Lesson idea: TypeFACE portraits - Digital

 This is the second year that I have done this project idea in the Graphic Design course (the first year's student work examples are HERE) and I am amazed at how far the students pushed their work this round. I believe the jump in complexity that is shown is attributed to a number of factors including my insistence to raise the proverbial bar every time I repeat a project idea and the amazingly natural talent I've been seeing in the rising underclass art students.

I presented this lesson a little differently to the students than I did last year in the following way:

• I held off doing it almost a month later in the project timelines than when I did it last year during Fall semester
•  I presented a full powerpoint presentation that included not only very solid examples of typography portraits I found via the web but also a tie in lesson to the study of typologythat encouraged a deeper investment of understanding for type in all of its forms
• I limited the background color palettes for all of the projects to only black or white and color was only allowed to be used on the foreground lettering/type layers

I did not give the students a step-by-step tutorial for this project and instead required them to think back on prior knowledge and skills that they have been building since the beginning of the course. It was interesting watching the different approaches they took and seeing the ways they chose to overcome design challenges. They have definitely become very knowledgeable about the different ways photoshop can be used and also the ways a project can be completed from start to finish. They are showing solid abilityand working knowledge about how to look at a project idea and deconstruct it to be able to figure out how it comes together. I'm so proud of them and it's stuff like this that makes me so proud to be in the classroom every day with them and do what I do.

Anyway, enough of the bragging. Here are some of the best pieces I've seen turned out this round. Some of the students have photoshop at home so they spent significant time out of class working on their pieces but the majority of the pieces were worked on during class time alone (about eight meetings of 55 minutes a piece) with one or two study halls worked in there.