JOY + GRAVITY in Design by Hilary Dana Walrod Like many design educators, I pursue two primary activities: I design, and I teach. Along the way, I’ve come to realize that a common, fundamental purpose underlies my approach to both pursuits: I aim to move people. One of the benefits of working as a graphic de signer in academia is that I have the freedom to pursue not just client-based projects but also independent projects. I care deeply about the environment, the arts, community, farms, food, health and place, so I can choose to pursue and develop graphic design projects that support these interests and causes. As renowned designer Michael Bierut points out in his essay “Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content,” “the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else.” I’ve also come to realize my creative work is compelled by two forces that are at times contrasting and at times complementary: the joy of making visual things, and the gravity of issues to address in the world. I can trace this duality back to my undergraduate career, when I studied both studio art and environmental studies. These disciplines continue to inform my graphic design work, which is often situated at the intersection of environmental consciousness and visual communication.
Vegetable Know-How booklet front cover (above) and sample spread (opposite), 2013-2018
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design for the common good My graduate thesis project, for example, centered on this question: In what ways can the design of an exhibition prompt people to change individual habits for the common good? Beginning with the admittedly broad intention to address climate change through graphic design, I focused on food, which is a largely invisible consumer of fossil fuels. My project evolved to become “A Fork in the Road: The Time and The Place for Local Foods,” a multimedia gallery installation that visualized both the staggering externalities of our conventional, industrial food system and the possibilities inherent in alternatives such as local food systems.
COLBY-SAWYER MAGAZINE
The more I’ve researched and learned about what might move people or change their minds — and the more I’ve explored how to do so via visual communication — the more I’ve come to recognize the potential inherent in incremental change. When aiming to move people to alter habits and/or perspectives (whether about food or something else), I believe it’s crucial not only to provide “what” an issue or topic entails, but also “how” one might respond — which can facilitate hope and/or action. Being both an educator and an optimist, I design projects that present nonprescriptive options for change alongside or through data. One substantial piece in “A Fork in the Road” was “East Tennessee Eats,” a calendar that visualized the seasonal availability of all local foods within a 100-mile radius of my graduate school. I produced two versions: a large-scale installation of banners for the gallery, and a small-scale wire-bound version for purchase. I’ve relocalized this seasonal calendar for each of my homes since, repeating the research and design process first for “Iowa Ingredients” and then for “New Hampshire Nosh.” At Colby-Sawyer, a large-scale version of the latter is displayed in the Ware Student Center dining hall. It’s been an interesting, long-term creative exercise to repeat this project every few years in a different locale. Each time, I encounter new com plexities in the research, and I can’t help but consider changes large and small to the information design system I’ve developed for visualizing this content (i.e., the colors, typefaces, structure and layout). For example, when working on “New Hampshire Nosh,” I tried changing the structure from 12 single-month banners/pages to four threemonth banners/pages that depict each season as a whole, allowing one to identify patterns over a longer increment of time. Now that I’ve tested this version, however, it’s evident that the monthly calendar is a more usable and readable format, so this project is undergoing more revisions. Repetition — or, more specifically, iteration — is a fundamental part of the creative process in design and art. Making multiple versions of something lays the foundation for an exhaustive, in-depth approach to creative problem solving. Whether it be three versions of an album cover to present to a client or 100 hand-drawn sketches (which I require each student in my Identity System Design class to create during a logo design process), iteration necessitates moving beyond the first obvious solution. Further, iteration is one way to synthesize joy