Writing Project
As you develop your independent project, this essay will serve as an opportunity to discover relevant practitioners and creative work that can inform your own project. Researching, organizing your thoughts, and articulating them in writing are absolutely essential skills for any designer.
Of a group of applicants for a job or project, the best writer will have a serious advantage. Plus spending time thinking critically about your work and life is always valuable to do.
Prompt
The title of your essay should be a question
What questions do you have about the ideas, feasibility, or historical context of your own work? What unexpected connections can you make? What is missing? What is confusing? The title of your essay should end in a question mark and should seek to discover a specific answer (or possible answers) to this question or explore its context.
Analyze a specific work by an artist, designer, filmmaker, or studio
Incorporate a focused discussion of one creative work or project into your essay. This should somehow relate to your project, research topics, and/or the media you are interested in. Resources for discovering interesting work can be found at the bottom of this page.
- You are encouraged to look for new, obscure, historical, or otherwise thought-provoking creators — not just mainstream pop culture.
- Include a thorough and detailed description of the work's design — Assume your reader has not seen the work before. Describe formal qualities such as, colors, shapes, movement, structure, and so on. Use descriptive adjectives to help the reader picture the work.
- Include the work title, date, medium, and location (as relevant)
- Describe pertinent historical context for the work.
- Include credible scholarly sources to support claims and information.
Include 1–2 related works
These secondary works should not be a primary focus of the essay, but can offer additional context or comparisons to the primary work under discussion. These could be contemporary works by peers or historical precedents; they could be similar or antithetical (in opposition to) to the primary work.
Not sure where to begin?
- You could start with an artist or designer, and pose a question that intrigues you about their work, or suggests a possible connection to your project.
- Consider the historical precedents or themes of your current or past projects, and find writing and creative work that lies in a similar orbit.
- This writing should be though of as art or design criticism (a critical and reasoned examination of a cultural object). Consider your unique point-of-view and identity; choose a subject that you are passionate about.
- Imagine someone else was writing a serious essay about your work, what connections or questions would they include?
- Use a chatbot like ChatGPT to think through your ideas or discover practitioners or writing related to your investigation. You can even tell it to ask you questions, if you're feeling stuck, to provoke introspection or curiosity.
Visual Outline
To begin this project, create a virtual whiteboard using FigJam, Miro, Mural, or something comparable.
Use this as a brain-storming and note-taking hub for your project, similar to the beginning of Project 1 in this class.
- Brainstorm possible “topic questions” for the essay.
- List possible artists or designers and their specific works.
- Add images, links, and quotes to collect resources for the essay.
FigJam includes a Mind map feature that is very helpful in exploring related ideas from a central topic and generating possible research topics.
As you collect ideas and resources, begin to organize them into essay sections. Use text headings and spatial organization to indicate the “story” you will tell in the essay. For example, you might have sections like “Introduction” or “Historical influences” and list what you will write about in each section (much like a written outline and bibliography, but with pictures).
Search for articles and ebooks at the Penn State Library or Google Scholar
📥 Submission: The Visual Outline will be due as a preliminary assignment ahead of the main essay.
Writing the essay
Your essay should include discrete paragraphs that give structure to your writing, including an introduction and conclusion. This essay is a substantial part of the class and should demonstrate college-level writing and your ability to research appropriate sources.
See syllabus for your instructor’s policy on the use of generative AI.
Requirements
- 1000–1500 words
- Bibliography of 3 or more professional sources (Chicago, APA, or MLA format)
- Parenthetical or footnote citations in the body of your essay to support facts and cite quotes.
📥 Submission: DOC or DOCX file
Rubric
- Meets requirements: 10%
- Topic question: 10%
- Is the title question specific, relevant, and worthwhile? Does the author answer the question?
- Relevance to Independent Project: 10%
- Is the essay relevant to the author’s own work?
- Writing ability: 30%
- Is the writing free of typos and confusing sentences?
- Does the author use vocabulary and concepts appropriate to their professional field?
- Critical depth: 40%
- Does the author analyze the meaning, design, or form of the work in a thoughtful way? Do they grapple with related issues in art, culture, technology, and/or economics?
Resources for Discovering Artists and Designers
- Fast Company: An essential design publication; features mainstream design and weird creative stuff.
- We Make Money Not Art: A quirky blog of new media art; search for keywords to browse years of material.
- Dribble: A social media platform for designers (mostly UI and graphic design)
- Creative Bloqq: A very pop-y blog of creative tech stuff.
- Surface Magazine: A high-brow publication on "architecture, art, design, fashion, and travel."
- 99% Invisible: Every designer's favorite podcast; browse years of stories on design of all kinds.
- Abstract: The Art of Design: A Netflix series about innovative designers.
- Art21: A great video series on artists of all kinds.
- TED Talks: You know what they are; search for designers, artists, and practioners.
- ChatGPT: Ask an AI chatbot for “examples of contemporary artists working with 3D modeling” or “graphic designers who use hand-drawn elements.” (Look them up on your own afterwards, but this is a great way to discover new work and writing.)
- The world around you: look through your books, albums, video games, or other design work that you love and find out who made it.