News & Events
Master of Design Thesis Presentations
Everyone is welcome to attend!
Hester Barnard
Readymade Design: A Critical Response to Discourse and Convention
Committee: David Cabianca, Paul Sych
April 7 2011, 9:30am–12:30pm MDes Studio
Bianca DiPietro
Do You See What I'm Saying?: Investigating the Arbitrariness of Letterforms through Typeface Design
Committee: David Cabianca, Paul Sych
April 12 2011, 1:00pm–4:00pm MDes Studio
Brad Tober
New Tools of the Trade: An Exploration of Interactive Computational Graphic Design Processes
Committee: Wojtek Janczak, David Cabianca
April 13 2011, 10:00am–1:00pm MDes Studio
Kevin Paolozzi
"What Goes Around, Doesn't Come Back Round": A Look into the Disruptive Influence of Basel School of Design and Cranbrook Academy of Art
Committee: David Cabianca, Wendy Wong
April 14 2011, 2:00pm–5:00pm MDes Studio
Kate Peer
Making and Thinking: Between the Boundaries of Craft and Design
Committee: Paul Sych, Angela Iarocci
April 19 2011, 9:30am–12:30pm Winter's Gallery, Winter's College
Hannah Park
Remembering the Starry Night(SkyAct): Using Smartphones and Social Networking to Raise Community Awareness to Light Pollution Awareness Networking System
Committee: Michael Longford, David Scadding, Leesa Fawcett
April 20 2011, 9:00am–11:00am TEL 2001
Hannah Park to Present Thesis at the RASC
Master of Design students, Hannah Park, will present her thesis, SkyAct at the regular "Meeting Night" of The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) on Wednesday, December 8, 2010 staring at 7:30PM. The RASC Meeting Night will be held in the Imperial Oil Auditorium at the Ontario Science Centre.
SkyAct is a smart phone application that raises users' awareness of the issues of light pollution, and facilitates a social networking system to reduce light pollution. The purpose of the project is to advocate the ways in which a design can be an active mediator in the transition toward sustainable ways of living. Through the studies of designers as mediators in relation to environmental issues as well as smart phone technology and social network, SkyAct will provide a user-oriented sustainable system that will ultimately reduce light pollution.
Master of Design Students in New York City
First and second year MDes students recently returned from a field trip to New York companied by Associate Professor Wendy Wong.
From first year student James March:
I arrived at approximately 3PM on Thursday to New York City. Design-related activities on Friday included visiting the Guggenheim Museum and The Museum of Modern Art as well as the MoMA’s design and book stores. For me, the architecture of the Guggenheim was probably the highlight of that entire experience as well as their exhibition on Bauhaus art. The MoMA was strikingly diverse and featured several works (Warhol, Van Gogh, Pollock) that I never thought I would have the opportunity to see in real life. The industrial design room was probably the highlight for me, specifically the four Braun products made by Dieter Rams. I have a profound interest in minimalist design and plan to slowly integrate reduction techniques into my own work.
Saturday’s activities included visiting Printed Matter, an independent bookstore specializing small print-run design books. The store was overwhelmingly great and would be the kind of place one could go to purchase books that are inspiring for a thesis-level inquiry of design. Following that, several of us ventured to the Museum of Arts and Design in Columbus Circle. The exhibitions largely focused on industrial design; one called Eat Drink Art Design was particularly interesting as it examined new ways developing common eating utensils (e.g. forks) that are both ergonomic or more literal.
The trip was very inspiring. Forms of inspiration were also present outside of the design-related activities; for example, the subway mapping of New York as well as the various logos and brands seen around the city. New York is surely an inspiring place and it is evident why some of the best designers reside there. I would like to thank the department of design as well as all parties involved in making the trip possible.
James March ’12
Additional photos from the trip can be found on the new MDes Program Flickr page, as well as photos and videos from other graduate student activities: http://www.flickr.com/photos/55978107@N06/
Joeng-Kwon Gye exhibits in Toronto
Eleanor Winters Art Gallery (inside Winters College).Gallery Opening, Thursday October 21, 6:00pm.
Joeng-Kwon Gye is currently enrolled as a Master of Design student in the Department of Design at York. His previous education includes a BFA from Sejong University and a MSc in Communication Design from Pratt Institute. His work has been included in "100 Habits of Successful Freelance Designers," Rockport, 2009 and Graphis Magazine's 2005 "New Talent Annual." His work has also been recognized by the 2003 Adobe Design Achievement Awards.
Please join Joeng-Kwon for his first solo exhibit in Toronto.
