There are a lot of books out there on tips, tricks, principles and technical expertise on how to make a good website or Powerpoint. My work isn’t about this. Its about using your own instincts to gain better understanding of graphic design to help your teaching and your students learning. Use me as your inner critic to help provide a mirror to help you see what I see, be your critical friend on your shoulder as you construct your Powerpoint asking, “Is this too much text for your students to take in?” “Does that color distract from the content” Is that image relevant? Is it at the appropriate level for an 18-year old?” Does it engage, challenge your students? Make them curious?
What would my ideal high school look like?
A school with a design consciousness throughout both online and face-to-face. The principal is committed to to this mission. The teachers are committed and evaluated on their willingness to reflect after each design decision. Are there places we can increase engagement? Distractors? Potential barriers? Teachers are working with their content teams to strengthen these decisions. Teachers challenge conventional meaningful text and image relationships with a lens for potential distractions and barriers. Graphic designers work with teachers periodically to offer professional development and coach individuals, content teams and whole school.
Teacher practice in a mirror
When first doing this work, I used the conventions of successful graphic design to lead my suggestions. I would say, “Make it bigger, simplify your color, don’t use Comic Sans!” I learned the hard way. A teacher’s visual choices are embedded in preference, years of habit, and the culture of conventional school language. I have come to learn that most teachers make choices based on care and careful planning. If his intention in the right place, I need to work from this space, not erase it. The best I can offer is to help him see his practice in the mirror of his students perception using my expertise to help guide.
What does it mean to be visually sensitive to text and image?
Graphic designers are taught to be visually sensitive to text and image. What does this mean?
- Understanding the point at which the form of your design meets the need
- Consider the audience, what do they need to get the right message?
- Reduce distraction allowing the design to reveal its content
- Spatially organizing elements that clearly dictate a 1st, 2nd and 3rd position
What happens when I meet with a teacher
As a “critical friend” I couple my expertise with teachers to look together at the design of their materials. Often teachers will say, “I would have cleaned up first” or “This would have been better if I had the right technology” or “This looks this way because it’s what existed from the teacher who was here before me.” A well designed classroom isn’t necessarily a neat classroom. I have seen very neat classrooms that are austere and unengaging.
Visual perception and interactions with the everyday of school
Visual perception is defined as the ability to interpret the surrounding environment by processing information that is contained in visible light. Consider all the graphic design one student encounters in a day. He gets on the yellow school bus, sees and ignores safety signs, sits next to a student with a concert t-shirt, looks down social media posts on his phone. He arrives at school, sees his school name on the outside brick wall, sees a banner overhead, graduation signs, posters in the hallways. He is now in class and sees many things at once including a pile of book covers, motivational posters, objectives for the day on the board, he opens his laptop and opens to his teachers website, then goes to a quiz.
A personal journey
Why graphic design learning is important stems from my own disassociation to English and Math learning, particularly in high school where traditional classroom instruction provided no option for students like me. I need alternate pathways to learn. It was only by chance in college where I learned to connect to my own extended communication toolkit and by chance because the intended outcomes for the program was not for students to link graphic design to learning. Realistically, all my peers were in the program to design cool CD covers (this was in the late 80s) and to get good jobs in design studios after they graduated. I am now in a faculty of Design and can tell you that these intentions of a graphic design program haven’t changed except now students want to design cool websites.
For me, graphic design revealed a language beyond plain text, a learning environment where text can be visual but also combined with pictures as a language of learning, to the great benefit of the learner. Now, in my school-based work, I coach teachers to hone their natural instincts embedding graphic design literacy into their practice. Acting as their critical friend, I look with a teacher together with their own graphic design. I probe for and observe innate capacities and tendencies and build on them. My goal is to elevate what can be perceived as ubiquitous unimportant forms in the high school classroom environment — into a more significant and relevant part of a teacher’s visual literacy.