education, the modern (russian) design, and heavy lifting

“One of my big caus­es is to get peo­ple to THINK again.”
—me, on the RADíO FLoMM [breeze] episode
 

As I write this I am just a cou­ple weeks into my twen­ty-some­thingth ses­sion teach­ing graph­ic de­sign his­to­ry. And with my main school (of class­es and in­come) shut­ting down this past De­cem­ber, I’m find­ing my­self reeval­u­at­ing where my cours­es have been and where they are headed. 

Typ­i­cal­ly, no one knows what graph­ic de­sign is. This is how I usu­al­ly start the teach­ing thing. 

Graph­ic de­sign is a most­ly un­known field, even though it ex­ists every­where in our lives. It’s mor than just logo de­sign or some­thing some­one does on a computer.

I see the edu chal­lenge to­day to get stu­dents to want to learn, to want to ob­sess over the ma­te­r­i­al the way they ob­sess over pop­u­lar things, likes games or movies. It’s an up­hill bat­tle tho. #whyflomm

— FLomm! (@flommus) Feb­ru­ary 6, 2019

FLomm! grew as a side gig out of my graph­ic de­sign his­to­ry course. Usu­al­ly halfway thru, stu­dents learn about
mod­ern art move­ments,
de Sti­jl (Van Does­burg is where the idea came from),
the Bauhaus (100 years old this year, where all art schools got their mojo),
and So­vi­et Con­struc­tivism (a pow­er­ful phi­los­o­phy that in­cludes art can be ‘a prac­tice for so­cial pur­pos­es’ as ref­er­enced in the video below).

Part of my self-as­sess­ment is I’m now in a po­si­tion to go far­ther into the world of graph­ic de­sign education:

This year, a few pro­fes­sors, a for­mer stu­dent, and my­self are go­ing to open a to­tal­ly nü school.

We are go­ing to teach things no one else teach­es. In de­sign, in business – 

And to do this, I have to be fit. Not ex­act­ly phys­i­cal­ly (still do­ing my best late­ly tho), but I have to be be­yond where I’ve been.

In my jour­ney I found a doc­u­men­tary that talks about graph­ic de­sign to­day in Rus­sia. It resonates:

And my cur­rent stu­dents should watch it. Es­pe­cial­ly the part where they in­sult the stu­dents at the end. That part is im­por­tant be­cause güd stu­dents have to be pissed off, pas­sion­ate about their work, self-mo­ti­vat­ing and want­i­ng to move forward. 

Do­ing every­thing your pro­fes­sor tells you to do is nev­er enough. Blind­ers on – that have scrawled on them this is good enough – typ­i­cal­ly won’t al­low you to do any heavy lifting.

And com­ing up, we have a lot of things to lift. As a species, as a cul­ture and as students. 

 
 

—steve mehal­lo

Flom­mist Steve Mehal­lo is a graph­ic de­sign­er, il­lus­tra­tor, font de­sign­er, ed­u­ca­tor, food­ie and gad­fly. He is the cre­ator and founder of FLOMM!

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