The summer school is many things. For sure, it's about graphic design, specifically editorial design and all its constructive processes. However, it's also very much about human relations, about people – strangers – getting together, negotiating working relationships, sharing experiences and building bonds. This year, the human emotional connections that the summer school always facilitates were particularly strong and most evident when the course came to an end. It's a rewarding revelation, evidence that the search for meaningful connections in an often uncertain and unpredictable world is at the forefront of people's minds. We build bonds around our interests, our professional practice, our experience and ambitions, and always around our humanity.
When it comes to ways of learning, we enter a different territory. Within design education, and sadly beyond into professional practice, there has long existed, clichéd and banal (mis)conceptions about design that place notions of 'creativity' and 'ideas' at its centre. The problem is that most notions of creativity are so vague that they are meaningless. And there is nothing proprietary about ‘having ideas’. The operational practice of graphic design is no more predisposed to generating ‘ideas’ than any other discipline. Besides, how does one teach ’having ideas’. In short, these promoted characteristics are not useful intellectual or organisational tools. They are platitudes at best and at their worst stereotypical notions about individual creativity and ‘uniqueness’.
We propose a different perspective. One which swaps ‘creativity’ for methodology and ‘ideas’ for strategy. Neither of these are prescriptive but they imply systemisation – of questions, of procedures, of iteration and testing. And these things feed best off, not ‘imagination’ (another cliché), but off research, knowledge and tangible skills – the more profound the better.
This perspective is what guides the exercises we conducted in the first week and the principle editorial project that followed. Overall we aim for a mix of lectures, informal talks, manual and digital exercises, always with time to discuss, and to socialise.
As usual, the four principle tutors gave lectures about their practice and methodology.
Our guests this year for the informal evening talks in the second week were again Porto based practitioners. They were all asked to choose one editorial work to talk about – no digital projection, just the object and support material. A special thank you to designers Susana Carvalho from the studio Carvalho Bernau, Joana Lourencinho Carneiro, and Nina Paim, founder of the feminist publishing project Bikini Books.
At the end of the fortnight five different editorial projects were created, which, with a copy for each group participant plus one for the summer school archive, resulted in a total of twenty two printed publications. To see and to read a little about these publications please visit the news pages where there is a separate post about each.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who made this edition very special, the tutors, the guests, Árvore (Escola Artística e Profissional) for allowing us to use their wonderful premises, the print company Orgal Impressores, and above all to the course participants whose skills, engagement and persistence made it possible to produce five unique editorial publications in such a short period of time. Congratulations to all.