What is the most profound thing you have learned about yourself and your creative practices through this course? Have you experienced moments of disruptive wonder? In what ways has your perspective on graphic design practice changed?

The most profound thing I’ve learned about myself and my creative practice through this course is that I really do well when I’m having fun. The presence of play in graphic design leads to personal enjoyment, fulfillment, which in turn leads me to produce good work! I think realizing that this is a really important if not integral component to my design process was healthy and really profound for me. The first project I did in this course, which centered on play (called “how to have fun if you are a designer”) gave me some insights that I tried to bring into the second project. Throughout both of these projects I think there were moments that I experienced some disruptive wonder, but to be honest, the schedule was pretty tight, and because of the external pressure of deadlines (and my work schedule) this was probably hampered a bit.
I think my perspective on graphic design practice has changed in the sense that I see my own practice as the result of a deep and complex process that can be charted or explained, but which often goes unnoticed (especially even to me). I think I’m much more aware of the role of process within graphic design and will look forward to seeing how this plays out in future courses and in my future endeavors.

Reflect on your own creative process. How do you strive to achieve a moment of performance or move forward in reach of a noble pursuit? Are your creative activities leading toward a moment of disruptive wonder for your audience, as well as for yourself?

This question has gotten me thinking quite hard. I think it’s particularly difficult to answer because my creative process has within it a number of ‘stages’ or ‘pervious moments’ where there is a good bit of cycling and recycling of ideas – of considering and discarding and re-considering ideas. Because that’s the case, it’s often difficult to specifically ‘nail down’ where these moments happen and communicate them to others. Maybe that, in itself, is worth communicating: that in my own design process, I try to stay in an “evaluation phase” throughout almost the entire process – until nearly the last minute, when I have to put my “pencils down” and begin feverishly producing final deliverable material. I think this has become so intuitive over the years that it often is hard to locate (that’s another reason). To that end, I think this map can be somewhat helpful:

The reason I represented this process using both an x-axis at the bottom (communicating the nebulous transition between ideation and execution, which is based on the passage of time but which is somewhat undefined from project to project) and a series of circles at the top was to communicate the “both-and” nature of the design process as it works out for me. I think having these represented as circles is analogous to what actually goes on in my process (which is why I chose circles, haha) – and that means that within each “realm” or “porous phase” of the project above, I am free to find those moments of “disruptive wonder” for myself, and then hopefully to be able to eventually communicate those to the client later on.

To that end, often in a project I will ‘stumble’ into some disruptive wonder in the form of an approach to the design problem that I didn’t initially conceive of but which just seems to fit perfectly. I sometimes can communicate this with the client and really I think this serves to communicate both that I am deeply engaged as a designer and that I am excited – which helps them to trust me and to be excited themselves. This is good.

I think regarding the question of whether or not I reach toward a noble pursuit in my design process and products – I think this is a quote from Malcolm McLaren’s talk, where he said,

“Authenticity is discovering something that is real, that can only be achieved through a struggle, that romanticizes the messy process and becomes a noble pursuit.” (roughly 8:40)

What are you learning about yourself and your creative process as a result of this unit’s discussion of values? How do you find that values (personal, political, cultural, etc.) inform your creative practices? 

This is an awesome question, and one that surely brings up multiple thoughts and issues for each individual. I think the largest way that values inform my creative practice is mainly by influencing and guiding those things in my life that are not actually directly related to design and creativity but give rise to it. Part of what I mean is that one of the more common notions of the ‘self’ in our culture is somewhat fractured – there is the “home self” and the “work self” and the “religious self” and the “leisure sex and sports self” and these are all basically incompatible, or at least can be autonomous and independent of one another. So I suppose my value structure says that this is actually dangerous and somewhat impossible notion (though seductive for many obvious reasons). As I believe we are whole people, and the things we think and believe and do and say have a kind of multiplicative effect on all the other areas of our lives, I believe that it’s important to integrate patterns of attention that help us address our ‘selves’ first, to become healthy and whole people, and then to do things that we all have to do – like work and play and rest and eat and design, etc.

So with that said, I think my faith as a Christian is by far the primary way that my creative processes are influenced, mainly because it gives me a framework by which I can see and understand the world (both existentially and intellectually) and from there, I am becoming the kind of person who strives to be an excellent designer. What that means in practical language is that the valuations of my design work are always compared against the baseline of my faith which says “work is not what defines you”. I am therefore free to not be defined by my work (which as anyone who has worked seriously at anything knows, is a good thing), but I’m also free to engage more rigorously with my work because I’m not looking to it for my ultimate sense of personal value and worth. Paradoxically, this is also a good thing!

In more practical language, this sometimes means that my design work is a communicative expression of my beliefs and the hope that I have as a Christian (as you’ll see in some projects on my personal website). Other times, it just means doing the best job I can as a designer and making beautiful things, which can be an act of worship. My personal values would surely preclude me from designing something that I felt was essentially evil, or was antithetical to the beliefs that I do hold, but this hasn’t ever come up for me yet in my career. I think Jenny Holzer’s work has been really inspirational in the sense that she is really “talking about values” in an oblique way, even though she evades that question. Though my own personal value structure is probably quite different than Holzer’s, I can very much appreciate what she is doing and why.

