Design School Drop Out
is a chapbook of concrete poetry, which came to life when I started experimenting
with digital recycling. In my first year of university, foundation classes had
me creating work for the sake of learning but not use. I was always perplexed
by the digital clutter in both our world and my desktop, so I revisited this
work years later in hopes that I could make sense of it. It soon turned into an
ode to graphic design’s past which was deeply rooted in craft before the
profession turned digital. There is something deeply personal about making
things with your hands and I wanted to see that reflected in whatever I
created.
This
book explores the struggles a young designer goes through while trying to
grapple with the loss of craft and how to make meaningful work. In the original
version, I used found objects like spreads of newsprint and an elastic band to
bind the book, as this contributed to the handmade feel. When sending it to above/ground
press, I had included cropmarks to make the printing easier and they found
their way into the book. The cropmarks are now my favourite part, because it
allows me to see the boundaries in which I worked and brings attention to the
reproduction that was part of the process.
I
chose concrete poetry because there really was no other way to tell this story.
I like to think of concrete poetry as stripping design down to its core and
focusing on its most basic task: visual communication. It brings attention the
aesthetic design of communication and to how we communicate by deconstructing
letterforms, which are usually preprogrammed carriers of content. When paying
attention to form, it allows an audience to look at the structures in which we
understand language and how we communicate it. That’s why I think concrete
poetry is so powerful and why more people should read it (you can start here!).
Rachel
Kearney
is a writer from Toronto who is interested in the intersection of poetry and
design. She is pursuing her Bachelor of Design with a minor in Creative Writing
at York University.
