October 22, 2009

Allan Drummond

Today in Western Thought II, a speaker came in to give us a lecture. I'm not sure how it related to the course, but it might be my favorite thing we've done in philosophy so far. The speaker was Allan Drummond, the chair of the illustration dept. at SCAD. In his lecture, he spoke about some of the books that he's published, and also his work experience leading up to where he is now. He started out as a journalist, then moved into graphic design work, and now teaches at SCAD and writes children's books.

Listening to him speak, and looking at his visuals was a nice treat, as it was a real-life example of things we have been learning in all of our studio classes. His work combined the elements of layout, type and copy, and illustration, which I found especially relevant to the books we've been making in VisCom and CDF.

On a more personal note, I absolutely LOVE anything related to children, ESPECIALLY children's books, so this lecture was really really interesting for me. At the end of class, he showed us pictures of students with their own books that they made in a children's storybook course at SCAD, and I was really jealous. Most of them were pretty nice, but you could tell who had experience with design and who did not (one of the books had wonderful illustrations, but the text was Comic Sans--I gagged a bit when I saw it). This just emphasizes the importance of being well-rounded, no matter what your specialty is, because something as simple as the wrong font choice can make something beautiful look like crap.

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