Typography and craft in Graphic Design education
Pamela Bowman, Portfolio Director, Art & Design | Course Leader, Graphic Design , Sheffield Institute of Arts at Sheffield Hallam UniversityClaire Lockwood, Subject Group Leader Visual Communication, Sheffield Institute of Arts at Sheffield Hallam University
Over the last few years there has been a clear shift in terms of student expectations and decision making around their HE choices. This has been effected by a number of influences mainly financial and employability. As a course we have responded to this with the introduction of specialist routes within the Graphic Design degree course. This allows the student experience to be individually focused. Specifically we have introduced a Typography route and a Graphic Design Handmade route. As discrete areas of study, and as potential professions, these are quite specialist and very small. In order to maintain a consistently high rate of applications the Graphic Design degree course has had to evidence employability and make specialist routes implicit in the course outline. However, as key aspects of Graphic Design study, Typography and Graphic Design (Handmade) touch on such a huge number of students and influence/effect other specialism’s. Typography is a particularly interesting area of development. It maintains the appeal of an ‘academic’ area of study due to its relationship to the written word and its long history at the forefront of communication and technology. With the additional aspect of an area of contemporary craft, handmade graphic design, there are a number of great opportunities for the student experience. We are finding that students are relishing the opportunity to be involved in a more tactile, back to basics form of graphic design and are exploiting facilities available to them once perceived as ‘traditional’ such as screen printing and letterpress. The return of such skills has brought about a different perception of what graphic design can be in relation to the role of the analogue and digital. We would therefore like to look at the role of Craft and Typography within Graphic Design and how students have embraced the application of the analogue and digital. This will be in relation to the recognition within the design industry that there is a place for traditional skills. This is in response to the ever increasing development of new technologies and the emphasis placed on them within the industry. Both designers and consumers are demanding a return to the importance of the individual.