Home, DSD-2020-K, Essay, 2017

Two weeks before the 2017–2018 semester started, an email appeared in my inbox asking if I would lead a class of students through their first introductory class to graphic design at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Full disclosure, at the time I was 25 (the youngest professor teaching at the school) and graduated from that same school in 2015. My immediate response to the email was that I'm too young and shouldn't even be considered to lead a class of 18 or so students through a series of assignments about color, form, composition, history and gestalt with only a BFA in design. To make things even more interesting, these students are also the same age as me or a few years younger. I was a teaching assistant for a senior thesis class and a junior interactive class a few years prior but was I ready to lead the class on my own? Was I overthinking and being a little too existential about this whole thing? Looking back at it now, maybe, but I personally think these are perfectly appropriate, critical, questions to consider before stepping leading a class of students.

With skepticism and enthusiasm I decided to take the class on and couldn't have asked for a more wonderful group of students and school year.


Exquisite Corpse Workshop, 2018



DSD-2020-K
Introduction to Graphic Design
School of Visual Arts

FALL 2017
Set 1: Contexts
SET 1: CONFIGURATIONS
Workshop: Detailed conversations
Project 1: Expressive compositions I & II
Project 2: A Visual Language

SET 2: COMPRESSIONS
Workshop: The Rotation System
Project 3: A Series
Project 4: A Video Guide

SPRING 2018
SET 3: COMMUNITIES
Workshop: NY-DO-C
Project 5: A Basic Reader
Unit 6: A Symbol

SET 4: CONTEXTS
Workshop: A Location
Project 7: A Remix
Project 8: A Useless Object



Thank you to all the students and the School of Visual Arts design department. Please consider and review the list of talented students for prospective design positions including David Choi, Minhee Han, Hansol Jang, Heewon Kim, Yanyun Liu, Geohang Luo, John Meng, Henry Qian, Justin Sager and Hyejin Song.



“When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.“ — Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language, 1977.

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Last updated: April 26, 2022

© Anthony Zukofsky 2012–2022.