19F: Typography III

Typography III: Syllabus
Rhode Island School of Design, Graphic Design
GRAPH-3223-05 (29748), Fall 2019 
Thursday 01:10PM — 06:10PM, DC 210
Instructor: Minkyoung Kim, mkim37@risd.edu
TA: Seyong Ahn, sahn04@risd.edu
Course website: https://mkim.netlify.com/t3f19/
Office hours: By appointment, Friday 9am — 12pm
*Typography II is a prerequisite for this course

Course Description

Typography 3 is the culmination of RISD’s typography sequence, with an emphasis on typography and contemporary display platforms. Advances in software and hardware have created new opportunities for how language is written, sequenced and accessed. Projects in this semester depend on altered states, where the content, composition, and context all are potentially at play. Students will continue to develop proficiency in designing for static compositions while extending the meaning and voice of that work across multiple platforms. Students will have ample opportunity to further shape their perspective and individual voice in relation to contemporary typography.  
This is a studio course, so some class time will be used for discussions, most of the time we will be working in class, often on a computer. There is an expectation that students work both individually and in groups and be prepared to speak about their own work and the work of their peers in supportive and respectful ways.  A laptop and relevant software are required.

Learning Outcomes

A student of this course should be able to:
  • Develop fluency with typesetting that holds across various applications
  • Manipulate letters as part of a system across media.
  • Tend to all aspects of your work at a professional level: including printing, assembling, rendering, prototyping, finishing, animating, presenting
  • Locate yourself and your work within the contemporary typographic discourse. 
  • Make choices that are informed by social, cultural, technical, political contexts — including issues of equity and inclusion — in which your work exists and to articulate these ideas in oral and written form
  • Facile with expressive typographic methods
  • Facile in the ways typography can be used to structure the reading of textual content across media (static, dynamic, interactive) and space
  • Manipulate the formal qualities of typography to convey intended, complex and layered meanings across multiple platforms
  • Convey recognizable voice and point of view across media (still and moving, big and small, static and dynamic)

Course Schedule (Subject to Change) 


Part 1. Dynamic Text Environments
For the first half of the semester, we will look at variability from following perspectives: type in motion, working with templates (where the type changes), and where the fixed elements of a single composition are in flux (as is the case with modern websites). In this part, we will be working on shorter assignments and exercises. These are intended to introduce individual platforms as a single experience or system and to deep into related issues and experimental approaches for each platform. The outcomes from this part should help you expand your ideas for the cross platform systems on the part 2. 
*GD Commons
Date
In- Class  
Week 1
09-05

  • Class introduction
  • Lecture: Introduction to digital typography
  • Setup: Indesign, Figma
  • Exercise: 3 Compositions
  • Introduction of Project 1: Type in flux
Week 2 
09-12
  • Project 1: group crit
Week 3 
09-19
  • Lecture Exercise: Mark up Carl Dair
  • Project 1: final crit
  • Setup: Sublime
  • Introduction of Project 2: Container
Week 4
09-26
  • Lecture: CSS — form and content
  • Exercise: Style Carl Dair
  • Project 2: group crit
Week 5 
  • Lecture: Typography and image, Nancy Skolos & Ramon Tejada*