Gerrit Noordzij: having a good time when you’re teaching

Above is a Vimeo frame still of Gerrit Noordzij as he’s sketching and explaining the design of letterforms during his talk at TypeMedia on 25 March 2010. Erik van Blokland posted the video.

Noordzij is the renowned graphic designer and teacher at the Dutch Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. A great little book titled, The Stroke: Theory of Writing (1985) was written by Gerrit Noordzij and translated fairly recently by Peter Enneson (thank you, Peter). The publisher, Hyphen Press, states, “The Stroke stands out as the most concise and complete summary of Noordzij’s theories on type.”

In an excerpt from an interview with Robin Kinross, Noordzij describes how he teaches his “binary system” to students — Noordzij prefaces:

… any writing of any civilization begins with the stroke, and the stroke is made with the tool [brush or pen], and if you have a stiff tool, then the shape of the tool dominates the character of your writing, and with a soft tool the impulse of your hand dominates the writing.

Noordzij continues to explain:

I always found it very nice to ask my students “is it this? or is it that?”… It’s a nice method. It’s the binary tree.… My system is good for finding your way in design.…

The journalist Margaret Richardson once asked me what my main objective was in teaching. I said, to have a good time. She thought that I was not serious. But I said I was serious. And why did I want to have a good time? As a teacher you can only have a good time when your students are sure that they have a good time. I tried to find things that the students found interesting. Thought-provoking things are always the best; they like that.

I wanted to ask my students to study the book Printing Types by [D.B.] Updike. Then after three weeks I would ask them about it. In my classes we didn’t have what is called a ‘discipline’. Imagine that you go to your students, show them these impressive thick volumes, and say that you will ask them about the book in three weeks’ time. What do they say? “Oh, that's too much! We have so many things to do!” I just took a paragraph from the book and read it aloud. They started laughing. I said: “how do you think that this man could be so famous and yet say such stupid things?” The next day they were crowding around me with quotations and arguments. Just ask a student to find the faults in Updike or in Morison or in me, and they will bring you arguments.

It is just as with a child playing a game. I think that many students have the feeling, often unconsciously, that playing this game could be important for everything else in their lives. It may not really go to the heart of the matter, nevertheless it’s a good problem for a school. It’s a problem that can be a metaphor for your real problems, and because it's just a metaphor you can play with it. Then the only thing that you have to do as a teacher is watch, and show that you are present. So that when people are doing dangerous things, they can afford the risk, because you are there. When you are at the back of the class, sometimes you see somebody look to see if you are still there. That keeps you alive, or at least it gives you a good time.

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Quotations on creativity—Stanley Wiersma

Photograph credit: Calvin College

“Creativity is fruitful freedom, and freedom is the opportunity of choice…. The romantic theory of the creative process, by failing to recognize that creativity is choice, either absolves a student from ever trying to be creative, or makes him mistake the first idea that comes into his head as Inspiration.”

Dr. Stanley Wiersma was a former Calvin College English professor, poet, and author who often wrote under the pseudonym Sietze Buning. Perhaps his best writings are Purpaleanie and Style and Class, which are based on auto-biographical experiences growing up in Northwest Iowa.

Stan was a Fine Arts Guild faculty mentor when, as a student, I served as chair for the Visual Arts Guild at Calvin College. Professor Wiersma, was also known for his encouragement of young Christian authors, he died suddenly in 1986 while on leave in the Netherlands.

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Quotations on creativity—Saul Bass

Portrait of Saul Bass from the Design Museum. Bass’ second quote about the fine line between failure and creativity is particularly interesting.

“A brainstorming session is one in which a group of people try to pool their imagination, operating on all of the facts they can summon up and…they allow themselves to toy with any idea (however foolish), in the hope it may suggest something to someone else in the group and, in the end, snowball into a useful idea.”

“…yet failure is built into creativity…the creative act involves this element of ‘newness’ and ‘experimentalism,’ then one must expect and accept the possibility of failure…”

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Quotations on creativity—Sidney Geist

American sculptors George Spanenta and Sydney Geist (center) working on sculpture in Paris, 1949. Photograph credit: Dmitri Kessel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images/© Time Inc.

