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  1. Introducing Typedia

    Typedia, “a shared encyclopedia of typefaces,” launches with help from faculty members Jason Santa Maria (Design) and Khoi Vinh (Design) and many more. The new site aims to revolutionize font creation and curation, and is sure to be the ultimate treat for typographers.

    Jason Santa Maria relates the origin of Typedia: “I can’t count how many times I’ve labored over looking for just the right typeface—from the right era, in the right style, or with just the right aesthetic qualities. This is often a frustrating process of hopping between sites and books with different criteria for organization, and most times, only involves the typefaces that a company sells. Typedia can be agnostic and unburdened to catalog typefaces from any library.”

    Screenshot of Typedia Homepage

    Read more about the launch of Typedia

  2. Dates to Remember

    With fall approaching, we wanted to outlines some important dates to keep in mind so prospective students can mark their calendars. Students can expect the following timeline from October through April—if they are planning ahead:

    • October 2009 Online applications open for MFA Interaction Design for fall 2010
    • October 3, 2009 Graduate Portfolio Days, New York
    • October 24, 2009 MFA Interaction Design Open House
    • November 8, 2009 Graduate Portfolio Days, Chicago
    • January 15, 2010 Application deadline for prospective students
    • February/March 2010 Telephone interviews for the program
    • April 1, 2010 Applicants receive a decision in writing from SVA

  3. Summing Up the Summer Intensive

    The first Summer Intensive in Interaction Design wrapped up at the end of July. As such, we talked with two students, Ray DeLaPena and Erin Moore, about how the courses went.

    Ray has been a software and systems designer for nearly 10 years before discovering interaction design as a discipline. He took all three tracks in the program and completed three projects in the theme of “time” Erin is a visual designer with formal training in print design and publishing, but had always fostered a strong interest in systems, information design and interdisciplinary projects. She took “Practice of Interaction Design” and worked collaboratively to design a personal alarm clock targeting suburban moms.

    Carla Diana's class, Practice of Interaction Design

    Carla Diana’s class, Practice of Interaction Design

    SVA: What were your expectations coming into the classes? And what overall insight did you leave with at the end?

    Erin Moore: Coming into the “Practice of Interaction Design” course, I knew that the ideas surrounding the field resonated with me, but despite all my reading, research and conversations with people, I still had a pretty vague idea of what interaction designers actually did. I learned quickly that unlike some of the other design disciplines, interaction designers don’t design things. They design people’s interactions with things. There is not one process or five programs that I needed to have mastered. The success of our group project relied on our ability to perceive, interpret, translate, and plug into people’s everyday experiences.
    Ian Curry's class 'Practical Programming for Design'

    Ian Curry, Practical Programming for Design

    Ray DeLaPena: I have a particular interest in visual thinking and communication so working with Nicholas Felton in the “Elements of Communication Design” course was an incredible treat. Nicholas gave the class a quick primer in typography and grid design and followed up with projects that opened the door to be creative and make beautiful work with specific communication goals.

    Carla Diana’s “Practice of Interaction Design” class gave me more than a peek into the process of interaction design and how things work at companies I greatly admire. We were guided through the process and able to experience a few of the most exciting aspects of design: sketching, collaboration, iteration, and critique. Carla touched on the many directions there are to go in this field and encouraged the class to find the areas we are passionate about, and delve into them. 

    I have been working very closely with developers for a long time. A good designer needs to be able to communicate with developers. We need to speak their language. The best way to do that, as with speaking a new foreign language, is to just open up your mouth and start speaking. Ian Curry’s “Practical Programming for Design” class was a good introduction to the building blocks of all programming languages and showed us that it’s not that hard to dive in and start coding.
    Nicholas Felton's class, Elements of Communication Design

    Nicholas Felton and class, Elements of Communication Design

    SVA: How did the courses help clarify your understanding of interaction design? 

    EM: Interaction design is expansive, combining an infinite number of disciplines and areas of expertise. It uses multiple tools, employs many methods, and will undoubtedly create new methods when existing ones don’t work. The course communicated—on many levels—what interaction design is right now, and made clear that the field will keep expanding as people keep interacting.

    SVA: Who do you think would benefit from taking these courses next summer when they’re offered again?

