Expand your understanding of graphic design with the Insights Design Lecture Series, presenting leading designers and design thinkers from around the world. Exploring the theme of collaboration through a variety of perspectives and approaches, this year’s Insights pairs four in-person lectures with expanded programs that range from virtual workshops to articles, special projects, and more.
This year’s in-person lineup features innovators in type and motion DIA Studio, Brooklyn Public Library Creative Director Leila Taylor, long-term collaborators Studio Lin, as well as the Twin Cities Zine Fest, whose members have championed sustainable self-publishing and the DIY ethic in our local community for 20 years.
Expanded programming includes workshops from the Feminist Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles’s Co—Conspirator Press, and Chicago’s Half Letter Press/Temporary Services. On walkerart.org, David Gissen, author of The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access, invites designers, thinkers, and disability activists to reimagine everyday objects freed from concepts of a “normal body.”
Copresented by the Walker Art Center and AIGA Minnesota.
Insights 2024 Design Lecture Series
March 12–April 20, 2024
Walker Art Center
Alex Lin / Studio Lin
Tuesday, March 12, 7 pm
$24 ($19 Walker and AIGA members; $10 students)
Since 2012, New York–based Studio Lin has focused on long-term collaborations across art, architecture, and photography with a focus on publications, identity, exhibition, and web design. Clients with multi-year projects at the studio have included the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Princeton School of Architecture, and art book publishers Aperture and Capricious.
Leila Taylor / Brooklyn Public Library
Tuesday, March 19, 7 pm
$24 ($19 Walker and AIGA members; $10 students)
As creative director of the Brooklyn Public Library since 2015, Leila Taylor collaborates across multiple publics in one of the nation’s largest library systems. Recent projects include Books Unbanned, a nationwide initiative combating book bans; The People’s Ball, the anti-Met Gala; and The Book of HOV, an exhibition on the life of Shawn “JAY-Z” Carter created by Roc Nation in partnership with Brooklyn Public Library. She is also the author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, equal parts Afrogoth memoir and trenchant analysis of the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the cultural work of mourning.
Mitch Paone / DIA Studio
Tuesday, March 26, 7 pm
$24 ($19 Walker and AIGA members; $10 students)
Founded by Creative Director Mitch Paone and Managing Partner Meg Donohoe, DIA Studio has been instrumental in repositioning typography and motion at the center of brand design in recent years. As smartphones and screens of all kinds reorganize viewership and the ways brands engage with customers, DIA Studio has collaborated with Squarespace, Nike, Adidas, and YouTube to create bespoke, moving typographic compositions from app to architectural scale. Trained as a jazz pianist, Paone brings a musician’s knowledge of tempo, arrangement, and rhythm to the creation of design systems that have invited the field to rethink the possibilities of formerly static approaches.
Twin Cities Zine Fest
Tuesday, April 2, 7 pm
$24 ($19 Walker and AIGA members; $10 students)
For 20 years, the Twin Cities Zine Fest (TCZF) has welcomed creatives, rebels, musicians, and frustrated intellectuals to connect, create, and share ideas through zines and self-publishing. Collectively organized by a group of volunteers, TCZF has collaboratively supported this form of design most often created by those without traditional, formal design training. Instead, TCZF champions sustainable support of self–publishing and the DIY ethic in local communities, with an intersectional focus on politically and socially engaged zines, community partnership, and amplifying the voices of those who have been historically unheard. Gathering a group of zine makers throughout TCZF’s years, this evening explores the vibrant plurality of voices and perspectives on local zines.
EXPANDED PROGRAMS
Collaborative Publishing Workshop with Temporary Services
Saturday, April 13, 2 pm
Free
Online
How does group work work? For the last 25 years, the group Temporary Services (now Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer) have engaged in hundreds of collaborations, creating publications, events, exhibitions, and public projects. In 2008 they established the publishing imprint and webstore Half Letter Press as another outlet for circulating their own ideas and working with others. This free workshop presents an overview of their publishing practice, followed by a guided collaborative worktime in which participants can generate ideas in groups for new approaches to creative collaboration.
The Alchemy of Publishing Workshop with Co–Conspirator Press
Saturday, April 20, 2 pm
Free
Online
Housed within the Feminist Center for Creative Work, Co—Conspirator Press is a publishing platform for artists, writers, designers, printers, social justice workers, and editors from historically underrepresented communities to voice intersectional feminist issues and challenge cis-hetero-patriarchy, white-supremacy, and exclusionary, colonial, capitalist, and ableist systems. In this free online workshop, the designer at Co—Conspirator Press, Raquel Hazell, leads participants in developing a collaborative practice, and designing for publishing projects rooted in intersectional feminist futures.
Rethinking “Normal” Design
Walker Reader series guest edited by David Gissen
From buildings to coffee cups, sidewalks, and hammers, many design objects we engage with daily were created for a so-called “normal” and “ideal” body. Stemming from a legacy of eugenics, the concept of a “normal” human body excludes a significant number of people, including many persons with disabilities. Pairing designers with thinkers and activists, this series of articles guest edited by David Gissen, designer and author of The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access, forms new collaborations that rework what everyday design could be if freed from concepts of a “normal body.”