Stefan Sagmeister and Massimo Vignelli

What an exciting year to be in Syracuse for design! Last week, Michael Bierut was here visiting campus, and now Massimo Vignelli is scheduled to speak at SU in late-October! Also, RIT is having Stefan Sagmeister visit their school in three weeks and has invited our AIGA members to RIT for the event!


One of the things I'm most excited about is connecting with other AIGA groups. Albany's AIGA chapter will also be at RIT for the Sagmeister event, and I've extended invitations for RIT and Albany to join us at SU for Massimo Vignelli's lecture. Hopefully this is the start of greater communication and exchange between the chapters; I would love to have a giant portfolio show from the different schools at the end of the year!

Michael Bierut

Last Tuesday, SU's School of Architecture hosted a guest lecture by Michael Bierut, called "My Life as a Font." Unfortunately I was unable to attend, BUT because of my position as Co-President of AIGA, I had the privilege of attending in a special Warehouse luncheon instead! Hopefully, we represented AIGA (and CommDesign) well and didn't embarrass ourselves too much, because for those unfamiliar, Michael Bierut is something of a celebrity/hero to design students.


Blurb from the SU events site:
Michael Bierut, partner at full-spectrum graphic design firm Pentagram in NYC, will lecture. In 2006 Bierut received the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) medal, the profession's highest honor. His work is represented in several permanent collections including MoMA and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in NYC. He currently serves as a director of the Architectural League of NY and of New Yorkers for Parks, and is a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art.

I think it's safe to say that I wasn't the only student in complete awe, but what really impressed me was how gracious and candid he was with his time and in speaking with us about design. We gave him a small tour of our third floor, and he even signed a poster for us!

I'm still giddy thinking about it.

Later that afternoon, the Warehouse showed "Helvetica," an independent documentary film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. Michael was again a special guest speaker and participated in a Q&A after the movie.

I can't think of a better way to christen the renovated Warehouse!

Soccer Start Up

We just had our first soccer tournament of the season today. It was held at Cortland, which is about 40 minutes from Syracuse, but we had to leave at 6:30am in order to be there in time for our first game. We did pretty well considering we've only practiced twice, but I have a feeling a lot of people are going to be feeling it tomorrow. (I know I will.)

We played three games against Cornell (0-3), Cortland (1-0), and Ithaca (0-3), so we lost two and won one. We definitely could have taken Cornell if we had warmed up better, but it took the whole first half for our team to start operating at full speed, and they had already scored 3 goals by that point.

Next time...