14 Planet of the Arts / December 1996 a Wbes = a Fai SANTION: IS NN se Gemiblose, | OF TAKE MATTER — cow ee Aen ard 4 MANY, WAYS TO SLyce KN APPLE CS @@relNon @)VIEREN i he 6 CoRE Sy WWE ine : -stAND if (Ol Sho THE SHIN se ae llustration by Alan So PIS Quit There --Bid lime Outside/In is a collaborative installation of works by part-time students. A wide cross-section of experience and expression is represented in various media including performance, 3-D design, paint- ing, drawing, printing making, photogra- phy and sculpture. The Outside/in exhibition runs until December 19th, in the Atrium of the South Building. Venture in from the cold and take a look. Photograph: Maayan Former PTS Working Group leader, Karen Myskiw, with her submission to the Outside In show. Design At Emily Carr Is Mostiy About Process, Really continued from page 11 to make the images and the design work together. Working with someone else's images (occasionally referred to as “collaboration”) does happen in Design, but it’s not overly encouraged. Sesigen Animation Project One: Flipbook. An introduction to moving images, the flipbooks had to contain text of some kind, so that we could see how text works in a time- and motion-based medium. ¢ Project Two: Basic Movements. Beginning to look at how shapes relate to one another within a set space and an introduction to animation techniques like keyframing and in-betweening. And yes, | know that's a sentence fragment up there. e Project Three: Character Animation. Make someone move around. Okay, | slipped a billboard into the background, but the space was not rented, it was offered to non-profit groups at cost. All in all, a fairly basic look at character design and movement. Hey, it’s animation after all. ¢ Project Four: Computer Spot. A two-dimensional short piece done on the computer as an introduction to the digital tool and how it works with movement. Subject matter pretty open, but it had to include text again, just to see how text works over time. p apeberrang Typography In addition to the seasonal cube detailed above, for twelve weeks we laboured away at redesigning the emergency page from the telephone book. A concept-heavy approach, the emphasis was squarely on infor- mation design, and how best to organize a set of information and make it accessible. It sounds easy, but this project explains many resid- ual furrowed brows in ECD3 and GD3. Intermediate Design Drawing More of the same. Haven't sold a drawing yet. Intermediate Design History I'm still waiting for someone to offer me fifty grand a year to write reviews of design books for them; no takers.as of yet. Btroductory Electronic Communication Project One: Map of Granville Island. An introduction to Adobe Illustrator, this project was in some ways related to the wayfinding project above, because it, too, concerned itself with how one might effectively aid people navigating around a space. ¢ Project Two: Granville Island Poster. This continuation of the first project added Adobe PhotoShop and Quark X-Press, and combined vector- and raster-based graphics. Of all the projects done in the year, this one seems the most “commercial,” as it was suggested that we might design these posters for the tourist trade, although we should also make something that looked quite different from the standard tourist fare existing today. And there you have it. Seventeen-hundred words later, just how commercial and market-oriented does Design look to you? tt is not, | should point out, my purpose here to make a judgment whether or not “commercialization” and “marketing” are Bad Things. I’m not even sure what they are. As opposed to, say, the “non-commercial” and the “un-marketable.” It is my intent, or a part of it at least, to suggest that art/Art and design/Design are not necessarily as antithetical as one might think, and the notion that one is somehow “aesthetically pure” and a natural home for “critical thought” while the other is “contaminated” and concerned solely with pleasing a client is erroneous. Why the inde- pendent student-run newspaper at ECIAD should wish to suggest other- wise is beyond me. Getting back to the issue of “creativity as an end in itself”: I’m not sure what this means, especially as it implies “creativity as a means to an end” as something other. All | will say here about Design is that the second year ECD program emphasizes the concepts and tools needed to communicate a message or set of messages, whether that message is a clear one, such as the emergency telephone page, in which the information on the page should be as accessible as possible as quickly as possible, or an ambiguous one, such as a number of the seasonal cubes, which worked on several dif- ferent levels simultaneously. Design, like many of the other programs at ECIAD is, | think, more about process than product; what we choose to do with those processes is largely up to us as students to determine for our- selves. | have spoken to Tom Becher, and Sharon Romero, and Deborah Shackleton, and without wanting to put words into their mouths, my impression of the three of them has always been that the last thing they want to see students do in Design is become anonymous programmers or assembly-line designers who accept the status quo. No one in Design has ever said the Internet was either a Good Thing or a Bad Thing; the ques- tion in this case as in others is, how are we as students and hopefully pro- fessionals going to respond? The hope is that if and when we do make a response, it's a good one. The school’s name, after all, is the Emily Carr Institute of Art AND Design, not Art OR Design. And perhaps that title suggests a unity that we, with our segment- ed student body, aren’t often able to see. Perhaps we're all artists and designers at the same time with means and ends that aren't so polarly opposite at all. Admittedly the curriculum seldom encourages this kind of crossover; why should a studio major take a course in typography, or why should a graphic design student take a course in painting or performance art? But curriculum can change, and if we’re going to change it for the better, we should be willing to make our own connections and make them valid for ourselves. On a further note, in case this brief outline of second year Design remains too vague, | should like to point out to First Year students that what the faculty will be telling you towards the end of the year is, oddly enough, true: we really don’t mind talking to you about the program, what we're working on, or whatever. |, for one, always appreciate the input of non-design- ers on my work, simply because | don’t want my work to be design solely for other designers. And, strangely, | have many good and interesting discussions with friends in Studio, Photography, and Intermedia about their work as well as mine. To anyone curious about Design, all | can say is, Please come see us, anytime. If we're too busy to talk at that moment, we'll tell you. And invite you back some other time.