Through Process

Should you get an MFA? And if so, what kind of school should you go to? Mitch speaks with Silas Munro, faculty chair of the Vermont College of Fine Arts' low-residency MFA program in Graphic Design, and Jason Alejandro, who is currently enrolled in the program. Together they discuss pros and cons of full-residency vs. low-residency schools, the nature of graduate education, and what you can gain from attending a graduate program.

Mitch has a conversation with designers, authors, and educators Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell, who have taught design at Rhode Island School of Design for more than 20 years. In addition to discussing how their teaching and practice inform each other, we talk about magic, the problem with silos, and attempt to define what graphic design is (if it is anything at all.)

Why are students - who’ve often never had a client - so down on them? Is it something we’re accidentally teaching them? Mitch and Namdev discuss the differences between school and professional life (the good and bad), ways to make parts of academia more like client work without making wothless projects, and whether students should graduate straight into freelance instead of looking for a job.

Namdev and Mitch are joined by designer and educator Benjamin Shaykin from Providence, RI. Together they discuss what the goals of teaching are, the difference between prompts and assignments, cults of personality, and whether you should ban DIN in the classroom.

In the second of a two-part episode, Mitch and Namdev continue their in-depth conversation about the design process, this time examining two of Mitch's projects. First, a poster design for a lecture by British graphic designer Craig Ward, and a series of compositions for collateral he created for the Illumination Engineering Society of San Francisco.

In the first of a two-part episode, Mitch and Namdev delve into process with capital P; not process as a generalization, but the specific Processes for making real projects. Namdev talks through two projects: "Past Objects" is a book he designed in 2010, and "R.U.R" is a poster he made last year after completely rewriting both his ideation methods and how he works with clients. The end result is a wide-ranging conversation about how something gets designed.

What is critical practice? Mitch enlightens Namdev with a workable definition, and gets questioned about his process and how graduate school has affected his work and design philosophy. Namdev accidentally disses Tomato, and then drags Mitch into the art versus design debate (though it's not as bad as it sounds). Tertiary topics include meaningless business cards, architecture school, and why graphic design is fantastic.

Graphic designers learn their craft through group critiques. Or do they? In this first episode of Through Process, design educators Mitch Goldstein and Namdev Hardisty discuss the crit and why Namdev finally killed them after 5 years of teaching and what he’s replacing them with. Mitch talks about design school as a place of discovery and why he likes how Elliott Earls runs critiques. We also find out why Namdev got rid of deadlines - turns out you can blame Armin Hofmann.