    RD: I would recommend them for people new to the field who want a better idea of what directions there are to go, for specialists looking to get a feel for other areas of experience design, or for people who want to understand what the vast landscape of interaction Design looks like today and help start down one of the myriad paths there are to tread.

    SVA: After an intensive four weeks, what did you take away from the summer program?

    RD: There’s a huge range of activities going on around interaction design. If you are passionate, creative, and dedicated to developing your craft, you can contribute to creating beautiful experiences. There is a palpable excitement about the development and direction of this profession. There is good that can come of it if we continue to keep empathy, collaboration, and continuous iterative improvement as core values in our design and the growth of our community.

  4. New SVA Branding MFA chaired by Debbie Millman

    Debbie Millman, partner-president of brand and design firm Sterling Brands, will chair a new branding master’s program. To prepare students for careers in marketing and advertising, the Master of Professional Studies in branding will have a curriculum across marketing, advertising, branding and creative, with coursework in cultural anthropology, behavioral psychology, commerce and creativity. The graduate program imbues the school’s 60-plus years of art and design heritage with marketing and brand theory—topics usually reserved for MBA candidates.

    Guest lecturers will include: Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer, The New Yorker, and author, The Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Company, 2000), Blink (Little, Brown and Company, 2005) and Outliners (Little, Brown and Company, 2008); DeeDee Gordon, co-creator, L Report and Look-Look Magazine; Jonah Lehrer, contributing editor, Wired, and author, Proust Was A Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) and How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin, 2009); Grant McCracken, PhD, anthropologist and author, Transformations (Indiana University Press, 2008); Daniel H. Pink, author, A Whole New Mind (Riverhead, 2005); Virginia Postrel, contributing editor, The Atlantic, and author, The Substance of Style (Harper Collins, 2003); Cheryl Swanson, founder and managing director, Toniq; Gong Szeto, designer and former director of design and product design, PEAK6 Investments; and Rob Walker, “Consumed” columnist, The New York Times Magazine, and author, Buying In (Random House, 2008).

    Art School Adds Marketing Speak to Its Curriculum

    New Degree from School of Visual Arts Bridges Business, Science and Design: MPS in Branding Offered at SVA in Fall 2010

     

  5. MFA Interaction Design Fall Lecture Series: Kim Goodwin, “Designing Our Professional Future”

    This fall, the MFA Interaction Design Department welcomes visiting lectures in an intimate twice-a-month series to inspire conversation, pursue change, and incite creation. Please join us to kick off the series with the first lecture of the season as we welcome Cooper Design’s Kim Goodwin:

    Designing Our Professional Future


    Interaction design is still a relatively young profession. Like many new ideas, it has evolved organically, powered largely by the need to humanize the ever-accelerating proliferation of technology. The decisions we are making today—the ideas educators emphasize, the skills for which managers hire, and the paths we each follow in our individual careers—will shape our profession for tomorrow. Should we not design that future as consciously as we design products and services every day? Kim Goodwin will discuss her take on how today’s choices will affect tomorrow’s designers.

    Sorry, this free event is sold out!

    View all upcoming events

    About the Speaker

    Kim Goodwin, VP Design & General Manager
    Kim Goodwin is VP Design and General Manager at Cooper, where she leads an integrated practice of interaction, visual, and industrial designers. Her bestselling book, Designing for the Digital Age, was released in February. Kim knows the design world from multiple angles; she started as an in-house and freelance designer and spent several years as an in-house creative director before joining Cooper nearly 12 years ago. Kim has led projects involving a tremendous range of design problems, including Web sites, complex analytical and enterprise applications, phones, medical devices, services, and even organizations. Her clients and employers have included everything from one-man startups to the world’s largest companies, as well as universities and government agencies. This range of experience and a passion for teaching have led to Kim’s popularity as an author and as a speaker at conferences and companies around the world.

    Details

    Wednesday, September 9
    6-8PM
    MFA Interaction Design Department
    132 W 21st Street, 6 Floor
    New York City
    (View Map)

    About MFA Interaction Design

    The MFA in Interaction Design program trains students to research, analyze, prototype, and design concepts in their business, social, and cultural contexts. It explores the strategic role of interaction design in shaping everyday life, and intends to increase the relevancy of design to business and to society so designers can make a difference.

