Starting From Zero: Teaching Writing to Designers
Warren Lehrer
Why—a burst of grandeur, of thought or of emotion, eminent, a sentence pursued in large letters, one line per page, in a graduated arrangement—wouldn’t this keep the reader in suspense throughout the whole book, appealing to this power of enthusiasm—all around, minor clusters, of secondary importance, explicatory or derivative—an array of flourishes.
—Stéphane Mallarmé, The Book, Spiritual Instrument
I was a painting and drawing major in college in the late 1970s. On the side I wrote short stories and poetry. At a certain point, letterforms and words started finding their way into my pictures. One day, during my junior year, I decided to show one of my painting teachers a stack of drawings that combined hand-written words and onomatopoetic letterform clusters with abstract marks and shading. I had never shown these drawings to anyone before. My teacher studied the pile, shook his head disapprovingly, wagged his finger in my face, and said, “You’re a good student Warren, but you’re barking up the wrong tree here. Never combine words and images. They are two different languages. They are not meant to work together.” I left his office feeling like I had been given a mission in life. (Education works in all kinds of ways.)
Years later I came to understand some of the historical context for my teacher’s admonition. Picture making and the written word began splitting apart when the Phoenicians and other civilizations throughout the world shifted from iconic to phonetic writing systems. The invention of moveable type, though a great democratizing force, helped mechanize the reproduction of stories further and further away from storytelling’s pictorial (and oral) roots. While literature and visual art grew to become distinct fields, most graphic designers, as well as practitioners of visual literature, seek that (perhaps primordial) place where word and image still come together.
In today’s globalized, digitalized, post-post modern age of information, the primacy of the icon is back with a vengeance. Poetry is oral again, music is bound to images, people are watching more than reading, and everything from politics to personal identity is branded. For better and for worse, graphic designers, via bits and atoms, deliver much of this cultural landscape. Hopefully, we are informed, conscious mediators. Very often, we are more than just mediators. We are collaborators, sometimes even producers and authors of the things we design.
Most design educators by now have come to realize that this awesome responsibility—gift, power, voice—requires an education that goes beyond a strictly visual training.
It’s hard to seriously consider “authorship” as a component within a graphic design program that doesn’t offer at least one writing class. In addition to any creative writing or journalism classes design students might be asked to take, I recommend offering at least one writing class tailored specifically for design students, taught by a practicing writer/graphic designer. Less of an oddity than it was ten, twenty years ago, there are more and more author/designers around who can teach writing through design—as an integrated expression.
We can bring a lot of baggage to writing, much of which works against developing an authentic voice as a writer. Many visual art and design students are especially nervous about writing. Too many are not readers. Some have managed to avoid writing. Others define themselves as exclusively “visual people.” Most beginning writers (designers or otherwise) use language in pedestrian ways and assume rote conventions. And more and more students (no matter where you teach or study) are foreign-born, and are understandably petrified about writing in a language that is not their native tongue. For these and a few other reasons I begin my writing for designers classes like I begin most classes—from zero.
Here is a synopsis of a graduate course I have been teaching at the SVA Designer as Author graduate program for the past fifteen years. My class is called Writing and Designing the Visual Book.
The primary focus of the class is creative writing. The secondary focus is on typography and lettering as the principal vehicles for giving shape to the writing. Lastly, it’s an art of the book class.
I begin with an alchemy project that explodes and remakes preexisting works. “Make a Dada Poem” is a good one to start with. As instructed by Tristan Tzara, making a Dada poem is essentially a matter of cutting up a found text and putting it back together, new. As soon as the student is confronted with the freedom of undoing, they are faced with choices. First, what text to use? Then how should I put the words back together? In lines? In phrases? In fields? In columns? In the round? What kind of paper/material(s) should I use? I ask them to make several poems; a minimum of one 2-D and one 3-D (or 4-D) solution. Students present/read/perform their poems in class the following week. We study their literary and visual syntax. Surprising word combinations and unexpected metaphors ooze from the seeming randomness. As Tzara predicts, “And here you are—a writer! Infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming.”
An alternative assignment to the Dada poem: The “Change a Book” project (inspired by an assignment given by Jan Baker in a class she taught at Yale). Each student finds a preexisting book and transforms it into a more visual object. A book on nutrition becomes a container for junk food. Someone’s favorite book is carefully unbound and folded down into daily dosages and put into a pillbox, to be read as good medicine. A book about Joseph Cornell is encased in a Cornell-like box replete with metaphysical, biographical references. The Dada poems and/or the alchemized book, done in the initial week of class, suggest that language, both in form and content, is ready to be re-made.
