This workshop proposes to participants to:
- select a Wikipedia article that could benefit from an illustration.
- produce an illustrative drawing for that article.
This workshop proposes to participants to:
“Wikipedia Illustrated” was a workshop initiated by artist/illustrator Galia Offri and by designer/educator Mushon Zer-Aviv.
Host institution: Transmediale, Berlin, February 2011
During the workshop at Transmediale, images are created as illustrations for articles such as: Ash heap of history, Hikikomori, Moustache …
Links:
Host institution: Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons the New School for Design, New York
Timeframe: October-November, 2012 (three workshop sessions)
A proposal by Michael Mandiberg, building on the work of Wikipedia Illustrated and others. Illustrators and graphic designers are invited to join Michael Mandiberg to create images and illustrations for environmentally oriented Wikipedia pages.
Our goal will be to use visual language to explain complex concepts without over simplifying them. This could range from the factual, such as diagrams of biological or chemical phenomena, maps of environmental issues/disasters, or charts, to the poetic or expressive.
Links:
Host institution: Eracom, Lausanne
Timeframe: half day (4 hours)
During a half day workshop, a group of five students has created portraits of major figures of swiss design history, in order to illustrate their articles on Wikipedia: Karl Gerstner, Armin Hofmann, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Emil Ruder, Rosmarie Tissi, Wolfgang Weingart
Participants: Sophie Berry, Teo Dolci, Nelson Tavares, Samantha Trinkler, Marina Volet.
Links:
Use the basics of HTML to make a personal website.
Source: Sara Shields, web design and publishing course, Texas State University.
In this assignment, students create their own version of the CSS Zen Garden.
Source: Scott Granneman, teaching at Washington University, St. Louis.
Observation: it could be interesting to do an exercice that is “similar to it but on a component level”. For an example, see the article “Same HTML, Different CSS” by Ahmad Shadeed.
Rosmarie Tissi, in an interview by Louise Paradis (TM Research Archive), describes an assignment for a workshop she directed at Yale in 1991:
For the Yale workshop I thought of something simple and asked the class to make a composition with their initials. An easy task but some of the results were almost paintings; some very esoteric.
A design problem by Ellen Lupton, from Graphic Design: The New Basics (2008):
Source: original brief by Manuel Schmalstieg, February 2013.
Participants design a specimen book of typefaces. They select a number of interesting typefaces, and create specimen pages. The pages are assembled into a book, which may be published using a print-on-demand service.
Typical steps during this brief:
Bibliography: to give the students a frame of reference and inspiration, it’s a good idea to show them some specimen books. Maybe your school has some of them in the library. A few examples: specimen books by designers (Jean-Baptiste Levée, Radim Pesko), the iPad app of FontFont, the Free Font Index, books by Fred Smeijers…
First implementation of the “Specimen Books” workshop.
Host institution: HEAD Geneva.
Instructor: Manuel Schmalstieg
Timeframe: 18-22 February 2013, five days (ca 40 hrs).
Students: 11.
Second implementation of the “Specimen Books” workshop.
Host institution: EAA La Chaux-de-Fonds.
Instructor: Manuel Schmalstieg
Timeframe: May 2013, 5 half-day sessions (ca. 20 hrs).
Following the success of the first implementation at HEAD Geneva, I proposed a second iteration of that workshop concept to a class in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
Participants: Olivier Borel, Patricia Monteiro, Anthony Bühler, Lori Droel, Emilie Mojon, Yannick Chautems, Marie Lechot, Quantin Perrenoud.
Some differences compared to the previous workshop:
– Instead of working with Adobe InDesign, students worked with open-source layout software Scribus.
– Instead of one common sample text, students chose a different text for each specimen. The concept: descriptions of films taken from french Wikipedia (the title of the film isn’t revealed).
– The workshop duration was 50% shorter: 20 hours (5 half-day sessions).
Final result: a PDF of 153 pages, gathering 79 specimens. The attempt to produce a print version failed due to time constraints.
Design a self-contained website that measures time (hours, minutes, possibly seconds or milliseconds).
In other words, create a digital watch face, filling a screen, written in HTML/CSS/JS (and maybe SVG).
Possible improvement: if you want to focus on “best development practices”, you could have the students work up to a certain point on their project, then re-assign them randomly. Students will have to complete and debug the code of another student. This will be a lesson in code readability. See this Github thread.
The first implementation of the JS Clocks has been carried out at Eracom, Lausanne, in autumn 2017. A number of student projects were exhibited during the schools Open Doors, in December 2017.
Participants: Giani Agolino, Jonas Buxcel, Benjamin Coffrini, Lucie Ecuyer, Dany Fatana Neves, Rachel Gasser, Claire Graber, Jérémie Kursner, Luan Mendes de Moura, Sarah Meylan, Paul Mottaz, Baltazar Nanchen, Julien Nshimirimana, Anaïs Schaer, Zoé Schwyzer, Gonçalo Vieira Machado, Stephanie Wilson
Demo site: eracom-gr461.github.io/jsclocks/