AIGA/NY My Dog and Pony: Fresh Blood IV took place at 7pm at the SVA Theater on Thursday, May 23, 2013. Following an introduction by AIGA/NY Board members Rachel Abrams and Ian Spalter, fourteen of this year’s graduate design students presented their thesis projects.

Mike Susol of Parsons Design and Technology, Tom Harman of SVA IxD, Randy Gregory of SVA Branding, Liz Seibert and Leigh Mignogna of Pratt Communications Design, Kevin Paolozzi of Cranbrook Academy of Art 2D Design, Danne Woo of NYU ITP, Bryn Smith of SVA D-Crit, Eric Hu of Yale, Javier Lopez, Young Sun Compton and Luiz Ludwig of MICA, Lizzy Showman of SVA Design, and Wael Morcos of RISD shared a lot of impressive work in a short amount of time. Their presentations underscored the true breadth and depth of thought and practice taking place at today’s best design schools. Below are a few highlights.

Liz Seibert and Leigh Mignogna / Pratt Communications Design
Liz Seibert and Leigh Mignogna shared a joint project, Geneva Kneue: A Metafont. The two worked with Susan Kare’s 1984 typeface Geneva, a bitmap font built on a simple 5×7 pixel grid, and sought to transform it into a more contemporary typeface. Using Donald Knuth’s programming language Metafont, created in 1979, they defined a few basic points for each letterform and provided instructions for connecting those points. By manipulating parameters such as letter width and height, penstroke shape, grid slant, and line format, Seibert and Mignogna created several different styles for their new typeface, Geneva Kneue. The final product is an example of both designer’s interest in “transparency,” or, as Seibert put it, “exposing the design process in the form itself.”

Bryn Smith / SVA D-Crit
Bryn Smith began by quoting Rick Poynor: “On the rare occasions that an exhibition of graphic design appears, it’s a safe bet that one complaint will always be heard. Graphic design, someone will say, just doesn’t work in a gallery.” Smith’s thesis What We Talk About When We Talk About Exhibiting Graphic Design discussed the challenges of removing design objects from their real-world contexts and placing them “under glass” in a museum. Smith shared examples of graphic design exhibitions, such as Peter Bilak’s Graphic Design in the White Cube and Julia Born’s Title of The Show, that subvert common museum practices by emphasizing reflexivity and recursivity over display. She also presented a project of her own, in which participants take a self-guided tour of everyday designed items found on New York City streets. Rather than emphasizing any one successful exhibition, Smith placed emphasized the opening of dialog. “It’s time to bring this debate boldly out into the open,” she concluded, “not to find one solution, but to embrace many.”

Eric Hu / Yale
In his thesis Platforms, Eric Hu explored the presence and function of craft in digital contexts. All media has “affordance and limitations,” he explained, or “what it can do, and what it can’t do. I’m interested in subverting those extremes.” Hu shared several projects surrounding these themes, including a script that applies digital aesthetic styling to Chinese characters drawn “by hand” with a mouse, an iPad video of a walking person that plays only if the viewer himself is walking, and a three-part thesis book whose different sections had been printed at Lulu, Blurb, and Magcloud, highlighting their differences in paper stock and color reproduction. Hu’s pieces creatively tackle the complex relationship between the digital and analog. “Growing up with a love of both computers and classical notions of typography and print design, I couldn’t settle for one of the other,” he explained. “I had to do both.”

Lizzy Showman / SVA Design
Elizabeth Showman presented In.Bounds, a crowdfunding platform that raises money for inner city school athletic programs. Showman shared an energetic graphic video advertising and explaining the goals of the program, and then gave a tour of the website itself. Visitors to playinbounds.org can read about the schools in need of support and view exactly what items — ranging from from $4 ball pumps to $600 sports camps — their donations will buy. As Rachel Abrams put it nicely in the follow-up, “this project showed a really lovely balance of craft, design thinking, and real-world application.”

Wael Morcos / RISD
Wael Morcos’s thesis In Any Form or by Any Means – Communication as Copy was composed of several projects exploring reproduction’s role in graphic design. Among other projects, Morcos shared a book of copyright notices collected and re-presented as concrete poetry, an invitation to RISD Museum-goers to recreate a portion of Monet’s Le Bassin D’Argenteuil with dot stickers, and Bozoni, a system of three stacking pixel-based typefaces that echo Bodoni’s letterforms. Morcos concluded by drawing attention to our 21-century obsession with sharing, liking, and re-posting online information. “I believe there is real insight into who we are by examining what we choose to reproduce, how we reproduce it, and how we feel about the act itself,” he said.

Thanks to all the presenters for such an inspiring evening.

Additional Information:
Mike Susol | AMERICAN VALUE$
Tom Harman | figuros
Randy Gregory | MoMA Store Destination NYC
Liz Seibert and Leigh Mignogna
Kevin Paolozzi
Danne Woo | datavisual
Bryn Smith
Eric Hu | r-e-p-l-y
Javier Lopez, Young Sun Compton & Luiz Ludwig | Seventeen-Day Studio
Lizzy Showman | In.Bounds
Wael Morcos

Event Details:
AIGA/NY My Dog and Pony: Fresh Blood IV

Event Photos:
Click here to view all photos from AIGA/NY My Dog and Pony: Fresh Blood IV on Flickr.
To view additional photos, or to contribute your photos, visit our AIGA New York Flickr group.

Special thanks to guest contributing writer Karen Vanderbilt for the AIGA/NY My Dog and Pony: Fresh Blood IV event recap and photos. Karen can be found at karenvanderbilt.com and Some of the Parts.