Lida Shanehchiyan, a recent MDes graduate will exhibit work from her thesis project in a group exhibition at Contact Photography Festival. She also has been invited to give an artist talk about her work during the exhibition. In this exhibition four photographers present the experience of various women through diverse perspectives framing moments and emotions ranging from agony to ecstasy. The group collaboration is inspired by the poem, Cold Season by Persian poet Forough Farrokhzad. Title: Nobody Will Walk on the Forbidden Fruit
Artist talk: May 20th, at 6:30 PM
Lida Shanehchiyan has been invited talk about her thesis project at a conference at University of Toronto. The title of the conference is, Dissent: The Politics and Poetics of Women's Resistance. This two-day conference is the inaugural international feminist conference organized by the Women and Gender Studies Institute and New College, aims to bring together scholars, activists, community groups, students, artists and performers from around the world for debate, discussion, inquiry, and deliberation on a variety of contemporary feminist thoughts, politics and praxis as they relate predominantly to the Middle East. From the political to the personal, this conference is a conversation on questions pertinent to feminist resistance; its status, its history, its failures, its successes, its poetics. This is a conference inspired by the possibility of political transformation in all its challenges.
Date: Tuesday, May 11thTime: 2:30-4:00
For more information, click here
Nick Shinn, MDes Colloquium - March 31, from 2-4 pm, Grad Studio
Typographer, Nick Shinn will speak at the next MDes Colloquium. All YSDN and MDes students and faculty are welcome.
A REBUKE OF THE MODERNIST MYTHFor all the design profession's infatuation with it, Modernism was a marginal influence on the typography of 20th century mass media, where the dominant force was Historicism. In fact, the most radical and sweeping changes in type design occurred in the early 19th century. In a process of1 critical design, Nick Shinn has explored this phenomenon through the revival of two types from that era-Scotch Modern and Figgins Sans-recently published as the Modern Suite. This presentation follows his work from a critique of conventional wisdom to the discovery of new relationships between culture, technology, and designed form.
Nick Shinn was born in London, England in 1952. He has a Dip.AD in Fine Art from Leeds Polytechnic, and is a Registered Graphic Designer in Ontario, Canada. He lived in Toronto from 1976 to 2009, and now resides in Orangeville. During the 1980s he worked in advertising as a creative director. Going digital in 1989 he started Shinn Design, specializing in publication design. Since 1980 he has designed over twenty typefaces. In 1999 he launched Shinntype. His work is internationally renowned, and on view daily in David Pratt's 2007 redesign of The Globe and Mail, for which he designed all the fonts. Shinn has written for Druk, Eye, and Graphic Exchange, spoken at ATypI, TypeCon, and Graphika conferences, and taught at York University and Humber College. He was a board member of SOTA from 2001-2006.
Placing Creativity
Recently Mary Traill was invited to talk about her thesis project, Urban Reconnaissance Mapping a Sense of Place, at the Placing Creativity Partnership Update. Placing Creativity is a partnership established by the City of Toronto and the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. Placing Creativity works to develop new ways of stimulating regional prosperity by examining connections between culture, economy and place through cultural mapping.
Man of many faces: Brian Banton, York University, Department of Design graduate student explores questions of racial hybridity.
Toronto Star, Wed Jan 27 2010, The technology to turn oneself into a mixed-race avatar might be confined to movies, but Brian Banton plays with racial manipulations of himself online.
Brian Banton, as a York University graduate student, explores questions of racial hybridity as related to corporate design. Much of the work is obscurely theoretical, Banton says. "But I also want to be playful. (Mixed race) is a serious issue but I don't want to be heavy-handed."
See the full article here.
MDes candidate Brian Banton wins Applied Arts Award
A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Brian Banton is a Toronto-based graphic designer currently completing his Master's in design at York. He has worked at some of Toronto's top design studios, including Underline Studio and Cundari SFP. His design work has received recognition from Applied Arts magazine and Coupe magazine and will be published in the upcoming books Typography Today and DesignandDesign.com's Book of the Year.
Graduate Program in Design is pleased to Welcome
Michael Bierut
Nov. 4th, 2009, 10:00 a.m.
Michael Bierut is partner in the New York office of the international consultancy Pentagram. His work has been collected by major museums around the world. He was elected to the Art Directors Hall of Fame in 2003, received the AIGA Medal in 2006 and received the Design Mind award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in 2008. He is a co-founder of the world's biggest design blog, DesignObserver.com, the author of 79 Short Essays on Design and on the faculty of Yale University's School of Art and School of Management. His clients have included Saks Fifth Avenue, Princeton, Disney and the New York Jets.