Introduction
As an Open Education & Publishing Institute Fellow, Summer 2022, I created an Open Educational Resource with the CUNY Academic Commons for a foundation course in graphic communication. The fellowship invited connections to the CUNY Academic Commons and other like-minded colleagues and it provided rare compensation for a course design. This resource is now available for reuse and remixing across CUNY campuses and beyond, meaning that instructors can use any parts of the course and edit and adapt them any way that works for them. It serves as a solid base and resource for instructors beginning with the Baruch Department of Fine and Performing Arts. It can serve as a base template for all future courses—a shareable curriculum map and resources list—so that students moving on to intermediate and advanced courses can have the same underpinnings of knowledge, experience, and learning. As is best design practice, accessibility is always the first consideration in the pedagogy, including course mapping, plans, and course delivery.
First, I will discuss why Open Education Resources are so important in design education and how they are a natural fit with the collaborative nature of graphic design. Second, I will explain the course in detail, showing how this foundation course in graphic communication works to guide students through an introduction to more inclusive and decolonized graphic design methodologies, vocabularies, habits, and technologies. Finally, I will discuss my experience of the creation of this course as an Open Education Resource on the CUNY Academic Commons through my Fellowship at the Open Education Pedagogy Institute at CUNY, including an explanation of my course as an OER, fair grading practices, the requirements of accessibility for all, and the limitations and restrictions I encountered creating the course, including a discussion of labor.
On Sharing and Generosity in Creative Work and Creative Pedagogy
Every collaborative creative domain—graphic design, film and television production, theater, and others—has established workflows and processes, but rather than limit creativity, these traditions were developed to optimize necessary work processes in order to allow for more creative time.
The twentieth-century designer Prem Krishnamurthy discusses thinking about graphic design as a “generous discipline”. Post-graduation, he needed to learn how to work collaboratively in a studio environment. He reflects,
graphic design is inherently a facilitating medium, in how it works relationally and socially. It is collaborative. Almost any piece of graphic design requires multiple agents involved in it from the client to the designer, illustrator, photographer, design team, etc. So rather than approaching graphic design in terms of ‘problem solving’ or ‘functionality,’ which are by now pretty outdated frameworks, how might graphic design work as a kind of positive excess? How can it be generous, going beyond whatever is required in a given situation, giving more than it takes, as an act of love. (Miller et al. 2022)
It is not enough, however, to have the technical design skills. Both a discipline and well-established workflows make up the design process. Product exists as evidence of design thinking but the process itself is often opaque. Questions arise: How does an individual designer structure their project source materials so that another designer can collaborate or finish the work? How does a designer return to past projects or materials as a reference or revision for new work? How is the source material organized for archival purposes? The lack of a clear or agreed upon process can carry a real cost—disorganization can cost time and money for the client and studio. The need for this type of workflow is also true for teaching, especially for course design. Being able to return to our past courses, assignments, and materials is beneficial during the course design process. Sharing these materials with others should be, but is not always, the culture of academic departments.
To address generosity directly, my learning objectives position the students to become professional peers rather than clients—creators rather than consumers. They learn how to work together collaboratively and share their work effectively—and carry these skills forward into a professional design career. Select research tells us that graphic designers are inherently collaborative, using a shared visual and written language to communicate from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first. Design itself is a learned craft coming directly from guildsmanship—the teaching and learning of the craft is an expression of sharing and generosity, and the final products created are about sharing the message and sharing the means of communication. The writer Audrey Watters asks, “how can we think about ‘openness’ as an ethos not simply a licensing agreement, one with tremendous power to shift education beyond a focus on ‘content’?” (Watters 2015).
The generosity in sharing the craft includes decolonizing the syllabus and the course by decentering the Western canon of design examples, including visual formats that have been traditionally devalued, welcoming everyone with inclusive and accessible materials, tools and accommodations, and by truly believing that everyone is creative. Adhering to the principles of the Decolonising Design Collective , my course “seek[s] the radical transfiguration of [existing power structures] through the critical eye of the programmatic imagination that dares to identify the possibilities and conditions that will give us alternatives to the now” (Decolonising Design Collective 2019). The Open Educational Resource material extends this goal to other educators in the spirit of generosity, providing the tools and framework to rework, reuse, and remix for other courses across CUNY.
About the Course
My introductory graphic design class, Basic Graphic Communication: Design & Advertising Layout, is a studio course that introduces the graphic design process and methodology. It is mandated to build students’ visual, verbal, technical, conceptual and critical thinking, and creative communication skills to transmit ideas, and also to cover the essence of branding. Students learn and use tools for thinking in this course’s curricular sequence, some borrowed from other domains such as the writing process of “word mapping”. Graphic communication is both a discipline and a craft that puts order to the visual and informational world; it is also, as the designer Forest Young states, “both an imaginative way to think about what is yet-to-be and as a critical act of looking backwards.” (Sala, Olins, and Young 2022).
