b) Music. c) Commentary and slogans.
  • 26. October 1962: Premiere of the short film in the aula of the HfG Ulm.

Sources

  • Alfred Jungraithmayr, « Beiträge zum Thema Film an der Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm », Output, no 14,‎ October 1962, p. 4-24
  • Erika Fortner, «Bericht über die Filmabteilung und den ersten Film an der HfG», Output, no 14,‎ October 1962, p. 31-39 (PDF document)
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historical

Central Saint Martins

Excerpt of an interview with Nina Paim, on the archived website of the 26th Biennale of design in Brno (2014).

BB : You came across hundreds of assignments while preparing the exhibition. Do you think there are good assignments and bad assignments? Do you have a favourite assignment?

Nina Paim : Perhaps the most surprising discovery was a series of assignments from Central Saint Martins, which I received through different sources, mainly from Maziar Raein and Richard Doust (who both taught at the CSM). It turns out Saint Martins has been keeping a record of all assignments by asking teachers to fill out a “template form” containing a reason for setting/purpose, learning objectives, the brief itself, learning outcomes, schedule and codes (the latter is still a cryptic category to me). Every two weeks all tutors were asked to put up two new briefs on the “wall of briefs” (which will generate a pool of approximately 20 to 25 briefs). Students would then choose one or more briefs from the wall and attend the briefings and crits lead by that teacher. Students could do as many or as few briefs as they wanted – they were evaluated by their portfolios at the end of the school year. It’s a very nice collection and the assignments themselves are very instigating: one could do an exhibition only with those!

Pictures: two examples of Project Briefs from CSM: “Deface a symbol of our time”, by Richard Doust, 1973; and “Atrophy? no, invention”, by Geoff Fowle, 2004-05. Depicted in Taking a Line for a Walk, 2014.

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historical

Chip Lord and found footage

The Wikipedia article dedicated to Chip Lord (of Ant Farm) describes his teaching at UC Santa Cruz:

The students make various projects, including an appropriation and recontextualization of footage from Hollywood and television. Another project requires students to use found footage to create a central theme such as time (and temporality), art that helps the economy, intervention on the status quo, desire, and darkness.

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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)
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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 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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historical

twenty variations of a small size newspaper ad

In the 2014/04 issue of TM-RSI, Helmut Schmid writes a recollection:

My first typographic exercice under Emil Ruder was twenty variations of a small size newspaper ad. Eight of them were shown in November 1961 in Graphisches abc, a german magazine for apprentices of the graphic trade.

Categories
briefs historical

A square, 30 cm by 30 cm

An example of Kandinsky’s assignments during his teaching at the Bauhaus. Cited in Teaching at the Bauhaus (Wick, 2000, p. 201), from the notes of a participant in Kandinsky’s course:

In Kandinsky’s class we were given a real vacation assignment, but it isn’t bad. A square, 30 cm by 30 cm, is to be divided up into 5 by 10 cm rectangles. The following colors are to be used: 3 primary, 3 secondary, and 3 uncolored (black, white, gray). The arrangement of the colored rectangles is entirely up to you as long as they are horizontal and vertical, not diagonal. It’s also up to you how often you use each color, so long as every color is used at least once. The task is as follows:

1. emphasize the center.
2. balance top and bottom.