Matthew Lemmond

Design and the Play Instinct

In “The Play Instinct in Design Education,” authors Hester and Hannaford identify several misconceptions students have about the creative process: namely, that graphic design is not an intellectual pursuit, software will fix all their problems, and creative outcomes can be “correct.”

A timeless undergraduate project asks students to create using “Design and the Play Instinct” by Paul Rand. The internet is replete with examples of students mindlessly laying out page after page with almost no consideration or understanding of how Rand talks about play and restraint nor the processes discussed in this classic text.

To combat these misconceptions, I ask students in my class to physically make some of the processes discussed in the text. For example, my students first played with Photogram and Cubist Collage processes before laying it out in book form. As Hester and Hannaford say, “the psychology of play is conducive to learning and problem-solving.”

Rullo

Rullo is a math-based game where the user removes numbers from the grid so that the remaining numbers in each row or column add up to the numbers at the beginning and end of the given row or column.

Students explored UX/UI principles in this project.

Book Series

Scenario for Students: Your publishing company has bought the rights to distribute the Thames and Hudson series of manuals on the arts. Your job is to explore many conceptual options and present them internally. We’ll have four internal drafts before meeting with the stakeholders at the end of October, where we’ll deliver our best two concepts. Instead of designing all 11 manuals, we’ll give the stakeholders a taste of our skills and only show them three manuals, but with two visually distinct concepts. Since they’ll be comparing and choosing one concept, we should present them the same three books, but with two visually distinct concepts. 

Type Legibility as seen by Historic Design Style

Students communicated the principles discussed in the “The Legibility of Type” through a historical design style.

Women’s Suffrage in Motion

Dr. Ham trusted me to work independently with the students to lead critiques, lectures, and tutorials.

Module 3: Animated Design Systems: In this assignment, students take their printed posters from Module 2 and explore how their message changes when setting their work in motion. Then, they study how their work changes when put into a real-life scenario.

Women’s Suffrage in Print

Dr. Ham trusted me to work independently with the students to lead critiques, lectures, and tutorials.

Module 2: Computational Design Systems: In this assignment, students explore making grids with Shape Grammars and rules for how their design elements will fit into the grid. Then, they test their design system by creating two very different posters with the same rules. 

Crowdsourcing DataViz App

In the course “Online and Mobile Interaction Design Systems,” Dr. Armstrong trusted me to assist in critiques, lectures, and tutorials (motion and interactive prototyping).

Cognitive Theories with Type

This assignment asked students to research two different cognitive theories and enact them with a typographic poster. Students were directed to watch three segments of the National Geographic show “Brain Games” and take notes.

Visual Semantics with Type

In this assignment, students explore the power of visual semantics by altering or manipulating type.

Type as Signifier

Type as Signifier: Visual semantics deals with the use and manipulation of words (letters) to illustrate an idea, an action, or evoke some particular pictorial image. This involves the treatment and arrangement of letters in such a way as to make a word visually self-explanatory. – Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art