Old Dog

I often tell my students that one of the nicest things about design is that it’s not an exact science. For any given design problem, there are many elegant solutions. For those of us who always had trouble coming up with the right solutions in calculus, it’s a comforting concept.

But just because there’s more than one acceptable answer doesn’t mean all answers are good. Some solutions are better than others. Some are just plain bad. And it’s often difficult to pin down what separates the elegant from the awful. We study rules and conventions. Typography. Grid systems. Graphics. Color. Similarity. Proximity. Contrast. Repetition. Hierarchy. We try to apply the rules, and we learn how to break the rules effectively. We can talk about what succeeds and what doesn't, but to a large extent, whether we like the result is subjective.

After 32 years of teaching “Publication Design” in our journalism program, in the fall I’ll be introducing a new course, titled “Visual Communication.” What’s the difference, you ask. Nothing. And everything.

Our former course taught the sort of design one needs to create posters, newspapers and magazines. I have always been surprised to learn that many journalism students don't think a lot about visual communication. They're focused on writing. Part of my job has always been to explain why they need to know about typography and graphics. Today's students have an even greater obligation to learn about telling a story visually: They need to be able to shoot and edit video, to create a slide show, design and maintain an attractive blog site.

In our small journalism and communication program, our goal will be to teach these things throughout the curriculum and to all of our students, but my new course will be an important conceptual and skills foundation.

Talk about an old dog and new tricks.

So this blog will help me explore some of the challenges and opportunities as I develop a plan for this new class in the coming months. I hope along the way to engage some of my colleagues at other institutions and in the profession in a discussion that will help me find the way. As with design itself, the beauty is that there are a lot of solutions out there to the problems of teaching visual communication.

I’m building on a fairly good foundation, I believe. I’ve been a newspaper editor, doing production that included layout and design as a part-time job for more than three decades. My college training at the graduate level was in photography and cinematography, and I’ve continued to have an interest in those. So I’m not new to visual storytelling. But I’ve been doing these things intuitively all my life. Teaching others to do them is much harder. I learned this when I first began teaching news writing and reporting. I had been a reporter, but teaching other people to be reporters took a lot of thought. I also learned a lot in the process. In the end, it made me a better writer, a better editor.

So I’ll be trying to get a fresh blog out a couple of times a week. I’ll post the topics out there in Twitterland and see if anyone’s interested in having this conversation. I know there are many of you who have been teaching this sort of class for some time ... probably others who are just starting, like me.

Let’s share.

Next blog: Some Basic Choices