Fig. 1 A few examples of student Dada Poems.
Theater exercises are used to get students out of their (overthinking) heads. Playing an exercise known as prop rounds, students pantomime ways of seeing an object as something else. A blue towel becomes a swimming pool or magic carpet. An orange traffic cone is a huge toothpick, then an exclamation mark. This leads to a “Word/Image Equation” or “What’s in a Title?” project. Each student makes or finds five images or objects. Then they write three very different titles for each image—each title transforming how we perceive the image. The point of view, perspective, placement, and cropping of the object or image can change or remain constant. They compose these Word/Image equations, first using a “neutral” approach to the typography (whatever that might mean to them), then using an expressive (or more visual) approach. Instead of having images illustrate the words, or vice versa, the goal is to create word+image relationships that work synergistically, and (perhaps) leave room for the reader/viewer to discover meaning(s) within their combination.
After one week, students project their initial results to the class (in a PDF or Keynote presentation). We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the word/image juxtapositions, and compare neutral versus expressionist approaches. Depending on the results and the amount of time we have, I either move onto another project, or ask them to craft their results into a book, adding sequencing and book format to the mix of design variables. I show several different book structures as points of departure, but each student needs to discover a structure and design that best suits their interpretation of this odd collection of repeated images paired with changing titles. Students come up with a title, design a cover, print, and bind, and present their word/image books the following week.
Fig. 2 Two panels from Issa Mao’s Word/Image Equations, one in a neutral typographic setting, one more expressive.
Fig. 3 Miriam Bossard reframes photographs of common objects with titles.
Time to really start writing. In class, we begin with large sheets of newsprint paper, brushes, and ink. I suggest a topic, they write, but they can’t use words or any alphanumeric characters associated with a language known to them. Students think I’m crazy as they discover their own pre-literate writing systems, handwriting, and visual syntax. For a few moments they experience that place where writing and drawing come together. Having loosened up, they are asked to continuous-write (no scratching out, no edits, no worrying about writing masterpieces, no lifting brush or pen off the paper) in twenty-minute stretches, using actual words, starting with “This morning” in one stretch, then “I remember,” then “Growing up” then “If I had my way. . .” Even the nervous design students who say, “but I’m a visual person” are writing nonstop. Voila—they have a means of writing (at least unselfconscious journal writing) for probably the rest of their lives.
Fig. 4 Mohammad Sharaf infuses words into inkblot drawings.
Next step: rewriting and editing. Additional writing exercises—in verb usage, sense writing, writing good sentences, basic grammar and parts of speech—help students become critical wordsmiths. Non-linear, “experimental” writing is valued and explored side by side with more traditional sentence/paragraph structures. Each student edits two pieces based on their continuous writings and other exercises. Next they compose five typographic variations for each of the two edited texts.
Fig. 5 What’s In A Title finals by Bruno Zalum and Melissa Gorman.
In class, we analyze how the different settings affect the reading of the same text. A student prone toward expressive typography, now suddenly the writer as well, confronts how their designs reinforce or distract from the intent of the words. A design student inclined toward a more neutral typographic approach might feel liberated to try different things, since she or he wrote the text. In the end, each student confronts the notion of composing a text through typography, not as style or convention, but as an integral expression/vehicle for meaning, rhythm, metaphor, voice, structure. It’s often helpful to have students read texts that espouse opposing views on the role of typography in literature such as “Printing Should Be Invisible (The Crystal Goblet)” by Beatrice Warde and Words in Freedom by F. T. Marinetti.
In another one-week project called “Book as a Space/Time Capsule,” students set an original text of no more than fifty words through a sixteen-page book. Instead of setting the text in a block or paragraph, or thinking only about the composition of the text within a single plane or across a two-page spread, students are encouraged to take full advantage of the book as a time-based, three-dimensional medium, considering pacing, sequencing, the turning of the page, surprise, juxtaposition, etc. The students in the SVA grad program are pretty sophisticated; most of them have undergraduate degrees in graphic design plus professional experience. Yet thinking about the composition/movement of text through a book in this way is usually a revelation. While it’s second nature to most design students today to think of animation and motion graphics as time-based media, books are seen mostly as a collection of individual pages or spreads, albeit unified by a grid and approach to the style. For more theoretical context on the book as a dynamic medium, I sometimes have the class read Ulises Carrión’s essay “The New Art of Making Books” and/or sections of Keith Smith’s The Structure of the Visual Book or Text in the Book Format, and occasionally Stéphane Mallarmé’s The Book, Spiritual Instrument. It’s helpful to discuss and debate these texts in class, supplemented by showing and analyzing many examples of historical, modern, and contemporary works of visual literature. Exposure to a wide range of possibilities is key.