This class is a studio course taught using a critique-based workshop model. It is an experiential progression of graphic design projects that helps to introduce and refine the technical skills essential to professional practice. More importantly, it overlays other twenty-first century skills, adding pedagogical depth to the skill-building through an implicit layer of meaning-making, critical thinking, and abstract and symbolic thinking. Embedded in the discipline, accessibility runs throughout the course: making sure the teaching tools and materials themselves are available in multiple formats and legible to all learners, designing classroom and online practices that invite various forms of participation, and ensuring the visual and verbal processes of the designer-students themselves. This paced course is designed to work for three modalities: synchronous online, synchronous in-person, and asynchronous online, allowing for an ease of transition from in-person to digital and back.
The challenge of deepening the development of students’ visual and written communication skills threads through fourteen weeks of instruction. This approach also models a real-life designer/client relationship, using the classwork parameters as surrogate client design briefs and other students as a design team. The trajectory of the course includes:
- Students are given a design brief, along with related readings, hands-on tutorials, and skill-building exercises.
- Projects that the students create from the design briefs are shared each week via a class blog.
- Students are taught how to write about their own work for critique.
- Students are taught how to critique each other by describing the work, interpreting the work, evaluating the work, and recommending changes.
Using this art critique methodology, students work on projects within a consistent feedback loop. The revision and refinement through multiple iterations of the projects allow for deeper learning, and the process models a creative studio production workflow and environment. The sharing and presenting of the design is always a multi-modal communication, in which students must use at least two modes to share their work and thinking, whether it is writing or commenting on their work or another students’ work, or video or live presentations of work.
At the end of the semester, these first-year design students have a complete and focused portfolio that showcases all their hard work and creative thinking. The work is deeply personal, yet the sharing of the design projects throughout the course facilitates connections outside of themselves—students see their own projects alongside other individual creative takes on the same projects that they themselves have helped shape with their critiques and feedback throughout the course.
Creative Work and the CUNY Academic Commons
It is not enough to say, “Here are some free fonts and here are some free images—just go.” Academia has limitations on what it can mimic in terms of work culture. Students don’t experience a real workflow and, more importantly, don’t experience what the creative process of production actually is—not just the creative process of thinking, but the process of production and collaboration, and the limits on the means of sharing. The ideas, typefaces, images, and tools are NOT free. Starting after the 1960’s with the advent of the photocopier and the rise of the personal computer, self-publication and design expanded access to the dissemination of materials. But, even with this democratization of design production, copyright, digital terms of service, and other forms of restriction, keep the tools and the means of production tightly controlled.
The current state of common digital content platforms (including Learning Management Systems like Blackboard and design tools such as the Adobe Creative Cloud, Behance, and the Adobe Type Library) have become “walled gardens” which are not conducive and often outright hostile toward the notion of content sharing. The journalist and author Cory Doctorow states:
Giant companies corral an audience, locking them in through “digital rights management” (which locks all the media you buy to a platform controlled by the seller), or by subscription fees, or through exclusive deals with venues or radio stations, or by buying out any company that tries to compete with them, or by starving these upstart competitors by selling at a loss whenever a new company starts up, so they can’t gain purchase. (Doctorow 2022)
In an academic setting, copyright and creative ownership must be respected. There are provisions for educational fair use of content, but often, digital platforms may not even be architected to allow for content sharing within the bounds of fair use. Conversely, Creative Commons Licenses used by creators the Open Educational Resources, offer a standardized way to grant permission for anyone to use creative work under copyright law. Pairing Creative Commons License work with an open-source, community-built and -oriented platform like the CUNY Academic Commons allows us as design educators to create and share our content as we intend, without the restrictions (or expense!) of commonly used learning management systems, subscription design tools, and closed platforms.
The Fellowship Experience: The Open Education Pedagogy Institute at CUNY and the CUNY Academic Commons
My goal was to make a graphic design–oriented Open Educational Resource (OER) that is accessible, wide-ranging, and culturally relevant, and that takes advantage of the enormous amount of resources available, while hosting the material in a learning space that is contemporary and alive. I was inspired by the generous and shared aspect of building this resource on the CUNY Academic Commons.
