Lecture: Thursday, February 13 7pm Nave Alcove, CCA SF Campus 1111 Eighth St. Emmet Byrne is the design director and associate curator of design at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He provides creative leadership and strategic direction for the Walker in all areas of visual communication, branding, and publishing, while overseeing the award-winning in-house design studio. The exhibition Designs […]
Anyone would collect something, some moment, either consciously or unconsciously, and this collection explains the particles of oneself—a substantial body of personality, his/her interests, and histories. For many years I have initiated workshops based on participants’ personal collections to explore the conceptual relationship with personal objects and (re) contextualizing stories behind them in the design […]
A collective poster and book making workshop designed by Berg. and hosted at The California Academy of Science, The Institute of advancing Uncertainty, SF Art Book Fair, and California College of the Arts. The workshop invites the public create a poster using graphite rubbings over curated images from our research. The rubbing technique pulls the […]
The survey tool is a completely divergent enterprise. Playing in this space, using this space as a storytelling device, and using graphics to amplify the look and feel between the form and the reader. The audit begins with logistic questions, such as date and location, and it reaches the arch where it asks unanswerable questions. […]
The project focuses on reclaiming his workspace at MFA design studios as a gallery space, and install 4 exhibitions which relate the title itself—Reclaim. The space initialed the first exhibition on 02.18.2018, and the 5th exhibition, which is the final closure exhibition, will be on view at CCA Hubbell Street Gallery from 05.10.–05.14.2018, as a part of 2018 CCA […]
Test Image explores image-making techniques to celebrate and critique the digital world that we live in. Using traditional and new forms of image-making methods (riso printing and processing) hybridized images are created that visually articulate the intersection between traditional print and new digital imaging methods.
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 8, 5:30-7:30 PM CCA Hubble St. Gallery 151 Hubble St . . . . . . . . . . Work by: Kennis Chow Max DeVore Yangyifan Dong Winston Struye Zheyuan Zhang Mo Zhou Qi Zhou . . . . . . . . . . . Faculty: Catherine Leigh Schmidt […]
The frame defines a 2D space from the external world. I am trying to map and sum up an logic of graphic design by finding and locating these frames. From my perspective, the invisible space is the most important aspect of graphic design. Although the topic and text change, the frame is consistent supporting the visible system. […]
JPEG compression. Skewed graphics. Missing glyphs. Misaligned mechanisms. Unexpected inputs. New technologies begin as broken tools. Emerging from a primordial soup of glitches, bugs, and errors, they endure years of debugging, buffing, and polishing which gradually refine them until they disappear into the smoothness of the background. There they operate, invisible functions which pattern life until, […]
Index was created as part of my thesis project called Methods of Organization. The concept comes from the working title for our MFA Design thesis show, Fakes. The process: 1.Choose two fonts 2.Place one on top of the other 3.Remove areas where they overlap, fill areas unique to each
This poster was designed for Colin Owen’s In the Making lecture and was meant to reflect his working philosophy: Accuracy, efficiency, and industry. The marks/symbols in this poster demonstrate the broad spectrum of Colin’s interests and methods. Behind the large variety of Colin’s toolkit, there was a system, represented by the parameter, which organized each part together. […]
Deluge and spectacle, media and politics, and image over-saturation in the digital age – a chronological collection of material gathered during the first hundred days of Trump’s presidency. Photography by William Bottini.
Manifesto Project
Project 1: Subversive Guidelines. Each student was assigned a graphic identity of a cultural institution to research with the goal of experimenting and exposing the limitations of its design system.
