A Collage Education
Thomas Wedell and Nancy Skolos
The creative act of collage can provide endless inspiration for graphic design students. Everything in a graphic designer’s bag of tricks—words, ephemera, materials, colors, and contexts—can be recombined to create truly new visual/verbal phenomena. These visual configurations engage both our minds and our eyes, and challenge our preconceptions.
Collage is at once a process and a result. It has been employed for at least a century and its potential as a creative force shows no sign of being exhausted. Milestones include the introduction of found objects onto the surface of “real” art by the cubists; the awakening of spiritual and tactile sensations through unusual combinations of elements by Kurt Schwitters; the posing of complex psychological conflicts by the Berlin dadaists; the exposure of political evil through John Heartfield’s mastery of photographic juxtapositions; and the compositional innovations and diagrammatic structures in László Moholy-Nagy’s photo/graphic experiments that dissolved the boundaries between photography and design.
As a process, collage is invaluable. Once a project is under way in our studio, more often than not, the tossed-aside pile of scraps at the edge of the desktop is far more provocative than the project being “designed.” The unexpected accidents that exist behind the scenes, in drawers layered with cut-up colored paper from earlier creative activities, have sparked and sustained our creative energy for decades.
In teaching, we have also employed collage to make intuition a more tangible, teachable experience. One of our favorite assignments uses thousands of pieces of chopped-up magazines as the catalyst for a liberating exercise in how content and form can be developed simultaneously. The fluidity of mixing and stirring up pieces and the resulting happy accidents—contrast, scale shifts, and collisions—releases an uninhibited sense of play.
In-Class Exercise
We take large-format magazines (mostly vintage Domus) to one of our friendly offset printers. Each cover is inscribed with a template of shapes drawn with a Sharpie and a straightedge. Some are strips, some rectangles, some triangles, and some random. Average size is about two or three inches. The printer then cuts the magazines on the guillotine and puts them in a box.
Architectural magazines work well because of the richness of color, texture, and three-dimensional space, but if you have a particular topic in mind, you can stack the deck with images appropriate to the subject.
Using the chance operations of collage, students recombine, recontextualize, and reconfigure form to reveal meaning. There are two critical requirements. One is to have a lot of pieces equal to a heap in front of each small group of students. The second is to insist that the students use cropping tools—a pair of black construction paper, L-shaped framing pieces approximately eight to ten inches long in each direction. The students will also need scotch tape, scissors, a glue stick, a pen or pencil, and some letter-size white paper. It is best to encourage students to begin intuitively, sorting through the pile with the framers to see if anything interesting seems to be happening. The Ls can be focused on a small area or a larger field. Random compositions are framed by the croppers, taped in place, outlined with a pen, and trimmed, and then glued onto a white sheet of paper. Initially, these should be generated as quickly as possible and with as little thought as possible. Gradually, a little more consciousness can be awakened and a composition may be aligned more intentionally. Students can work off a central piece that suggests a structure and invent their own parameters, choosing pieces with certain colors, or only typographic pieces.
Cropping is extremely critical to the process. If students have cropping anxiety, they can make photocopies to try various ways of framing the collage. Photocopying is also a valuable way to observe the difference in the collage as the color is removed and the surface becomes more homogeneous. Sometimes it is even helpful to position the collage inside a larger white field to add space on one side or another. Two collages can also be combined to further extend the possibilities. In the spirit of chance operations, it is also fun to look at the unplanned backsides of the collages because they are sometimes more interesting than the fronts. The students are asked to keep their favorite compositions in a sketchbook for future reference. Even if the overall composition is weak, there may be a provocative detail—perhaps the way a letter is cropped off or how a piece of an image meets a piece of type— that can be a starting point for a future project.
The Assignment
Students select three favorite collages and enlarge them to roughly tabloid size. They then use tracing paper overlays with sketches and notations to try various directions for expressing a selected subject. The collages are to be considered a framework, a complex grid, and students should both utilize and break out of the fixed compartments, soften edges, and substitute meaningful content for formal shapes in order to direct the meaning.
Uniting forms with content can prove to be the most challenging because students are more acquainted with working in the reverse—beginning with content and struggling to provide form. It is useful to go back and forth between the two methods of approaching the process: One is direct narrative (representational) in which the content assembled yields a comprehensible scenario. The second is an assembly of abstract forms (nonobjective), which generate a platform from which the designer can draw out the content. It is easy to see how formal relationships such as scale changes and spatial illusions suggest meaning and automatically challenge conventional hierarchy because relationships no longer fit expectations. (For example, a human thumb can be larger than an automobile.) This conflict of scale can be used to project a strong point of view.
The potential for typographic experimentation is one of the most fruitful results of the exercise. A sentence turned sideways becomes the vertical stroke of a letterform—one idea nested into another or dominated by another. A word contains some letters that are no longer oriented on the baseline but float sideways. Type is sliced mid-x-height and then collides with another slice of another typeface. All of these configurations suggest potential meaningful relationships.
It gets even more exciting when type meets image. A small piece of a building abuts the bottom of the letter B forming a typo/photo graphic ligature silhouetted against a bright blue sky. A row of human figures in black pants become letterforms from the waist up. There is seamlessness to the space. Some elements are flat color, some texture, some are photographic, and some are typographic. You can at once be looking at an elevation, a plan view, and a worm’s-eye view. The process of collage creates a synthesis that relates many unexpected ideas and objects. Photo-graphic images can converge with shared vanishing points or diverge with multiple vanishing points to suggest multifaceted meaning. Some compartments have deeper space and recede, suggesting the passing of time.
The medium of collage allows the students to efficiently and intuitively pose new solutions that were beyond their imagination. By leaving the form/content relationship more malleable, they are better able to engage with the creative act. Removed from the pressure of having to produce an immediate solution, they can allow themselves to be immersed in a realm where one decision leads seamlessly to the next. Hunches and conscious choices sustain them throughout and lead them to an inner space where they can experience the wonderful give and take of a true creative process.