Teaching the first class during a semester is always dicey to me. What do you do with a class that runs for 3 hours, is full of freshman with little-to-no graphic design experience and who don’t bring any materials to work with?

I could lecture them for 2 hours after the hour of syllabus, introductions, and class rules nonsense, but I’m pretty sure they’d only hate me. Graphic design to me is the antithesis of sitting still and taking notes.

Plus, it’s generally believed that if you want your students to act in certain ways through the course of the semester, you need to get them acting that way on the first day of class. So if you want collaboration, creative activity, and critical thought throughout the duration of the class, there needs to be some of that on day one.

It has always bothered me that graphic designers had to introduce themselves with words—their names, where they’re from, favorite foods… it says nothing about them as designers short of the occasional “I want to be a famous album cover designer”, or as is more common these days, “I want to design t-shirts”.

So, my solution four semesters ago was this syllabus activity. I bind their syllabi into little booklets, and then bring a stack of magazines and papers. Their goal is to collage the cover in a way that says something about them. I believe that all graphic design is to an extent about communicating identities—and at least for the first day they can start to see and experiment with how different elements & parts can have relationships—and when put together— associative meanings. It’s also interesting to see how these designs reflect the early hints of their seedling design philosophies and aesthetics. On the second day of class, they bring in the finished collages and re-introduce themselves, telling the class how what they chose represents them as individuals.

This semester, for example, I have a modernist student, I have a few who have been clearly influenced by postmodern design, and I have students who have an innate attraction to grid structures, though I’m sure they don’t even know what a grid is.

But I always like getting to know my students in this way, and I want them to be able to get to know me in the same way, so I always do one also. This is my cover for this semester. I ended up doing it very last minute, but kind of like the way it came out.

All apologies for the paltry photography (and the long post)—it was 11:55 by the time I got around to the picture.