Learning Outcomes

Close

YEAR
2025

CREDITS
Advised by Tom Griffiths

FORMAT
Book, Website, Typeface, Digital Billboard, Workshop

Learning Outcomes is a BFA thesis project consisting nine works of graphic design responding to the listed course learning outcomes. The work addresses the problem of creating content for school design assignments by identifying the school as a kind of client. The thesis class “learning outcomes” listed in the course syllabus became a list of instructions for nine works of graphic design drawing from assigned class readings, institutional guidelines, and images in school archives as content.

The project emerged from an interest in restriction and default systems. In seeking a neutral source of content and constraints, the work comes to terms with the inherent contradictions of the kind of self-initiated graphic design project expected by contemporary graphic design programs. In professional practice, graphic design depends on the client-designer relationship where designers face real external problems and constraints. When students are asked to invent their own problems, schools risk framing design as a self-contained, low-stakes exercise; design for design’s sake. Learning Outcomes makes its point in foregoing the task of content creation and tackling the problems and constraints faced in school.

Learning Outcomes assumes the Communication Design program as a client and the course syllabus as a brief. The learning outcomes were treated as instructions and followed accordingly, creating a fixed framework within which to experiment. In keeping with this restricted approach, each project is typeset in Arial at a single type size. Across the nine responses, the project tests the limits of institutional language, of graphic design convention, and of this default typographic language while maintaining an approach rooted in problem solving.