When I was first introduced to graphic design, I was extremely young and a member of a pretty popular message board. Posters showed respect for other members by presenting them with these things called “sigs” — they were little rectangular graphics that fit in the reserved area for a person’s signature. If you’re familiar with message boards and forums, you know exactly what I mean. If not, it was just an image that showed up at the bottom of someone’s message. This wasn’t an exclusive concept for these message boards, as many did use this feature.

Back then, I downloaded either Adobe Photoshop 4 or 5 (it was so long ago, I can’t recall the version). I went to work and eventually taught myself how to do many of the things these other designers were doing.

The designs we made were elaborate and colorful. They were fantastical and made people feel like they were mystical creatures hidden by the cloud of reality. These sigs were nothing but decoration and the more fun you had, the more the receiving member loved it.

This is now

Fast forward to now and if I showed you all some of the graphics I made during this time, you’d critique me harshly and probably continue by laughing at some of the choices I made. I would (and have) too.

We’ve strayed away from formerly learned concepts and there’s two reasons why: 1) Design doesn’t rest upon the favor of decorations and unnecessary aesthetics and 2) It’s just not cool anymore. 

Times change and trends do as well. In 2013, what we seem to value is flat design.

As we progress, so do our trends and our taste in creative things. That’s an understandable concept, but it’s gotten to the point where we just don’t do lots of designing at all. We don’t rarely make any of our design elements design heavy, even when they can be tasteful. We tend to opt for the flat, minimalist look. But when is enough enough?

Predictability and creativity

Lots of us preach creativity and urge others to think outside the box. I’m one of those people, but every so often it seems like we forget this concept and create graphics that are the norm or that are the trend. Sure, some of the things we do now just happen to work, but where’s the creativity? Isn’t there a way to use a trend but make it work for a certain person or brand. Have we become a little too predictable?

A while back, I touched on the idea that minimalism could be killing creativity after I saw redesigns for USA Today and eBay logos. There are obviously standards in design, whether it be logo design or web design, but everything seems to be so…regular. These logos weren’t bad logos, but there were very simple and the rest of the branding seemed to fall into that category. There wasn’t much character (especially with eBay) or style and I’m pretty sure I could open Photoshop or Illustrator now and make exact replicas of these two logos.

It seems that we’ve decided that the cleaner our graphics are, then the better they are. And this makes some sense — we are designing now for people to use things. The less clutter it has, the easier it is to use, but there’s a very fine line between simple and plain. There’s certainly an air of beauty that comes from simplicity, but we’ve got to do a better job of learning when that’s necessary and when that’s not.

Again, I like to think of the eBay logo as a prime example. The former logo stood for fun, but that idea has kind of been taken away. Simplicity is not just stripping the character of an element, but about taking away what doesn’t need to be there, it’s a very fine line. But distinguishing the line shouldn’t be rocket science. What needs to be there and what doesn’t? Not just from an aesthetics point of view but also from a branding point of view as well.

What we do with Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is still the standard for web design. If you think about this, it’s somewhat baffling because Photoshop was created to be an image editing application for photographers. As we continue to make it the go-to app for everything else, Adobe expands our capabilities and what we can actually create with Photoshop.

Unlike any other programs in Creative Cloud, Photoshop really allows you to do some extremely creative things. We can change and add the lighting in a photograph, add motion and different types of blurs, create glowing edges, warp shapes and so much more. It’s great for graphical elements as well as light and heavy adjustments to photographs. You can literally create a new world and new feel just by messing with images and filters in Photoshop.

All these filters and all this ability to be extremely creative in Photoshop (and other programs), begs the question of why or why don’t we utilize these effects more? Why are we so fond of solid color backgrounds and flat design? Why don’t we create these new worlds for our audiences when they visit us online? Why don’t we do more creatively?

Images and excuses

It’s common to keep our designs fairly simple in print because not all printers and all colors are created equal. We try to control this with Pantone colors, but even still, bad things can happen after you ship a job off to print. This is a concept many who are familiar with print design are familiar with and understand: don’t do a lot of gradients, fine details or crazy colors in print because you may end up very disappointed when your print is in your hand. It seems as if this mentality has crept into our website designs.

We know what Photoshop is capable of. And we know we can see the fine details, wonderous gradients, blurs and bright colors online. All screens aren’t created equal (thanks to developments in retina screens and the like) but there’s a standard that makes so many things viewable, so what’s the excuse?

