80 Works for Designers

Work 07 / Lick It Good: Student Designs

The challenge: Design a series of six commemorative stamps that celebrate energy conservation. The class will brainstorm illustration styles, which will be written on slips of paper, dropped into a hat, and then selected randomly to determine how you will individually execute the stamp designs.

The Spring 09 class into a hat the following artistic styles: collage, folk art, stippled, photo-realistic, gouache, and kitsch. Here's what they came up with...

 

Katharine Widdows:

 

Jake Rae:

 

Michelle Cormack:

 

Jessica Thrasher:

Spring 09 | Class 02: Book Report

We're dong this assignment again! This time, we're focusing on doing young adult books.

Bring in a book that you really like that most people probably haven't read. Each of us will give a brief talk about the book and why we like it. Your book will be randomly assigned to another designer in the class. You are now the book designer at Knopf assigned to create the cover for the new paperback edition. (Let's ignore that Knopf doesn't regularly do paperbacks.) Come up with an idea for the cover design + a single chapter page/spread of the interior. You may not read any part of the book other than the back cover/inside jacket flap.

Class, please leave a blurb about your book here for whom you've swapped books with. Thanks!

Work 45 / Touch Screen of (Deaf) Rock: Student Prototypes

A few weeks back, I took a class taught by Dan Saffer and Bill De Rouchey about designing gestural and touch user interfaces. Within the class, we had an hour to prototype a "music store interface of the future." When we were working on the exercise, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of experiences we could create with similar technologies for people who are disabled.

Two weeks later, I'd crafted the following exercise for our 80 Works class:

"The Experience Music Project (EMP) would like you and your big brains to create a novel exhibit experience for their Music Lab that lets deaf people feel different kinds of music. You have 45 minutes working together as a team to create a paper prototype AT SIZE that defines this experience. We’ll test your interface in a walkthrough, and then you'll get 15 more minutes to refine the interface for a final test."

With only 45 minutes to get a first rev of a paper prototype into place, Mark Notermann, Meg Doyle, Claire Kohler, and Donnie Dinch jumped into action! Let's look at their interface and see how they revised it on the fly to make it sing.

Work 22 / Dry Diapers: Student Designs + Case Study

About four weeks ago, the 80 Works class was tasked by me and Jill Vartenigian, an instructor at Seattle Central, with the following challenge:

"In 30 minutes, brainstorm ideas for a name, logo, and form factor for a brand of diapers that can be marketed to urban parents. These diapers need an edge, a hint of sly humor or cool that make them stand out from the boring 'ol diapers you can find pretty much anywhere.

Boy, did the class rise to the challenge. The following is a case study of how the class took this seed idea and executed it as a design concept.

Work 21 / Mr. Blue: Student Designs

The most common color? Blue. And yet there are so many variations on this hue... Can you design a masthead for a new magazine that’s solely about the topic of blue? This includes its name, suggestions for art direction, and what kinds of articles you think the editor should include.

 

True Blue by Mark Notermann

 

BLUEMAG by Meg Doyle

 

Blue by Donnie Dinch

Work 05 / Easy as ABC: Winter 09 Class Alphabets

Here are the found alphabets from our first take-home assignment! Everyone did great work and took a completely different approach to this project. Click on each letter to see the full alphabet on Flickr.

 

Denim Alphabet by Donnie Dinch

 

Circuit Alphabet by Meg Doyle

 

Liquid Alphabet by Claire Kohler

 

Shoestring Alphabet by Mark Notermann

 

Pin Alphabet by David Sherwin