A writing/design class needn’t simultaneously be a book class. But if it is, I find it very helpful to provide students with some bookbinding skills that go beyond Wiro and perfect binding or dummying up comps with double stick tape, or for that matter relying on lulu.com or blurb.com to do all that putting-the-book-together stuff. Especially now that the physical book is no longer presumed to be the most (or only) convenient vehicle for delivering and transporting texts, there is an opportunity (if not an imperative) for writers, designers, artists, and publishers to really explore the book form as a medium. As someone who equates design with innovation, I don’t want students to be hamstrung by the kinds of limitations that come along with the most expedient means of production. The goal isn’t to train students to become professional hand bookbinders (or even book artists), but to give them some basic experiences and tools that can lead to invention.
It’s relatively easy to learn how to make/sew a one signature folio book. Thicken the plot just a bit, and a first bookbinding workshop can introduce students to multi-part single folio structures like “dos-a-dos” and “French door” bindings. We also look at ways of making multi-platform books that combine physical and digital components. For the past 15 years, the amazing bookbinder and educator Barbara Mauriello has conducted these binding workshops for this class. Not only do the students walk away from each workshop with two to four (blank) books that they’ve made with their own hands, they have also been introduced to good materials and a basic understanding of grain direction, folding, scoring, calculating, and the importance of being patient, careful, mindful—and open to experimentation.
Fig. 6 Some views of Bruno Zalum’s sixteen-page book based on one of his “I Remember” writings.
On a parallel track, we do some writing exercises that require students to get beyond the self by observing and interviewing other people. Workshops in shaping a story and writing from different points of view, voices, and characters lead to the last assigned project—writing and designing a “Bifurcated” or “Multi-part” book that portrays multiple perspectives. Here are some examples of this project:
Fig. 7 The Separation Wall, Samia Kallidis
This book, written and designed by a Palestinian student, depicts two opposing perspectives of the separation barrier that divides the West Bank from Israel. On one side of the wall—we read a subjective narrative of an Israeli man who strongly supports the existence of the wall as necessary for peace and security. On the other side—the very different opinion of a Palestinian man who sees the wall as an isolating blockade creating impoverished ghettos.
In this work of original science fiction, a scientist experiencing a life crisis goes back in time and has a conversation with his kid self. This book is printed on both sides of a poster-sized sheet of newsprint-like paper. The book starts folded down into a tight wad, then unfolds into a dialogue between older and younger self, contained within sixty-four panels on each side.
Lauren noticed how people on different sides of controversial issues can use the Bible—both the Old and New Testaments—to bolster their opinions. For this book, she decided to study and portray the most prevalent biblical passages (and arguments) used on both sides of issues such as gun control, homosexuality/gay marriage, polygamy, slavery, abortion, and environmental protection. The design of the book is inspired by ancient sacred text structures like the Talmud that juxtapose different passages from a holy text annotated by different interpretations.
Fig. 8 Caus-ality, Len Small
Oh, This May Sound Pathetic To You is a book about a young woman who is always falling for guys who are far out of her reach, in one sense or another. The circular structure helps enable the reader to feel the suffering of Seet’s protagonist as she “repeats the same mistakes and spirals further into loneliness.” Oh, This May Sound Pathetic To You is painstakingly handmade, measures 11 x 13 inches, and was made in two (very) limited editions, one in English and one in Arabic.
Apart is about a couple going through a hard time. The book is perforated closed, down the middle, forcing the reader to tear it as they read. The text reveals the devolution of a relationship as it moves toward break-up. The woman’s perspective on one side, the man’s on the other. The reader literally has to rip the book apart to get to the end. After the first reading, you have two books—his and hers.
Fig. 9 Pro Anti, Lauren Monchik
In Hee Bee’s re-interpretation of Wendelin Van Draanen’s novel Flipped is almost the opposite of Pieter Kienzle’s Apart. An unrequited love story, this book starts out with a gulf between the perspectives of a boy and a girl. As their relationship develops and they get closer, the stepped bifurcation draws closer, and eventually unites.
Fig. 10 Oh, This May Sound Pathetic To You, Nada Seet
Based on stories culled from her own Japanese and Japanese American family, Donica Ida’s trifurcated book showcases reactions to the bombing of Pearl Harbor from three points of view: the Japanese military, the American military, and Japanese Americans from the 1940s to present day. Each story highlights an individual’s true account.
