mcvey teaching archive/notes

I was in the studio/classroom for 25+ years. Among the courses I taught were Typography; Design Seminar (devoted to students’ thesis projects, and involving reading, discussion and crits supporting their work); and Design Stories (design history, theory/discourse and adjacent areas).

This page is a portal to some records of that teaching. It is in slow progress.
 

  1. Typography 1 (GD212)
    exercises
    course introduction

    The typography exercises evolved over the years. There’s a lot of “cruft” in the html/css behind them, and probably in the assignments themselves, and the thinking behind them. A lot of attention goes into formatting of paragraphs and even of indexes; and to books; and rather less to type families and their usage. William Johnston, who taught a methodical and exemplary typography course for a few years, also left an impact.

    Some touchstone principles behind the typography exercises included formalisms in concrete poetry and in architecture; my preference for the engineering aspects of design; an aesthetic DNA that included Jost Hochuli, Ian Hamilton Finlay and the hybrid a/symmetric designs of Lorraine Wild (@greendragonoffice), as well as a sense that order and disorder go and belong together, in different mixes depending; a sense that nothing should be more complex than it need be; the idea that small (hand-sized) pages ought not to look like shrunk-down multi-column posters; and always an interest in the “content” that was clothed and structured by type. My own practices did not necessarily adhere to these principles, btw.

    Were I to begin teaching typography now, I might not start with exercises so wedded to the printed page. My justification was, I suppose, the importance of detail in typography. And there was habit, and “path dependence,” and sunken costs, and the process of aging.

    Some of the exercises were retired after a time, for whatever reason(s), and forgotten. I have decided to incorporate those in the exercises page above, else they vanish. No one semester could ever have involved all of those included. I will probably build separate linked pages for each of the exercises; it’s all too much (for one page).

  2. Design Stories (GD216, multiple years)
  3. Design Seminar (1998-2022)
    directory

    mcvey seminar blogs (Fall semesters; some lost to time) —
    workworks22   (Fall 2022)
    workworks21   (Fall 2021)
    workworks20   (Fall 2020; pandemic deeps)
    workworks19   (Fall 2019)
    workwerks17   (Fall 2017)
    workwerks16   (Fall 2016)
    workwerkz   (Fall 2015)     		 
     
     

  4. design seminar library (photos of books on shelves as of June 2018)
    file categories
     

18 October 2024