1. Home
2. Education
3. Adobe Design and Film School Connection

Designing against your creed

When faced with a creative challenge for a design project, most students like to select a topic related to their interests or experiences. But what if students are forced to design for an unfamiliar client whose values are opposed to their personal beliefs? What kind of results do they achieve, and how do they feel about their work afterward? Can and should designers work to advance companies or associations whose causes are opposed to their personal beliefs? Answering these questions was an experiment pursued by an undergraduate graphic design student at the University of Dayton, and it so impressed faculty member Emily Wallace that she incorporated it into her Graphic Design 1 course.

A controversial independent study

Erica Nooney, a senior at the University of Dayton, was struggling with uncovering her own sexual identity while trying to define the social responsibilities of her chosen profession, graphic design. She was intrigued by an organization postulating that homosexuality is something to be overcome. She noticed the design inconsistencies on its website and proposed an independent study to create designs for the Exodus International Youth Program. She wondered if creating design work for an organization that denied the validity of her sexual orientation would help her understand her role as a designer.

Nooney researched the organization for two months. Then she began to plan her campaign and identified herself as the target audience — she would find out what it was like to create propaganda aimed at herself.  Her first instinct was to do the nastiest job of design she could imagine, but she soon decided to create designs that truly communicated to gay people her age.

Effective design for a despised “client”

She first designed a new logo by transitioning Exodus International’s name into a short, sharp phrase that was slicker and less institutional. The slant of the “X” implies instability, and the “I” suggests the straight, upstanding pillar and eventual “correction” of the slanted homosexual.

The fade completes this suggestion with connotations of transition, movement, and progress. Her marketing plan was to create black-and-white portraits meant for inexpensive reproduction in college newspapers. She used the same angled text applied in the logo to engender insecurity. Her advertising slogan, “Be Who You Were Meant To Be,” is a twist on a line from a song in the musical Rent. She developed three ads for her campaign; one turns on a twist of the homosexual rainbow symbol, one plays on the conflict with traditional religious beliefs, and one raises doubts about gender roles.

Defining beliefs

When Nooney told Emily Wallace about the independent study project, Wallace felt it would be an arresting challenge to pose to other students. She incorporated the project into her syllabus as the final design exercise for her junior-level students. In order to set up the project, she asked her students to fill out a survey with three questions about religious, political, and social beliefs. She found that the majority of the class did not hold strong beliefs on any issue. Most had not registered to vote, didn’t follow the news, knew little of current events, and had limited or unevaluated religious beliefs. The project forced students to learn more about the cultural and political world they lived in.

Almost team teaching

Wallace and Nooney jointly presented the design challenge, showing the students Nooney’s work. Then Wallace gave students their assigned clients, ranging from the National Rifle Association to the National Alliance to the United Socialist Workers Organization and found them initially surprised, shocked, and resentful. Wallace gave them one week to research their organization, write a brief report, and assess their organization for an unexplored design avenue. She hoped students would propose projects such as promotional materials for a new audience, brochures or booklets to augment an underexposed facet of the organization, a more organized web page, commercial storyboards, and so on. The project challenged the students to think critically in assessing what their individual organization truly needed to better meet its goals, even if those goals were repulsive to them.

Using the best tools

This project, like the rest of the course, was divided into lectures, research, sketching, computer lab time, and critiques. The students used Adobe® Creative Suite® software installed in the lab, which the department chose because the common interface between components makes it easy for students to learn how to produce the designs they envision. 

Researching an organization and its philosophy

Students sent email to their assigned client organizations and interviewed people within them. Some received existing collateral pieces from these organizations. Catherine Baker, a student assigned to the NRA, was initially taken aback but curious. She disliked and feared firearms and wanted to meet someone knowledgeable about the NRA to hear their views. Wallace introduced Baker to a police officer who was also an NRA instructor. She inundated Baker with a plethora of brochures, workbooks, and videos. She accompanied her and Wallace to a firing range for actual experience with firearms. For Baker, the design challenge was to create a simple introductory manual that could educate novices like herself about gun safety and the role of guns in U.S. society.

White supremacy from the perspective of an Asian immigrant

Hoang Ton, an Asian-American student, got the National Alliance, a white supremacist group, as his client. His was one of the most offensive and difficult assignments. Of the experience, Ton comments: “I did stick with the assignment to prove to myself that I could do this well, no matter how difficult it was.” At times, the only motivation Ton had for mastering the project was his own distaste for his client, but he created a powerful poster and two bumper stickers designed to reach a teenage audience.

Resistance yields to understanding

In the final critique, the students displayed a wide range of products — from guidebooks, commercial storyboards, and ad campaigns to picketing kits, depending on what each felt the “client” needed. Despite initial resistance, the Graphic Design 1 students created strong work and became the strongest proponents of the assignment upon completion. They remarked on how much more challenging this assignment was than being asked to design to a specified scope for a client with generic aims. By situating the students as disbelievers in their own designs, this project helped them experience the long-range effects and power of design in a provocative way. Wallace challenged them to examine and define the designer’s role for themselves and left each of them pondering their personal boundaries.