One of the com­mit­tees that I’m cur­rently serv­ing on has been charged with coming up with an end of year event dis­play event for School of Print Stu­dents. This type of event, in theme, if not form, is pretty common across the Col­lege of Imag­ing Arts and Sci­ences. For exam­ple, each year all the stu­dents and fac­ulty mem­bers in the film depart­ment gather together and watch every student’s final project. Like­wise most of the other arts have gallery exhi­bi­tions or studio walk throughs.

All of the above focus on an end prod­uct. But what is the end prod­uct of print? It’s easy to focus on the cre­ated arti­fact. But that often is reduced to con­cerns about the item’s graphic design. That focus is com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate for print­ing stu­dents – if for no other rea­sons that they are not train­ing to be graphic design­ers. Arguably, the final prod­ucts could be eval­u­ated on choice of media and pro­duc­tion aspects, but many of these fac­tors are con­trolled by the assignments.

Frank Cost noted these prob­lems with judg­ing print pro­duc­tion at the begin­ning of the chap­ter “The value of print” in his book The New Medium of Print (Cost, The New Medium of Print, 2005: pp95-7).  Cost reminds us that most print­ing indus­try awards are based on the qual­ity of the final project rather than intan­gi­bles such as “was the job deliv­ered on time? Was the cus­tomer please with the ser­vice? Did the prod­uct deliver the antic­i­pated value to the customer?” (Cost: p95).

Cost goes on to sug­gest that while print qual­ity is impor­tant, it’s also assumed. Thus, com­pa­nies dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves on those other vec­tors. Like­wise, our stu­dents are judged on far more vec­tors than simply “did the job print” and “is it pretty?” The chal­lenge that we face is choos­ing a method of dis­play that brings those intan­gi­bles to light.

The ben­e­fit, ped­a­gog­i­cally, is that find­ing a method to dis­play the intan­gi­bles serves to make the stu­dents more aware of their exis­tence – that, as Martha says, “is a good thing.” The ques­tion is, what method is best?

I just noticed that the photo of Scott McCloud and  "How to draw comics the Marvel way" dis­played below, has appeared on The Beat, a comics indus­try site. Unfor­tu­nately, I expect that Henry Jenk­ins will get more traf­fic from the arti­cle than I will (deservedly so — the dude is frickin’ smart). Either way, thanks for the nod Heidi!

Ok, since I still bleed yellow (and it’s not from jaun­dice), check out my Scott McCloud Lec­ture Kodak Gallery!

I’ve spent most of the last two days escort­ing Scott McCloud and his won­der­ful family around and about the RIT campus. The lec­ture yes­ter­day went off with­out a hitch ??? in fact, it was better than I could have asked.

Ingle was filled with a com­bi­na­tion of stu­dents, fac­ulty, and com­mu­nity mem­bers. We’re esti­mat­ing about 375 in all! Scott told me that was roughly the same turn out as at MIT. Not too shabby!

You can read Scott’s account at the 50 State Tour Blog.

Here’s a shot of McCloud lec­tur­ing. For those tra­di­tion­al­ists out there, note that he’s lec­tur­ing in front of a page from Learn to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.

After the lec­ture, a mini-​lecture by McCloud’s daugh­ter Sky, and a long Q&A ses­sion (facil­i­tated by his other daugh­ter Winter), we headed upstairs for the sign­ing. As you can see above, the sign­ing line wrapped all around the upper rooms. We sold out of Making Comics. In fact, I heard a couple dis­ap­pointed atten­dees trying to bribe the book­store to let go of copies that were on hold for people.

For more than an hour (by my count close to two) Scott greeted and talked with each person in line. He made every person seem like they are the only person that he’s talked to ??? regard­less if they were at the begin­ning of the line or at the tail end of it (this is a qual­ity that he shares with his friend Neil Gaiman). I can only imag­ine how tired his wrist is going to get on this tour.

Today was won­der­ful as well. Unfor­tu­nately, I need to grade, so that account will come tomor­row. Either way, I’m beam­ing that RIT seems to have matched MIT in turnout and hospitality.

Check out the Rochester D&C’s inter­view with McCloud. It’s pretty good, though I wished they men­tioned the spe­cific schools at RIT that are host­ing him.

By this point, I had really planned to revamp my web­site. But, as was best put by John Lennon "Life is what hap­pens to you while you’re busy making other plans." And in many respects I’ve been get­ting trapped by things I’ve wanted to do, but have yet to accom­plish. So rather than be trapped, I’m free­ing myself and posting.

Here are the big things.

1. On August 26th, Andrea and I got mar­ried. It was a small cer­e­mony which is what we both wanted and it ended up hap­pen­ing in our back­yard. We ended up having about 80 guests. Obvi­ously this has been in the works for a while. I haven’t blogged about it because, well, I wasn’t quite sure how to. There are a lot of people I wished we could have invited, but that just wasn’t going to work. The entire thing turned out won­der­ful, epse­cially con­sid­er­ing that a little more than a week before the wed­ding, Drea was checked into Rochester Gen­eral for an acute lupus flair. Thank­fully, we had caught it in time, but the net of it was an effort to cut as much stress out of the wed­ding as pos­si­ble. And thank­fully there was plenty of family and friends in town to assist us with last minute tasks. If you’re inter­ested in seeing pic­tures of the wed­ding, visit Jenny’s ever excel­lent blog for some ter­rific pictures.
2. I’ve just started my second week as a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at RIT and I’m nav­i­gat­ing going "back to school." I’m devel­op­ing one course this quar­ter — Web Design for Graphic Media  — and revis­ing a pre­vi­ously taught course — Prin­ci­ples of Print­ing. What I’m still get­ting used to are the addi­tional respon­si­bil­i­ties of being full time fac­ulty vs. my expe­ri­ence as a "full time" adjunct. File all of this under, you don’t under­stand how much time you have until you loose it.
3. Plus, I’m finally set­tling down, by that I mean, I’m moving my stuff out of a number of tem­po­rary abodes (and public stor­age facil­i­ties) and into Andrea’s house in Penfeild.
4. Finally, I’m coor­di­nat­ing bring Scott McCloud to RIT. For those who don’t know him, McCloud is a comic book cre­ator and the­o­rist. His books Under­stand­ing Comics and Rein­vent­ing Comics explore the evo­lu­tion of graphic lit­er­a­ture, from early civ­i­liza­tions to modern works, and the semi­otic inter­pre­ta­tion of the medium’s form, func­tion, and pacing. With his latest book, Making Comics, McCloud turns his atten­tion to the pro­duc­tion of comic books, includ­ing approaches to page design, char­ac­ter cre­ation, and var­i­ous avenues for self pub­lish­ing. McCloud’s research has been used in a number of aca­d­e­mic and pro­fes­sional dis­ci­plines rang­ing from illus­tra­tion to video game design. As a speaker, McCloud has lec­tured at MIT, Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, Elec­tronic Arts, The Smith­son­ian, Microsoft, and Pixar. I am really excited about get­ting McCloud to RIT and have been work­ing on this all summer. He’ll be here Monday, Sep­tem­ber 18th, speak­ing from 3.00pm to 5.00pm. The lec­ture, and recep­tion that fol­lows, is free to the public.

I know there is more that I’m miss­ing, but this is a pretty good start. I’m sorry I haven’t talked to all who I should have talked to about the wed­ding. But now that things are set­tling down (at least in theory) I’m look­ing for­ward to catch­ing up. More tomorrow.