Fig. 11 Apart, Peter Kienzle
Fig. 12 Flipped, In Hee Bee
Dual narratives intersect on an open spread: one recalling the death of a pigeon and the narrator’s sense of helplessness, the other symbolizing the death of the pigeon “as an opening of the narrator’s heart.” Its rhythmic prose moves from light to darkness to light again, from exterior to interior.
This began as a flipbook and ended up as an installation utilizing digital projection of kinetic typography and video onto a physical book.
In preparation for their final independent project, students learn how to bind a 100-page, multi-signature hardcover book. For the remaining five to seven weeks of the semester, each student (or collaborative pair) write and design a final book project, subject matter and format of their choosing. The idea is to develop an original text of some length that takes us (them, their fellow classmates, potential readers) on a journey of some kind; is based on a subject, idea and/or theme that they really care about; and is realized within a visual form that grows out of the text (or vice versa). Some books are one of a kind, some are produced in a small edition, others have been developed further and published.
Fig. 13 Japanese/American, Donica Ida
This “exploration of the human psyche” uses the institutional vernacular of mental health charts as a point of departure. With its exposed spine and threaded exterior, its text and collaged images invite the reader to uncover the “entangled portraits” detailed inside. A collection of ten paper-clipped “files” fluctuate between psychological profile and confessional prose revealing a “discordance between expressions of heart and entrapment of mind.”
Fig. 14 A Broken Bird, Najeeba Al-Ghadban
A collection of heartbreak stories based on the broken relationships of nine of Donica’s friends, And So, We Were “explores the complexity of love, the physicality of heartbreak, and lessons learned.” Each booklet is hand sewn and printed on vellum. The shifting scale and directionality of the typography combined with the overlay effects of the translucent paper evoke the shifting sands of love, expectation, and time.
This collaborative work explores the reconstructed memories of the 1990 Gulf War from the point of view of the authors’ own experiences as a seven-year-old Egyptian girl, born and raised in Kuwait, and a nine-year-old Kuwaiti boy. They use writing as well as typography, image, shadow, and light to evoke the ordinariness of growing up in war, as well as the terror, playfulness, confusion, loss, and affection.
Fig. 15 A White Asylum, Najeebah Al-Ghadban
Fig. 16 And So, We Were, Donica Ida
Fig. 17 Select pages from Mohammad Sharaf’s Reconstructed Memoirs.
The visual and syntactic revolution in literature (and text-based media) that Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, F. T. Marinetti, the Dadaists, and the Futurists envisioned a century ago never really took hold outside the fringes of the publishing world. Only now—that the second wave of the digital revolution threatens the book (as we have known it), and writers have all kinds of writing machines and platforms at their disposal—are more and more works of visual literature finding their way into the hands of readers. Go into your local independent bookstore (if you still have one), or big box bookstore, and you’ll find approximately one out of fifty novels that have something visual going on between their covers—instead of one out of a thousand! For better or worse, the polyvalent properties of the web, and the fluid mix of text, image, icon, sound, and navigational options afforded by digital media has changed the way nearly everyone in every field of scholarship and cultural production is telling stories.
Fig. 18. Reconstructed Memoirs—A Boy and a Girl’s Perspective of War, Reham Ibrahim & Mohammad Sharaf.
The proliferation of “digital humanities” and interdisciplinary and collaborative programs throughout academia is testament to this change. Underlying this paradigm shift is an acknowledgment (tacit or otherwise) of the importance of design tools and methodologies. That’s quite a leap from design being the unwanted stepchild of fine arts programs, always needing to be explained, rationalized, and advocated for. I’ve taught cross campus interdisciplinary courses—by myself and collaboratively—since 1980 (at UMass Dartmouth and SUNY Purchase), and I’m glad to see the phenomena become less of an anomaly. It’s great that design education is breaking out of its cocoon and reflecting the kinds of rich collaborations and exchanges that practitioners in the field experience on a daily basis. At the same time, I think graphic design programs can broaden their missions from within, and appeal to a wider range of students by shifting even more of its curriculum away from serving the corporate world and marketing, toward teaching students the means and methods of communicating stories—their own stories, the stories they think are most in need of telling, and those that are the result of their original research. This redefinition would attract more students with a bent toward being poets, writers, philosophers, historians, social scientists, fine artists, media artists, cultural critics, if not change agents—to take up design as their major course of study.
Even if many design students never actually become authors or producers of their own content, there is no doubt that the experience of writing, researching, and designing their own projects from zero on up helps them become better graphic designers and mediators of language and culture.
