This blog post wouldn’t exist without a deadline. I don’t think most things in life—and especially not in the arts—would exist without some sort of time constraint. As a full-time type designer, I understand this well. Every type designer I know understands that typefaces are never finished, they are just released. Meaning that, if I don’t have a deadline, either self-imposed or by a client, I could literally draw, test, and refine a typeface for the rest of my life, and die with a huge smile on my face.

However, the reality is that deadlines are a part of life, and they can be immensely helpful to the design process. I enjoy the challenge of a tight deadline. It forces me to act on instinct and find inventive solutions to complex problems. Time is a design constraint, and embracing this constraint can be a powerful tool for learning and personal growth.

Never has this been more apparent to me than last summer, when I faced one of the biggest design challenges of my career: teaching Graphic Design at Cooper Union’s Summer Art Intensive, a rigorous four-week program that prepares high school students to apply to top art schools.

While designing my syllabus for the program, I made a list of things that were essential to a designer’s education. Then, I narrowed it down to what could be most helpful to pre-college students. The list was still long, and condensing such expansive topics as Design Principles, Lettering & Typography, Color Theory, and Design History into three hour chunks would be too overwhelming and not enjoyable for any of us.

Like many designers, I often turn to Charles Eames for advice. Eames, an influential American designer, once said the solution to solving a design problem rests in “the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible” and, crucially, the designer’s “willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints.”

Eames’ quote described my teaching challenge perfectly. My students were a group of highly motivated and enthusiastic high schoolers who were choosing to spend their summer in school. And, on top of design, they would also be taking classes in creative writing and drawing. With that in mind, I designed the syllabus with a simple premise: each class would present a challenge that used time as a design constraint.

Using this approach, I was able to introduce my students to the principles of design, and give them a strong foundation that would help them approach problem-solving like a designer.

During the first half of the program, we focused on tools and ideas. We covered 2D Design basics and Graphic Design history by visually deconstructing famous works of graphic design. To help them situate their work into a broader context, I took them for a special visit to the archives at the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at Cooper Union. During this visit, the curator, Alexander Tochilovsky, discussed how we can gain a deeper understanding of graphic design history by studying design objects.

We also covered Typography through lettering exercises that enabled them to see the details that make a typeface unique, as well as how those details determine the color, texture, and optimal use of a typeface. I also introduced them to Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, and showed them how to use these tools efficiently.

I was afraid that some of the lessons would be too technical, but those fears quickly went away during class critiques. When the students themselves started pointing out the weaknesses in their designs, I’d helped them bridge the gap of identifying a problem and figuring out how to solve it. After a lot of trial and error, they were starting to see.

During the final half, we put these tools and ideas into action by focusing on the execution of short and long-term projects. I encouraged my students to work on these projects using both digital and analog tools. Getting them used to tight deadlines and short class critiques earlier in the program enabled them to move past their first drafts. By iterating and learning from each other, they were starting to see for themselves that design is the kind of challenge that is never finished, just released.

Their final project was to create a poster that clearly communicated their views on a topic they were passionate about. They created powerful images that explored the subjects as well as themselves, bringing to life a diverse array of themes including animal rights, film history, and feminism, to name a few. Throughout the project, we had many one-on-one conversations about their process, choices, and doubts. This culminated with the visit of a guest critic, where they had the opportunity to present their work, explain their process, and defend their choices in a safe and controlled environment.

At the end of the summer program, we had an exhibit that showed each student’s final project, as well as two group posters showcasing their best assignments from a class exercise. I was very impressed by the amount of work produced and the improvement that my students were able to achieve in just four weeks. It definitely helps having a good TA with you in the trenches—thank you Kelsey!

As the students printed their final project for the exhibit, I realized that I had met my deadline, and the summer program was rapidly coming to an end. All that was left to do was hang the exhibit and hope that I get lucky enough to do this again sometime.

Juan Villanueva is a Type Designer at Monotype, an instructor for the Pre-college Program at the Cooper Union, and adjunct faculty at The City College of New York, and a graduate of the 2013-2014 Type@Cooper Extended Program.

By Sam Chun

Applying to college can be stressful and confusing. Art colleges are no different. There is as much preparation in the application process as any other school. Portfolios are a huge component to showing schools your thought process as well as your skill. And drawing is one of the major ways to show these schools your ability to bring thought into the tangible world. It’s proof of your ability to draw and also how you present your personal visual language to portfolio reviewers. 