The CUNY Academic Commons is a WordPress multisite network built for and by the CUNY community; the platform provides hosting for websites, including graduate and undergraduate courses. The platform allows instructors to share course materials, facilitate discussion, and craft assignments that allow students to connect the course content to public discourses beyond the classroom. So often we are sharing our course development work in a void, or worse, using technology platforms that are taking our materials without allowing us the agency to share out to our peers. On the CUNY Academic Commons, the users retain the rights to their own content and have the option to license it openly; moreover, the variable privacy settings on the platform allow for private spaces of collaboration within a course, and the choice to share work publicly with wider audiences.
My CUNY Academic Commons course website was created as a template to inspire other instructors to design a course that teaches visual thinking and vocabulary, reviews historical and contemporary design movements, and introduces students to working with type and images with Adobe Creative Suite: inDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. It provides a timeline guiding instructors how to lead students through a 14-week studio course that culminates in a final student portfolio.1
Working over the course of four days in the summer of 2022, eight Fellows, including myself, learned about digital archives, copyright and creative commons licenses, and the affordances of various CUNY-created open course platforms, including the CUNY Academic Commons(a WordPress multisite network) and CUNY Manifold, a collaborative, open-source platform for digital publishing. We then went on to choose our platform and begin building out our open resources.
Learning the basics of WordPress, I began writing and designing my site. Designing a course for myself was completely different than thinking about how to share the same course with other instructors, even though it is a class I have taught before in three modalities. Each step and chunk of the course needed to be easily understood and work as a part of a whole.
The information architecture of the website was a key consideration: what was the best way to introduce another instructor to the course and what was the best way to walk someone through the course itself? Working from a text document that outlined my ideas and key areas, I created a site map and built menus, pages, and posts. I attempted and prototyped templates and menus as the site developed. Learning and working with four other Fellows creating CUNY Academic Commons sites gave a lot of insight into issues, problems, and solutions we were all facing as we developed our sites, especially about the importance of site architecture. Throughout, decisions about what to include and what to cut for clarity were both difficult and important. The running list of things I thought were important to the course became a streamlined hierarchy and extraneous notes were removed. As the site grew, I iterated menus and table of contents so that much of the course and the course site could be read or referenced at a glance: what use is a tool if it is not clear how to use it?
Thinking about the course as an Open Educational Resource meant that I had to look for open and free materials and sources and carefully consider what type of images I would use on the site. Ultimately, links to resources, reading, and tools were simpler to source than the images. Sources such as the BC Open Collection by BC Campus and Art History Teaching Resources had a range of useful materials.
While I use many copyright-unrestricted resources and images in my course and course lectures, I chose to use my own photographs of student assignments and workspaces on the OER course website. I excluded them from the Creative Commons license for the site as they are images of student work (acquired with a release from the students), although they can be used with permission.
Even with most of the course written and tested, it consumed time and thought to create new materials, learn a new skill (WordPress), and reshape the course as an Open Educational Resource. As a Faculty Fellow, I was paid for my time to develop this course, something for which adjuncts seldom receive compensation. The Open Education Pedagogy Institute is supported by my university, and throughout the process, the Fellows had complete community support from each other and direct support from two educational technologists (both during class time and continuing through the writing of this article). The support and compensation is a rare privilege.
The Open Educational Resource on the CUNY Academic Commons
Basic Graphic Communication, my Open Educational Resource on the CUNY Academic Commons, is designed for instructors and is available for reuse and remixing across CUNY campuses and beyond. The site was created as a template, timeline, and curriculum map to guide instructors in designing a course for introductory students from design and non-design backgrounds. This course encompasses a wide overview of graphic design, from the history of the Latin alphabet to hands-on practice, including visual thinking and vocabulary, historical and contemporary design movements, and methods for peer review and visual critique, and introduces students to working with type and images with Adobe Creative Suite: inDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.
As an OER that can be reused and remixed, other instructors are welcome and encouraged to copy and remix the course for their own purposes. In my department at Baruch College, new instructors of the course will have the option to copy the OER to remix for their own section. The site includes course goals and a sample syllabus that shows how instructors can lead students through a 14-week studio course that culminates in a final student portfolio. In order to copy any or all parts of the course via the Commons, instructors can request access to a clone of this course. Instructors can freely copy and paste any part of this OER, and it is also available as a cloned site via the Commons; instructors can request access to a clone of this course so they can have their own copy to work with and edit (the “request a clone” is a function of the Commons).
This is an Open Educational Resource for Graphic Design course for Baruch’s Fine and Performing Arts Department, including course curriculum map, readings, design for accessibility, visual sources for research and inspiration, and resources for online tutorials, design resources such as fonts, open-source software, and web-based design programs and whiteboards. Resources can be used to create lectures, find images, and to assign for student reading, including written articles, visual sources for research and inspiration, and necessary resources for accessibility.
