Counter-Narrative Project

In their work, communication designers curate content and use visual hierarchy to communicate and prioritize the information their audience sees. But those choices have also shaped the traditional graphic design canon, creating gaps because of the people, experiences, and identities that have been excluded or deemed less historically relevant.

Three communication design faculty—2020-21 Louis D. Beaumont Artist-in-Residence Jude Agboada, assistant professor Chrissi Cowhey, and senior lecturer Becca Leffell Koren—set out to reframe and expand this canon. In Typography II in fall 2020, juniors were charged to “re-author, reframe, or redirect” the conventional graphic design history narrative by researching and amplifying lesser-known figures and works including women and non-binary designers, black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) designers, and non-Western typography.

“As we frame the lens in which students start to view themselves, it is important to have an expansive representation of various parties that have shaped what design is today,” Agboada said. “Providing a more inclusive history of various cultural contributions to the field of design makes it more approachable for students. Hearing a student say, ‘I feel more confident about how I can contribute to design’ goes beyond just building skill—it’s knowing they have a place within the creation of new history.”

Each student created a two-sided poster that was both a source of information and a visually engaging expression of the history the student constructed through their research. The research and resulting narrative were meant to communicate a position or stake a claim within design history, establishing the meeting point between evolution in design and a broader historical perspective.

Students conducted research using numerous resources, including from the WashU Libraries, online archives and publications, and design profiles. Each student assembled a set of events that outlined their counter-narrative. Students contextualized the design entries with the social, political, cultural, and technological forces that were crucial to shaping the context in which the designers lived, worked, and evolved the practice of typography in design.

“In doing research, I wanted to break the history down into different eras that you could clearly see,” Laney Ching said about her poster Visualizing Communist China: Posters for the Revolution. “Whenever there were big events, the style and focused changed, so I wanted to choose images based around those changes.”

One of the challenges Ching faced was finding information that wasn’t filtered through an American lens. “In the process of research, I talked to my mom quite a bit,” Ching said. “She gave me university sources from inside China, which really helped me to understand the narrative from a perspective outside of America.”

Ching and her studio mates also relied on each other for fresh perspectives and feedback as they conducted research and made both curatorial and design decisions about their poster content. The iterative process of design allowed students to expose a nuanced narrative.

“The framing of this project, in addition to its research aims, invites students to see how they can engage the finest details of information hierarchy to tell a bigger, complex, and layered story,” Leffell Koren said. “The students embraced the process sensitively and with artful reference to their subjects, amplifying and elevating the content through typographic form.”

The final posters covered a wide range of topics, from race—including the Black power movement, Asian American identity, and how racial stereotypes appear in design—to language and design in non-Western countries, spanning many continents and countries, from activism to gender and sexual identity.

Sarah Auches’ poster, Global Threads of Solidarity for Liberation, connected liberation movements from around the world, including Palestine, the United States (led by the Black Panther Party), Cuba, and Vietnam. “I chose this topic because there’s such a lack of acknowledgement and knowledge about these struggles for liberation,” Auches said. “They haven’t been discussed in a way that allows us to learn about them. The information we receive is often dis- or mis-information.”

Digging into this topic allowed her to see the visual connections between the movements. “I had an understanding that someone like Angela Davis or other Black Panther Party members were expressing solidarity with Palestinian resistance fighters, but I was surprised by how linked the visual language and material produced actually was,” Auches said.

The project had a distinct impact on students, helping them to see the breadth and depth of the design canon and their place within it. “[After this project], I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about my role as a White person within American visual culture,” Kaitlyn Stansbury said. “Maybe my role is to get out of the way sometimes. For example, in creating the more expressive side of my poster (Design and the Black Power Movement), I felt that it was important for me to get out of the way of the imagery. That side of the poster was all about the images and how those images affirmed Black life.”

The faculty plan to include the Counter-Narrative project in future iterations of Typography II, learning from the experience in the fall. “There is and will be much more work to be done in addressing how we educate ourselves and our students about the design figures and works in history that have been marginalized, overlooked, and overwritten,” Leffell Koren said. “This project is one small step in that direction, inviting students to investigate and platform design movements and works that are on the outskirts of the tight curation of those that have conventionally been promoted as the markers of design history.

“The students’ important research expands our lens by bringing forward revolutionary projects and figures, inviting the viewer to delight in the discovery and revisit one’s own assumptions about design history.“

See all the student work from fall 2021 here>>