Drawing is the foundation to a majority of artists in their practice. It allows them to see ideas develop in real time. It is also a form or recording ones thought process, which allows an artist to revisit and rework ideas. Drawing develops their ability to observe and observation is a skill that requires one to pay attention to the details while at the same time keeping in mind the image as a whole. Observation and drawing come hand in hand which then allows the artist to use their imagination in ways that can push their ideas into much stranger and attention grabbing territories. These are all attributes of drawing that portfolio reviewers are able and would like to see either in your portfolio or in your sketchbook. 

But above all else, it’s important to have fun and to enjoy your experience while drawing. I’ve heard that you can taste the mood of the cook when the food was being made. And I believe that drawing can show a similar kind of transfer of emotion as well. When you are enjoying the process of making work, you will find that you are much more open to learning and more willing to explore new ideas. And that's when the best kind of work is made.

A mentor from graduate school once mentioned the significance of the first piece created in a new studio space.  Whenever entering a new studio environment, this notion always permeates my thoughts.  If I were J.K Rowling I may describe this as an invisible energy which lay dormant, inside the cracks of the floors and the corners of the walls, until the artist makes contact with the room, and by some magic, cloaked from my understanding, inspiration is sparked, cascading vision and genius into the artist…But that’s not how it happens, at least not for me.

As myself and the other Artists in Residence for the Cooper Union Outreach Program were selecting our studio spaces, the Director, Stephanie Hightower, coincidentally touched upon the importance of connecting to one’s space.  All of the studios are sundrenched with skylights capturing as much northern light as physically possible amongst a canopy of skyscrapers.  Although I could always use more Vitamin D, it’s the three unique arched windows in the upper corner of the back studio that I was drawn to.  This triptych, of Romanesque windows, seemed pointless against the magnificence of the skylights.   What was their purpose?  Why did I find them charming? Was I drawn to their repetition, their peculiar location, or was it the view that attracted me: an iconic giant clock mounted to a monumentally painted musical note orienting one to the Carl Fischer Building.

Like these windows, I asked myself, what was my purpose in this space.  I would be here for one month with a 2 week exhibition to follow.  This space would serve as my creative space: my studio.  It would serve as a space to host studio visits; I would later invite curators, writers, academics, artists and friends. It was a learning environment where students could observe and question me and the other residents about our studio practice. It was a space I was grateful to be in.  A place for innovation, exploration, making connections and asking questions.

So, what was the purpose for those three small windows?  What is their story? Maybe there is more then one answer.  

I became the teaching assistant for the Cooper Union Summer Art Intensive’s animation class in the summer after my graduating year at Cooper. I worked under Haisi Hu, who I previously knew from Cooper’s video facilities. Over my four years at Cooper I had been deeply involved with various facets the school, and by the time I graduated I felt I knew Cooper front to back. Yet when I started teaching at the Summer Intensive, I realized it represented a totally different and unique side of Cooper Union, one that reaches towards and nurtures young artists.

Even from my perspective, the Summer Intensive’s animation curriculum is daunting: Over the four week course, students work in groups to create two animation shorts. The animations are twelve frames per second, so one minute of animation means creating seven hundred and twenty frames. On top of that, each group makes two animations in four weeks, resulting in a focused and fast paced classroom environment.

In the first two weeks of the class we worked on cel animation, which required students to first create detailed storyboards and then create their hand drawn animations frame by frame in addition to photographing and compiling the frames. In the second two weeks we created stop motion animations, which saw the students creating character models and elaborate sets as well as maneuvering camera angles and lighting frame by frame to create a series of consecutive images that would then become their animations. Each of these animations also requires post production work and sound design to reinforce the narrative.

As the teaching assistant, I assumed I would be responsible for the nitty gritty parts of this process. However, it didn’t take me long to realize that the students were steering their own ships, taking charge of a process involving drawing, sculpture, photography, storytelling, video editing, and sound design. Each of the animation students is a regular jack of all trades, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to see them eagerly charging ahead with their work without skipping a beat.

This was not the only way my students surprised me - in addition to jumping seamlessly in and out of various media, they also exhibited an exceptional collaborative instinct. All of the class’ work is done in groups that are formed on the first day of class, yet the students wasted no time integrating into their groups and coordinating the animation process both inside and outside of class. If a student was going to be late or absent, it was guaranteed that their group would know first, before Haisi or I.

Seeing all of this unfold reminded me of my own experience of Cooper as an institution that cultivates talent in a truly unique way, attracting a particular kind of student who’s committed to as much experimentation, learning and creative growth as they can fit into the time they’re given. The students in my class embodied this spirit in a way I never expected, and for many of them I wouldn’t be surprised if the end of the summer intensive is not the last time they pass through the doors of the Foundation Building.