Teaching graphic design history
The Graphic Design material in this course goes beyond basic Euro-centric design history and inspiration and looks beyond a textbook to dive deeper into worldwide historical design movements, contemporary design, cultural design, and current design thinking and discourse, making the class more accessible and culturally relevant. Basic Graphic Communication begins with an introduction to what graphic design communication is today, and then does cover the history of three important European-based design movements from the early twentieth century through the present: Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, and Swiss Grid/International Style. There is a strong focus on the ideas and ideals of those movements and how they influenced (and were influenced by) design, designers, worldwide events, and visual communications across cultures. This opens the discussion to the chokehold of dominant cultures and influence. The course reckons with this and provides examples and strategies for challenging that narrative. The second half of the course builds on this material and discourse and goes beyond the Western Canon in a movement I have named Design Against Convention. The Baruch College student body is diverse in backgrounds, culture, and circumstances, and it is critical to showcase and uplift design and visual communication outside the basic European design movements to show ongoing worldwide participation and influence in visual culture. Design Against Convention covers 1960–present and starts with the accessibility and democratization of design tools—this access led to the expansion of the reach of the visual ideologies of political movements worldwide, self-expression and identity, feminism, and punk, and we look at those in detail.
Grading creative work
Using a simplified project feedback rubric, students are graded on fulfilling the criteria for design projects. The criteria are based on the Course Goals/Learning Objectives and remain consistent throughout the course. Areas of concern are noted for revision and rework. The criteria are:
- design technology (selecting appropriate tools, competence with tools)
- design habits (organization, following instructions, completeness of work)
- design vocabulary (typography, composition, etc.)
- design methodology (conceptual and design thinking, problem-solving)
- design field/history awareness (written analyses of work)
Rubrics are for feedback only. They are not “calculated,” in the spirit of generosity and ungrading. The deepening of visual communication and learning is the goal. By using a 4.0 scale instead of a 100-point model, the grading becomes instantly more “fair,” as the F is no longer 0–60 (Webb, Paul, and Chessey 2020, 2–4). A missing or incomplete assignment does not bring down the entire course grade, which can cause students to abandon the class altogether, or feel that they are failing at being “creative.”
Accessibility is always first
The CUNY Academic Commons uses WordPress as its content management system, which aligns with the Open Educational Resource ethos, as WordPress itself is Open Source Software. According to W3techs,WordPress is used by 43.1% of all the websites, which is a content management system market share of 64.2% (“Usage Statistics and Market Share of Content Management Systems, November 2022”, n.d.). Because of its large user base, developers are constantly updating its robust options for plug-ins and themes, many of them free. If it works on the internet, chances are that a WordPress user can incorporate it into their WordPress site. WordPress is also committed to making their community and project as inclusive and accessible as possible so that users, regardless of device or ability, can publish content and maintain a website or application built with WordPress (“Accessibility” n.d.).
As part of best design and teaching practice, all courses strive for fully accessible, inclusive, universally-designed coursework. Materials and platforms used for this graphic design course support accessible and barrier-free learning, and accommodate learner diversity and disability. I choose and create only videos with transcripts, enable closed captioning for all online courses, create alt-text for all images, and write detailed written instructions for all readings, assignments, and projects. All other material is created as tagged PDFs. If it is not fully accessible, it cannot be included in the course.
Limitations and restrictions of the software
While working on my Open Educational Resource, my biggest issue was not knowing if the limitations of what I could do were actually just limitations of what I know. Not knowing what was impossible, as opposed to unknown, limited my ability to create the Open Educational Resource. Sharing my process with other Fellows in my cohort enabled me to exceed my own conceptions of what was possible. Specifically, I repeatedly revised the table of contents and menus for the site architecture as I learned new techniques for compilation, which then meant a backend overhaul of my site. The gap between administrators and authors/editors doesn’t allow for one person to truly control the site while allowing other contributors the ability to add to other pages—authors and editors can only add posts. Additionally, there is an extra layer to sharing this open material; for an instructor to use a clone of this course (instead of copy/pasting content), users must request a copy of the clone directly from the creator.
Finally, creating an Open Educational Resource is a time burden; though it may be free for students, it is not free for instructors to make, as it is often completed as unpaid labor. The site I created is copyable, but can only be cloned by getting in touch with the creator, creating another demand on time.
Conclusion
Working within the ethics of generosity, the creation of an Open Educational Resource on the CUNY Academic Commons is a natural extension of the craft of graphic communication. Building on the guild model, instructors teach instructors the process of “teaching the process”, which becomes a way to pass the knowledge of the arts and craft of not only graphic design, but also of pedagogy, teaching, and learning. As we strive for communication, using these free and open resources to connect with each other and learn from one another becomes more and more relevant.