“The invention or creativity that new students often manifest is illusory and largely indebted to the stimulation of the instructors. Too many instructors are satisfied with this without taking into account the predicament of the student when the stimulation is removed.” —Sidney Geist, sculptor and writer

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Quotations on creativity—Gertrude Stein

Portrait of Gertrude Stein, with American flag as backdrop (1935 January 4)
Photographer: Carl Van Vechten
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, reproduction number LC-USZ62-103680

Graphic design students as well as writers may find this quote, by American expatriate writer/author Gertrude Stein, an interesting model for practice:

… ‘You will write … if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say the creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought, or afterwards in a recasting. Yes, before in a thought, but not in careful thinking. It will come if it is there and you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition. You won’t know how it was, even what it is, but it will be creation if it came out of the pen and out of you and not out of an architectural drawing of the thing you are doing … I can tell how important it is to have that creative recognition. You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole—and there it is and you have made it and felt it, but it has come itself—and that is creative recognition. Of course you have a little more control over your writing than that; you have to know where you want to get; but when you know that, let it take you and if it seems to take you off the track don’t hold back, because that is perhaps where instinctively you want to be and if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry’ …

Quote found in “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing” by Janet Emig (1964), 7-8. In her essay, Emig cites her source as: John Hyde Preston, “A Conversation with Gertrude Stein,” in Brewster Ghiselin, The Creative Process (New York, 1962), 159-160.

Emig, Janet A. “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing.” JSTOR: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 15, No. 1, Composition as Art. JSTOR, Feb. 1964. Published by: National Council of Teachers of English. Web. 21 July 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/355938.

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What do you expect from a designer worth hiring?

“Small Talk #1” design professional panelists

AIGA Nebraska presented a design education-focused “Small Talk #1” last Saturday afternoon, June 26, 2010 at the Strategic Air & Space Museum. This impressive museum is located just west of the beautiful Platte River near Ashland, Nebraska. The next conversation—“Small Talk #2”—will be on July 9 in Norfolk, Nebraska. “Small Talk” discussed some “big issues” in design education. The AIGA is the professional association for design.

Nebraska design educators were asked to participate in a discussion group with a panel of invited design professionals, talking about the skills current employers expect design graduates to possess. An outcome of this conversation helps design educators identify what the design field currently expects from a well-trained design student. Potentially, the discussion could guide curricular development and reinforce, enhance the insight and information we give to students.

When hiring a designer we look for the following skills:

1. Humility—there is more to learn once on the job; possess a willingness to learn.
2. Personality—just as important.
3. Having the right “fit” within the company—interaction with others.
4. Communicating well with others in both writing and speaking is as important as having talent.
5. The ability to draw by hand (sketching out ideas).
6. Proficiency in newer social media.
7. The tangible skills of Adobe Creative Suite.
8. Creative problem-solving skills.
9. Thinking and understanding the design process (listening, understanding the audience, concept and process).
10. Culturally aware and knowing about current events.
11. Convey confidence (work hard at being well prepared).
12. Typographically astute (take time to kern and spelling error free) — detailed and clean, not sloppy.
    

The design practitioner panelists included:
Moderator: Paul Berkbigler, AIGA Nebraska, director of education
Bennett Holzworth – Nebraska Book Company in Lincoln, Nebraska
Justin Kemerling – Swanson Russell in Lincoln
Craig Hughes – Ervin and Smith Advertising in Omaha, Nebraska
Jeff Reiner – Turnpost Creative Group in Omaha

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Jessica Helfand's 'Open Letter to Design Students'

In addition to Dordt's very fine 2009 commencement speech, 'Children of the Light' by communication professor Charles Veenstra, I thought I'd call your attention to a recent post on Design Observer by Jessica Helfand. Please read through to the last paragraph. Ms. Helfand is one of the founding editors of Design Observer.

As a side note, I have tried to do many of the things she advocates and it has served me well in the 30 years that I've been affiliated with design. My suggestion is to see if you can tailor her insights to your personal circumstances. (Click here to get to her post). For our alumni and other followers of this blog perhaps you may have your own 'words of wisdom.' If so, please leave a comment, or, let us know what you think about Helfand's piece.

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