Teaching To see

This is a documentary focusing on the teachings and students of design professor Inge Druckrey. The way she speaks about looking and translating information is very valuable to me as a practitioner, but also many of the discussions surrounding graphic design could be seen to be relevant to theories highlighted in my essay, as well as in a more general context the discipline of illustration. 

The importance of learning to look in translating information effectively and interestingly. 

• "Training the eye is very, very important, you can't come up with ideas if you don't see first. What interested me was to teach student to see in an abstract manner, so not to see an object but to see it as something round or square, something textured or smooth and to translate what they see into a form language." (Druckery, 2012)
• "When an art teacher asked me to look at a tree and I looked at a tree but I only saw the noun - tree. I didn't see the beautiful progression from heavier to lighter branches or the overlapping of branches and the resulting negative area. The potential of the human eye is so impressive and wonderful. It is very important for designers, or anyone in the field of art to develop a greater ability to see." (Druckrey, 2013)

The importance of order and functionality in graphic design, and how to achieve this.

• "I gave students a 9 square grid which its ordering principle allowed them to come up with a coherent composition, the actual design elements were up to them.""Limiting is important that students have a very clear playground set up and it helps them focus." (Druckrey, 2012)

This method of teaching could refer to the idea of whether we need or benefit from the use of rules (of composition) to create artwork. It could be triangulated with other art practices such as Swiss style graphic design - particularly their use of a rigid grid system to make posters - to conflict with the theory of art being intuitively made and instinctively appreciated. 

• "Graphic design it's seeing and envisioning. The eye has to move around enjoyably, there's nothing where you can get stuck, it all flows and holds together, there's nothing unnecessary." (Druckrey, 2012)
• "It's interesting to see how a poster or cover design are different from information design because both have to function at a distance reading. They have to capture the attention of someone walking by, and entice them to look at more detail information." 
• "Graphic designs always visualising an idea and its definitely about drawing attention, its about informing, its about distance reading but its also about symbolising something because like poetry you have to get the essence of something" (Druckrey, 2012)
• "Bad maps have a dominance of bright colours and simply get noisy, typographic details get lost in meaningless dark shading of the buildings. Its astonishing how sensitive our eyes are in distinguishing the most subtle variation in colour." (Druckrey, 2012)

I think the way graphic design is described in these quotes could also refer to illustration - some contexts of our discipline, such as editorial or poster design, demand immediacy and functionality in their reading (from a distance) thus making it important for it to also embody these principles of order, in visual elements such as colour. Illustration is also often used alongside type meaning it needs to be able to work in harmony with elements of graphic design. 

• "The eye wants to look at an orderly set of marks on a page, the eye wants pattern, the eye wants order, the eye wants relative perfection, the eye wants something that is reliable, that it can count on, the eye is a very conservative part of reading. On the other hand, you have the hand and the hand is the radical aspect of writing. So the hand wants to write faster and faster, writing changes because we're writing faster and faster all the time and the hand wants to write expressively so when you're writing your signature your not thinking about getting every little letter perfect you're thinking about the way you write your signature and that's why its very hard to forge someone's signature because you can't do it slowly you have to write it fast and expressively - that's the radical hand at work. So the whole history of writing can be looked at as an elegant little conflict between the conservative eye which wants everything perfect and rational, and the radical hand which wants to write fast and write expressively, and its this constant battle that makes our environment that we look at when we look at lettering." (Holmes, K.) 

Holmes is speaking about typography, however essentially she is discussing the conflict between order and expression in visual communication. According to principles of graphic or pure design, order is essential to communicating effectively; however in asserting order into an art form how do you control the artist personality or imperfection of the human hand? The quality and importance of the handmade is extensively discussed in design and art practice, therefore it begs the question whether complete order is desirable, or does removing the sense of the human hand render an image to some extent unsuccessful. Can you achieve both a sense of order and expression in an image?

"Teaching to See" (2012) Directed by Andrei Sevemy. [Online] Available from : http://teachingtosee.org/film/TeachingToSee.html [Accessed 09/11/17]

Tufte, E. (2013) "'Inge Druckrey : Teaching to See' trailer" [Online] Available from: https://vimeo.com/67108069 [Accessed 09/11/17]