The Exhibition Drawing Machines, is a result of a course taught by Colin Owen and Martin Venezky and features the work of MFA Design Students: Ashley Adams, Sophie Feller, Yisha Dai, Buge Jiang, Kate Moore, Bo Peng, Rob Exhibition Synopsis This exhibition investigates assistive and autonomous tools for art making. These “drawing machines,” created by MFA […]
Congratulations to recent CCA MFA Design graduate Praree Kittidumkerng, former student Jiho Jung, and current student Bo Peng, who were awarded the Society of Typographic Arts 100 Award for creating one of the top 100 graphic design projects of 2016. Visual Braille Type – Senses, Sound Experience Praree Kittidumkerng Jiho Jung The Legendary Debates […]
The way we use cooking tools and eating utensils influences how we approach food culture both economically and socially. The traditional European table setting which include fork, knife and spoon are based on etiquette and table manners. Eating is a physical need, and meals are a social ritual, therefore we conform to unspoken rules. […]
In this course students will create, analyze, and deploy assistive and autonomous tools for art making. Discourse will focus on the collaborative, augmentative, and translational nature of the tool/hand relationship. Built processes will veer between disciplined refinement and wild chaos. Bashing, hacking, disrupting, and refining will push both discourse and content into elegant working objects […]
The Legendary Debates of Graphic Design The debate as to whether design (or graphic design) can truly be classified as art in the literal sense has raged on for years. It’s a complex and rather convoluted argument to have, as both designers and artists create their own visual interpretations and compositions with the skills and […]
Mapping Project One morning, I pulled some of my hair from my head while taking a shower. I began to think about how hair is a piece of DNA that each of us can easily shed, change, or let go of…I began to ask people around me (school, neighborhood, work) if I could take a […]
In numerology and mythology, 9 represents completeness, yet its strength is built on whole individual units and its scale is infinite. For the nine graduating designers, the 2016 MFA Design exhibition is both a culmination and the start of a new phase of practice.”
Poster for Experimental Jetset lecture at CCA.
Experimental Jetset is an Amsterdam-based graphic design studio founded in 1997 by Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen. Focusing on printed matter and site-specific installations, Experimental Jetset have worked on projects for a wide variety of institutes, including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou, Dutch Post Group and Whitney Museum of American Art. Their […]
Come join us to celebrate MFA Design faculty member Martin Venezky’s selection as a new member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 2016! On this occasion we have installed an exhibition of Martin’s recent work in our MFA Design Studio titled Martin Venezky: Wallscapes, and will hold a reception and Conversation between Martin Venezky and Faculty members […]
A Tool for Making _____________ This project challenges you to create a design tool you’ve all probably used before but most likely taken for granted, the Template. This investigation aims to explore and complicate a conventional tool of the design trade in both a physical and conceptual sense. By creating a physical mark-making tool, you […]
Form Studio offers students a strong foundation in the making, assessing, and critiquing of visual materials and begins a discussion that will reverberate through the rest of their studies. Students learn the use and structure of materials and media, and the development of a rigorous and disciplined process through which they can create and analyze […]
IN THE MAKING is a new student-run faculty lecture series. This series aims to explore the grad school experience… how faculty members developed of a personal way of working in school, including relevant challenges, influences, and transition to their current practice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . […]
CCA MFA Design / AICAD Symposium November 6th, 6-10 pm Organized by Sara Dean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The field guide is a designed item, an collection of a place, and a tool for exploration. Using the Marin Headlands as […]
CCA MFA Design / California Academy of Sciences November 5th, 6-10 pm Organized by Leslie Roberts, JD Beltran, and Scott Minneman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In keeping with CCA’s annual partnership exhibition with the California Academy of Sciences, Design Lab explores and […]
Poster for Design Lab event at California Academy of Sciences.
CCA MFA Design / Headlands Center for the Arts Oct 30th, 9 am – 5 pm Organized by Sara Dean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This was a one-day retreat for students and faculty at the Headlands Center for the Arts. MFA Design Faculty […]
Visual Braille Type – Senses, Sound Experience When individuals lose their sight, they unconsciously develop their touch and hearing senses in order to replace the missed abilities. However, for one who has five sense completeness, how does audition and touch differ from vision? The “Visual Braille” is designed by combining two senses, sight and touch. All […]
A risograph lecture poster designed for anexact office.
