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The VCFA MFA in Graphic Design Program Blog

Does This Blog Scare You?

September 10, 2015

A new essay by VCFA faculty member Natalia Ilyin on life, graduate school, and finding redemption in yourself, often with the help of others.

So maybe your husband and you have recently taken separate paths. Still maintaining a cordial relationship for the kids, and all that. And you’re just now scraping yourself off the floor and back into a human shape and you’re remembering way back, before the before the house and before the SUV and before dealing with his mother’s arthritis and your son’s ADHD testing, you long ago got your bachelor’s degree in graphic design and planned to be a designer.

You liked the colors and the textures and your type teacher told you you were talented and you thought about making it big in New York. But just as you got out of school, well—you got married and that little apartment was so cozy and then the next thing you knew you were pregnant and taking freelance projects, making people business cards and notepaper and websites so that he could get through grad school.

Maybe sometimes you catch sight of yourself in the bathroom mirror when you’re toweling down the dog and ask yourself what the hell happened to the last twenty years. Maybe you take refuge sometimes in your set of colored markers and your pad that you bought when you bought The Artist’s Way ten years ago, though you never had time to do the exercises. Sometimes you just sit over that pad and draw nothing, and sometimes you make curlicues and vines. And maybe you just started to think maybe you could go back to school, and maybe get your MFA so you can make some design or teach when the child support runs out.

So you Googled low-res grad schools (because you really can’t move the kids) and you found this blog. Our blog. The VCFA Graphic Design blog. And the type is so big! And the alumni and the faculty all are all so young-looking and smiling and photogenic! (You’ve been thinking about Weight Watchers but haven’t gotten there yet because the meeting times don’t mesh with the Little League schedule.) It all seems so intense and knowing and maybe that scares you but guess what you don’t need to be scared.

This blog is super bang zoom because the wonderful and talented Ian Lynam designed it, pushed it through and got it launched. Ian works like a dog and makes type and writes books and works for clients and heads up this program right now. And since he’s doing the lion’s share of the work on it, naturally this blog looks like him. That’s an interesting thing about graphic design. It colors impressions of information to such an extent that it alters that information. Right now you are plunged into Ian’s Portland/Tokyo mash-up circa 2015. If this blog were set in eight point lower case Courier, you’d be feeling very 1991. You’d feel like you should be wearing Prada.

In the 1860s, when telegraph messages began to hum across miles and miles of strung wire, instantly connecting city to city and continent to continent for the first time, the operator receiving a message could tell who had sent it just by the sender’s touch. Design is that way, too. You’d think that all messages set in Cooper Black would carry the same meaning, but they don’t. We feel the operator’s touch.

Many operators tap out code at VCFA. We’re all tapping different messages with our different touch signatures, but we’re using the same wires. We all believe the same things about teaching design, and it boils down to this: the student must be at the center of her own education. For some of us, being at the center of our own lives is strange territory, and it takes a while just to get used to how that feels. But trust me, it’s a good feeling.

If you’re interested in making curlicues, we’ll support you to become the best curlicue maker you can be. Instead of asking you to design like a “VCFA designer,” your advisors will work to help you get those curlicues and vines to an unprecedented level of vineyness. You might go on to become the premier curlicue designer in the Universe. You might patent a curlicue app. You might create a series of curlicue workshops, and travel the world painting vines. Or you might go from curlicues to studying William Morris and his curlicues, and end up writing a book that traces the development of neo-Medievalism and its role in the beginnings of Modernism.

If you’re interested in type history, or in bookbinding, if you want to design for social change or pen calligraphy or make marks with a burnt stick; if you’re wondering why people think some methods of design are edgy and others passé, then suddenly historical; if you want to design for Big Data, or are enthralled by, say, a lecture by my colleague Ziddi Msangi, about the messages printed on the the fabric kangas that women wear in the African Great Lakes region— you’ll find people at VCFA who will support you in centering your work right there in your new or old area of interest.

Come and visit and see what’s going on here. Talk to people who have gone through the program, and who are going through it now. Your life may be betwixt and between, what with the moving in and the moving out and managing the kids and the losses and the sudden quiet in the house. But take heart from a message I recently read on a kanga: apo sipati tamaa sikati — “Even though I have nothing, I have not given up my desire to get what I want”.

Copyright 2015 Natalia Ilyin.Nike Sneakers Store | Sneakers