In responding to the questions, “reflect on your experiences with disruptive wonder. Are you open to creating disruptive wonder? Is the notion new to you?” I have had to think back to previous projects and consider which ones were most representative of this dynamic. So I can probably answer the last question first – no; the notion is not new to me. I think this question shows me that I’m thankful for my undergraduate education in architecture school, getting a grueling 5 1/2 year degree with a year-long thesis at the end. This really prepared me as a designer to think in this manner, and to consider how what I design can ‘disrupt’ the norm in a way that is proactive.

A recent project this makes me think of is something I did last fall – you can find it here:

http://www.justintowart.com/type-and-environment/

I think this project has a little bit of disruptive wonder because it is walking the line between what the normal functions we associate with typography and message and changing context. I am surely open to creating projects in a similar vein as Kelli Anderson’s TED talk described, and think that it’s quite enjoyable when projects like that come along – though they don’t come along as often as I would like! Maybe that is a subtle challenge as I finish my MFA – to continue creating in this way.

In thinking about how to describe the process applied to exploration A, I suppose my first though is this: “Have Fun!”. Seriously though, the impulse for creative play was the driving factor in this booklet because that was the theoretical focus. The process went like this:

-Talk to my wife about my idea. Laugh because it is wierd.

-Have her come up with 10 weird colors and 10 weird words.

-Cut them up, put them face-down in little bowls.

-Get up every morning at 6:30am and pick two random words from the bowls, and create an 11 x 17 poster from the random word-associations.

-After the six posters are done (from “six days of fun”), create a booklet called “how to have fun if you are a designer”, which is a fun title.

-Design a mark that is fun to represent the process and booklet.

-Post-rationalize the process (well, not really…haha) by adding substantial sources and citing.

So, it was really fun. In response to the question, “What was a point of success in your process”, I would probably have to say creating the booklet – I was back-and-forth on this notion, because I was considering how best to represent the work, and after some good critique from fellow classmates, decided to go with that form. I think that was a good move. The areas that might have been missing from the final product are probably a more robust written section in the booklet – I was envisioning it almost as a manifesto, but didn’t have nearly the time and energy I needed to create something like that. If you’d like to see the final result, check it out here:

http://www.justintowart.com/how-to-have-fun/

As I’ve continued to work on Exploration A, I’ve found it to be a lot of fun. For the most part, I designed the process to focus on fun as an integral aspect of the design process and one which is normally absent for many designers (myself included on bad days..). And the fun of creative “play” by word association is a different kind of fun altogether – it’s uncalculated and unpredictable, which is quite refreshing. I think it seems that many people haven’t really understood the connections between my initial mind map and word associations from parts 1-4 and what I have come up with for part 5 / 6, and that’s mostly my fault for not explaining how I arrived at creating this “once a day” design workshop for myself. I think that will be much more clear in the next phase and so I look forward to clarifying that for people (and in some measure, for myself)!

As I’ve thought about how to answer the way in which “thinking wrong and my heuristic biases have impacted my process of exploration thus far”, I have really struggled with knowing how to answer, until after I finished my final mind map. I had a lot more fun than I was expecting completing the final assignment, and feel as though a lot of the underlying ideas from weeks 2 and 3 (regarding the nature of creativity and free association, etc.) began to make a lot more sense. So as I think about these things, and why in particular it was enjoyable, a few things come to mind that actually directly relate to my heuristic biases and ‘thinking wrong’.

Since I have been trained as an architect, and work at a firm that does extremely modern, minimal buildings, and because my own design sensibilities are often oriented towards this kind of design practice, I normally have a pretty “strict” set of underlying rules about my work. Sometimes, this is great, and has produced some stuff I am proud of. Other times, however, it holds me back from making decisions in a more free sense that might, in the end, come out much better. So for this assignment, I tried my hardest to “think wrong” and leave my modernist heuristic biases as far behind as I could (although my poster was set in Neue Haas Grotesk so that gives you a clue about how much modernism I could let go of…haha).

In the end, I combined hand-drawn lettering for the three main words (drawn with a thick marker, scanned, treated in photoshop, then vector traced in Illustrator). My wife came home and was like “where did you get those fonts? I love them!” which was funny, because it was literally a 10-second scribble in my sketchbook (where I was intentionally trying to make the letterforms funny). Anyway, no grid on the poster. No common type size. Messy points of connection between lines. Nothing base-aligns. But it was fun! Definitely not normal for me, but I really enjoyed it, and would like to continue making “messy posters” in the future. I think conceptually this is very much like the mental process free association.

In working on exploration A parts two and three, I’ve found myself reminiscing through some of my earliest years in “formalized” education – elementary and middle school. I think probably because of the notion of free-association, it reminded me of the playful characteristics of early learning. I think it will be exciting to see how this exploration continues to unfold, but even at these early stages I can clearly see why it’s been called “play”. There’s definitely an exciting, youthful, refreshing kind of learning that can happen with this approach that seems integral to the freer side of design practice.

When I think about how this kind of thinking and free-associating can relate to the work I do, it seems fairly clear that these complex associations that we make almost based on instinct are such an integral part of the design process – the freedom to allow mistakes, and to not say “no” to an idea that might seem utterly silly at the onset might, in time, prove to be a truly innovative idea.

So, in short, it’s been fun and I look forward to seeing how the process continues to unfold!