  6. David Womack: A Conversation with Jessica Helfand

    Faculty member David Womack interviews Jessica Helfand for INSPIRE, a publication from the Adobe Experience Design team. A senior critic in Yale’s graphic design program and a partner in Winterhouse, Helfand shares her insight on the “changing nature of the visual biography… from scrapbooks to Facebook.” Below is an excerpt from the article.


    Credit: Jessica Helfand

    With all the different projects and issues you’re involved in, why choose to focus on scrapbooks?

    JH: I came of age as a designer at the height of the no-nonsense, neutral International style, so the idea that design could be personal and idiosyncratic was pretty verboten—so naturally scrapbooks intrigued me! Since I was a grad student I’ve been obsessed with biography, and particularly with what I call visual biography.  My favorite scrapbooks are the messy ones where the narrative changes literally ebbs and flows—just like life does. So maybe the deadbeat dad or the ex-girlfriend’s face is ripped out, or someone scribbles over a caption, or annotates later, after the fact.

    How would you compare scrapbooks to Facebook and Flickr?

    JH: For one thing scrapbooks are tangible and analogue, which makes them captivating in a world of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Facebook status updates. Also, there’s something annoyingly homogenized about all that is digital. It flattens everything out and hides the creases. It’s hard to imagine our grandchildren clicking through a Photostream and having the same sensation as I had, coming upon my grandmother’s scrapbook, with its little pictures of my grandfather, and dried flowers, and so much more.

    What influence do you think our current social networking tools have had on the images of ourselves we choose to display?

    JH: The current image free-for-all online occupies a strange zone where, on the one hand, you’re encouraged to share, but on the other you need to protect yourself from current or future predatory interest. There is no way to express the gravitas of posting all these images to anyone under the age of 25. I think it’s generational: I see all these people in my generation worrying how and how much their children are projecting images of themselves out in the world, like we know we’re supposed to teach them some serious cautionary tale about privacy. This generation, the “new millennials” I think they’re called, they just laugh, because to them, sharing is perfectly natural. They’re not territorial like I am!

    Read the full article

  7. 2009 IDEA Award Winners Announced

    The results for the 2009 International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) competition, a celebration of year’s most innovative and exciting product and product-concept designs, are in. Out of 1631 entries, 31 were awarded the coveted Gold award, while 47 received Silver awards and 72 won Bronze awards. 349 finalists were named in addition to the winners. Amongst the winners include:


    Gold winner: Interactive Product Experiences | iCASTS Advanced Safety and Training Simulator / AVIE - Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment / iDOME

    “iCinema Advanced Safety and Training Simulators (iCASTS) provide a series of immersive virtual environment simulators and an interactive control system for training employees from industries such as coal mining. Similar to a sophisticated computer game, iCASTS recreates environments for various training scenarios.”


    Gold winner: Computer Equipment | 15” Macbook Pro

    “The 15-inch MacBook Pro offers ultimate performance and features in a remarkably portable design (0.95-inches high and weighing 5.5 pounds). It uses Intel Core 2 Duo processors and a graphics architecture that allows users to switch between two modes, one that preserves battery life and another that offers higher performance.”


    Gold winner: Leisure & Recreation | Lightlane

    “Bike lanes have proven to be an effective method of protecting cyclists on congested roads, yet they can be cost prohibitive to install. LightLane provides an alternative. Using a laser, it projects a crisply defined virtual bike lane onto the pavement, giving drivers a familiar boundary to avoid. With this wider margin of safety, bikers will regain their confidence to ride at night, making the bicycle a more viable commuting alternative.”

    View the full press release and winners’ design gallery

  8. Robert Fabricant: On Designing for Ereaders

    Robert Fabricant, faculty for Prototyping the User Experience, comments the design issues around ereaders. Amazon’s recently decided to remove George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. The buyers were credited their $9.99, but such a recall could never have happened with actual books.

    Robert Fabricant:

    “Pages, chapters—all those things are very necessary on paper. They’re not in an ebook reader. ... One of the challenges has been to try to represent the page you’re on, right? And defining pages that don’t match the printed page in terms of the number of characters trying to show you in some progress bar where you are all those things are interesting design problems and the minute you buy into the metaphor, you have decide how literally you’re going to take those on.”

    Listen to the story