“Homage” Poster Project
This studio based design project introduces students to Chicago’s design heritage through research and creative application. Students will explore the Chicago Design Archive to select a Chicago-based designer, study their work, and design a poster that visually pays homage to their style and contributions. The project blends historical research with creative design, encouraging students to deeply engage with local design legacy and practice visual translation of historic styles into original work.
Uncovering Background Material Influencing Design Expression
This upper undergraduate or graduate level art history assignment is focused on analyzing how cultural "background material" informs and influences design expression. It starts with reading a text by Alison and Peter Smithson, “But Today We Collect Ads” (1956) that argues that vernacular culture serves as unclassified background material that designers draw from to shape new cultural expressions. This assignment encourages students to move beyond formal analysis and connect graphic design to larger cultural, political, and historical systems—framing design as an expressive output rooted in, and responsive to, its time.
Compare Design Work from Two Decades
This art history project invites students to explore and analyze graphic design from two different decades using the Chicago Design Archive (CDA) website. Through close visual analysis and historical research, students will write a comparative essay that traces changes in design over time. This lesson plan emphasizes critical observation, research-based writing, and the historical contextualization of visual culture, using the Archive to deepen student engagement with graphic design history.
Research, Analyze and Provide Historical Rationale for a Design from the Collection of the Chicago Design Archive
In this art history lesson, students will select a design from the Chicago Design Archive (CDA) and perform a deep visual and historical analysis. The goal is to understand how a specific design reflects or evolves from earlier visual traditions or historical influences. This project emphasizes the importance of contextualizing design not as an isolated act, but as a dialogue with visual history and cultural memory. This assignment fosters an integrated understanding of design as both a visual practice and a historically embedded cultural expression. It encourages students to consider how meaning in design is constructed through form, history, and ideology.