MFA Design is an open site for the investigation of contemporary design practice. Built on a firm foundation of technical skills, pushing the limits of cutting-edge tools and technologies alongside traditional craft-based techniques, MFA Design students work to reimagine the methods, modes, and meanings of design in contemporary culture. Whether intended to be commercial, civically […]
Jon Sueda / Chair Sara Dean / Assistant Chair Christine Lasher / Program Manager
Negash Asegde Annika Bastacky Yuhan Chen Yiming Cui Lingyin Du Cynthia Escalante Mitch Greer Rebecca Hanson Jiahao He Linya Huang Jenn Jiang Xinheng Jiang Yuan Jiang Anqi LI Chengru Li Chang Liu Yaqin Liu Yang Liu Pei-Chi Lu Jinghan Luo Andrea Murchie Pushan Panda Dan Qian Zeng Qian Juan Pablo Rahal Kelly Rouser Xinyue Song […]
Rafi Ajl Mary Banas Cory Barr Matthew Boyko Mark Brest Van Kempen Sara Dean Donald Fortescue Guillermo Galindo Cristina Gaitan Christopher Hamamoto Eric Heiman Jonn Herschend David Kasprzak Mathew Kneebone Barry Katz Stuart Kendall The Letterform Archive Ana Llorente Brett MacFadden Marty Marfin Emily McVarish Scott Minneman Paul Montgomery Randy Nakamura James Pierce Calvin Rocchio […]
Amy Balkin Julia Born Emmet Byrne Julian Bleecker Keetra Dixon Dinamo typefoundry James Edmondson Experimental Jetset Frank Grießhammer Jason Groves Na Kim Mike Kuniavsky Maryam Omar /Turquoise Mountain Jenny Odell Jonathan Olivares Monica Martinez Tim Parsons Megan Prelinger Leon Ransmeier Valkyrie Savage Sarah Teasley Bruce Tharp Etienne Turpin Marco Walser Allan Wexler
The World, The Collective, The Secrets is a publication of the 2015 MFA in Design program at California College of the Arts. It is an archive that looks past individual inquiries in favor of a collective voice. It is a zeitgeist – a cumulation of topics addressing the current state of design. These topics include: the […]
The Graduate Program in Design is proud to present the 2015 MFA Thesis Exhibition: A Range of Indeterminate Results. The exhibition will feature individual and collaborative works of graphic, interaction, and industrial design from more than 40 degree candidates who have completed CCA’s prestigious transdisciplinary graduate curriculum. Curatorial StatementWe are shaped by the spaces and […]
Lawrence’s work examines the role of competing mythologies in the formulation of ideas of place. Lawrence calls the friction between societal-level myths and personally held ideologies ‘myth tectonics’. It is in the space of these ‘myth tectonics’ that Lawrence creates graphic design to respond and contribute to understandings of place, myth, community, and politics. Lawrence […]
This thesis focuses on our relationship to the urban environments we inhabit as well as the people who we share them with. We are constantly navigating a sea of people, usually strangers, but we don’t realize the impact those people have on our perception of our surroundings, their impact on our wellbeing, and our own […]
Rules, habits and definitions arise from agreements that humans have made to construct a reality that we can all understand. These parameters create order within ourselves and our environment, allowing this world to function. However, I wonder whether an excess of automated behavior restricts our ability to experiment with new ways of making and delight […]
Within the field of typography, letterforms typically embody either static or kinetic forms. However there is yet another category that escapes the purely static or purely kinetic. This is temporal typography. Unlike static typography, these forms are not bound by one iteration within a singular viewing experience. And similar to kinetic type, temporal typography carries […]
In narrative texts, there exists an intangible space between an author/creator’s written word, and how that written word is perceived in the mind of a reader/viewer. My thesis explores the role of the designer in activating this space. The use of words in the English language works because it possesses a set of groupings of […]
Biography: Marco Walser studied visual communications at the Zurich University of the Arts and spent a year in London with an internship at Graphic Thought Facility. In 1999 he founded the Büro Elektrosmog in Zurich, which he heads as creative director. The studio designs books for artists, architecture magazines, visual identities for museums, and posters for theaters. Walser […]
Project: Exercises in Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Featured Work: Lake Buckley Kelly Steben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Biography: Keetra Dean Dixon is a designer and artist who relocated from NYC to rural Alaska in April of 2014. She and her partner, JK Keller, test the claim “We can work from anywhere” by building a new studio practice with a remote home base. Dixon traded in her team leading role as an Experiential […]
Workshop Synopsis: This workshop asks participants to innovate using formally focused processes. It’s a peak into R&D from my perspective. There is blending of analogue and tech fabrication, intentional and accidental output, and embracing of the unexpected. I often integrate ideas of “theft,” exchange, transparency of process, and social authorship. The workshop evolves familiar methods […]