Studio Blog | Stéphan Angoulvant

Design Fundamentals 1 and The Way Things Look

In the interest of making my first term wrap-up complete, I thought I should mention the other two courses I took last semester. Sadly I have very little of my work for these classes in digital format, hopefully a brief description will do.

Design Fundamentals 1 was divided into two distinct parts over the semester (Art Center calls semesters ‘terms’). The first half was a basic typography course in which we hand-drew letterforms, learned to space them correctly and created logotypes. Initially our assignments were to refine over several weeks hand-drawn versions of our name in Caslon, Futura and script. We also learned about the history of typography and worked on improving our architectural handwriting. Our final project was an open-ended assignment to create a logotype for an application of our choice.

I decided to design a cover for one of my favorite books, Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. First published in 1889, it’s one the funniest books ever written. It retraces the journey of three men (to say nothing of the dog) traveling across the river Thames. The humorous anecdotes are generally an exemplification of Murphy’s law.

After a few rough layouts, here is a scan of my final (hand-drawn) book cover.

The second part of Design Fundamentals 1 was a color theory course in which we mostly worked with gray values, learning how variegated they can be across different media and painting our own grayscale.

Finally, we ended the term with a half-semester long class titled The Way Things Look. Our professor (who writes Design Investigations), took us through 20th century design describing the history of different movements such as Modernism, Art Deco, Streamline, Post-Modernism, etc. I found it fascinating and obviously an important addition to our culture as fledgling industrial designers.