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Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design has a long tradition of welcoming students and faculty from across the United States and from around the world. This year we were honored to host communication designer, Visiting Assistant Professor Frank Armstrong, who taught graduate and undergraduate courses in typography, interaction and motion design. His primary research and work aims at teaching the integration of music, as an acoustic time-space system, with information design and typography. Armstrong joined us for the 2008 – 2009 academic year from California State University, Chico, where he is a full-time member of the Department of Communication Design faculty.
 Professor Frank Armstrong Armstrong brings over 20 years of experience as a design consultant and 15 years of experience as an educator, teaching graphic design and typography courses at Boston University, California State University at Chico, North Carolina State University, University of Connecticut and Yale University. He is a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and the International Institute for Information Design (IIID). He holds a BA in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University. This past semester, Armstrong taught Time, Motion, and Communication at the graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as the senior Communication Design capstone course, Senior Project in Communication Design. You can also view some of his students’ works from the fall semester when he co-taught Advanced Typography with Kristin Hughes.  Armstrong talks with CD senior Caryn Audenried in the Advanced Typography crits, Fall 2008 Over the course of your career, what are some of the things you’ve discovered as a designer? For a long time, I’ve been intrigued by compositional and theoretical relationships between music, as an acoustic time-space system, and typography. Music and typography are both temporal experiences and forms of communication and aspects of structure, motion, and time are common to both languages. They also both have a common ancestry: spoken languages. Since typography is the visualization of a spoken language, a notion of time and grammatical syntax are inherent to the process of reading a composition of typographic elements. Editor’s note: Armstrong discusses these relationships and his work in this area more in-depth in his essay, “Hearing Type”, published by the AIGA. What were some of the take-aways from being on faculty with Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design? Overall it was a very enriching experience, and I hope that I in turn have been able to help broaden my students’ perspectives. I’m grateful for the opportunity to observe several design faculty working with their students. I feel inspired to go back to CSU Chico with a deeper understanding about the future of design. This experience has also encouraged me to consider other creative pursuits that I would not have considered prior to my experiences here. One thing in particular that added interest were the fall and spring Design Lecture Series—it was particularly interesting and informative to hear professional designers from different backgrounds, professions and businesses discuss their work and their projects. What have been your impressions from working with the Design students at Carnegie Mellon? Because every school has its own ethos, it’s hard to compare the student work here with the work I have seen at previous schools. However, I am impressed with hard work, analytical thought process and the quality of thought displayed by the design students here. The computational aspects of design, interaction design, awareness, and design thinking are avenues that the students examine over the course of their studies. Consequently, the depth of understanding of design is huge and the possibilities seem endless. What skills do you hope to impart to the students? One must realize that design as a profession is dynamic, always in transition, and so are the students. I’ve learned that it’s so important for students to develop patience and flexibility. Their skills and experiences must be adaptable to the professional world. The good thing about the program is that it emphasizes knowledge of theory and thinking skills. What are some of your professional goals for the next few years? I’m most interested in the use of interaction and motion to enhance user experiences and visualize complex information and processes. I am interested in exploring the integration computational methods into the process of designing time-based information design and typography. For this, I have been learning to work in the Processing programming environment. Thanks for your time, Frank, and safe travels back to California! Thanks for an enjoyable year! Armstrong’s work has been published in numerous books and journals, including:
 An example of Armstrong’s typographical work Posted on May 15, 2009 |  |
