Milieu: Communication Design Discourse

Design's Impreative

I spoke last time about restriction and how actions are driven from those restrictions. But I must admit that the example I gave for anyone outside typography, lettering or graphic design was so specific that it was almost to the point of be asterisk. In addition, I feel this discussion of imperative could use some more fleshing out. With these points in the mind, I have a example of lettering that might address these points, provided by thegulfcostnews.com.

Wow.

I got this from Freshhome.

Call for Co-Authors + Collaborators

It's common sense that conversations take more than one person. With that in light, Milieu is making a call for submissions to be featured here on Milieudiscourse.com, and potentially in future printed Milieu's.

These submissions can be articles, essays, visuals or whatever best works for you to communicate what you wish to talk about.

Interested? Email Milieu.

Milieu 3

Issue 3 is available for download or purchase at lulu.com

Potential & Restriction.

A short essay on Mediocrity, Typography and Clients.

“Good” Design is a Commodity.

Usually the word commodity is spoken in economic or social theory circles, not design. But over the last few weeks I’ve run into a website, Livebooks that got me thinking in this direction.

Issue 2

Is design school working? Yes? No?

If Milieu just jumped into that question in a manfesto-esque nature, we would be just dealing with me and some other authors opinions — not a conservation in any real way. To answer the question of design school working or not, we need to know why people come to design schools in the first place. People come to design colleges for certain intentions— and it's the implied agreement between the school and the student that a transaction will occur. I think we can make the assumption that if the students get what they want, design school delivered it's part of the bargain.

For Issue 2 of Milieu, I asked some of my fellow Communication Design students to finish this sentence:
Design School is worthwhile when…

This is the first step in this three part series on design education. Step two is to do a word search on all the posted responses to see if any patterns begin to appear and to visualize that as Issue 3, and then Issue 4 is to compared those general patterns to the rhetoric and related statics for designers (economic, social, educational etc.) to compare if what students want is what they are getting— and from all of this we can make a more substantial argument if design school is working or not.

A Critique of SVA's Designer as Author

Few would disagree that Steven Heller is one of the leading voices in graphic design today. Beyond his prolific publishing of over 100 books on design, his position as co-chair at SVA’s Design as Author program is especially noteworthy. This program claims to be tailored to promote “content providers”, “independent creation of ideas” and “objects of worth.” Now, these terms appear to be pretty nice ideas and very promising for a MFA program, but we have to agree that these terms are in a way ambiguous and leave more questions than ansrews — To see what is program is really about, I downloaded all the senior thesis podcasts from the SVA website to see what kind of work was being produced. And from looking over these podcasts and the work produced I have some serious criticism about this program that I wish to share.

$120,000 for what again?

Forgive the break in Milieu work for the last 2 months, holidays and finals took a toll on time. As I was working away on finals, I began to think about why I am doing all of this again?

Issue One

What is Communication Design? That is the question asked in the first issue of Milieu, Communication Design Discourse.

download the frist issue here: Download Milieu, Issue 1 (pdf)

comments, critiques, respones and debates are more than welcome.