Many will point to image loading times as more complex designs will typically load slower than usual. And this is definitely the most valid concern, but there are various solutions. In Photoshop, we’re able to splice large images and put them together with code. We can also find different ways and formats to save images so they don’t take as long. There are hacks in web development that help sites load faster and so many other solutions to help out.

Another excuse is the ease of converting a flat design into a responsive site; but whoever said that easy was good?

When are we going to get back to being a bit more creative?

We are minimalist

We’ve been there before, that one website that has so much going on you don’t know where to go or what to do. But that’s not what needs to come back. No one is saying you have to design every piece of your web site, but perhaps create a more intricate background or other elements for your design.

Making everything so clean and simple is nice and it works many times. But we have to think of different ways to be creative and to utilize all the capabilities possible in our applications to really bring forth our creativity.

We aren’t artists, but we are designers, and it’s truly okay to design a little more.

Has the pursuit of flat design stifled our creativity? Is minimalism dull? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Pumping Up Their Math Muscles

Coach Sory Kante, moves quickly across the gym. One of his students working out needs help. But what�s stumped the student isn�t a 220 pound bench press or a complicated yoga move. It�s a calculus problem.

Kante is a coach in UMBC�s newest type of gym: The Math Gym. One recent evening, dozens of students lined up for the gym, knowing that rather than hitting the treadmill, they�d be tackling a regimen of worksheets and quizzes specifically designed for them. The gym provides students with training in foundational skills, skills they�ve supposedly already learned, but have now faded into distant memory. And, on this particular night, more than 40 students, working with as many as 7 coaches, spill out of the seminar room and into the corridors of the math department.

Math Gym is the first of the projects funded by the inaugural Hrabowski Fund for Innovation grants to get off the ground. The fund invests in creative faculty initiatives that reimagine our students� learning experiences.

Nagaraj Neerchal, professor and chairman of the department of mathematics and statistics, came up with the idea for Math Gym. �It�s something Freeman Hrabowski inspired,� he says.

Math Gym is a departure from traditional tutoring in focusing on crucial, yet basic skills�rather than a specific topic that�s stumping a student in a current class. �Tutoring is like going to the clinic when you�re sick,� says Neerchal. �Working in Math Gym is like working out to stay fit so you won�t get sick. We need both.�

The custom workout begins with QuizZero, a quiz Neerchal and his colleagues designed to test students� understanding of prerequisite material before classes start. It�s administered through Blackboard and evaluates students� preparation in the foundational classes, such as algebra, pre-calculus, calculus I and calculus II. Students who score below the median of the class are notified they should brush up on their skills. About 1800 students every semester take the test.

More than half of the freshman entering UMBC each year don�t place into pre-calculus. Those that do may be lacking in foundational skills. �Almost all of them have taken algebra in high school,� says Neerchal, �they just forget.�

The solution, he says: come to Math Gym and get fitted for a �custom workout.� Last semester, nearly 800 students whose QuizZero performance indicated they could use a refresher were invited to participate. Of those, over 500 came to Math Gym.

�If students are taking a class, any class,� says Neerchal, �and if they are unable to do well in class, it�s because they�ve lost their foundational math skills.�

Once a student completes QuizZero, they can come to the Math Gym and have their �workout� customized. The Math Gym coaches and manager have a spreadsheet that they can check to find out what students have to work on. They pass out worksheets and the students are ready for their �workout.�

As the semester progresses the gym rats develop their foundational skills and they can begin to move on to working on their current class, says Chris Harris, Math Gym manager.

And Math Gym appears to be working. �This semester, I saw a dramatic increase in student exam grades in applied calculus as compared to last year of approximately twenty points,� says instructor Elizabeth Stanwyck. �We are tracking the progress of those students who have come to Math Gym versus those who have not,� says Neerchal.

And students say that Math Gym is helping them in their classes. Take Aaron Good, a junior, majoring in physical therapy. Good is taking trigonometry and pre-calculus. �I noticed that my test scores and everything significantly improved,� since the opening of Math Gym, he says. Good says that he hopes to make around a B in his class.

Other gym rats, Nnamdi Onyioofor, a senior, and Caleb Zhou, a freshman, are at Math Gym one evening to work on Calculus I. �I�ve been here for the past week every day,� Zhou says.

Professors also offer extra credit for students who regularly go to Math Gym. But Nicole Lentz, a freshman, says it�s not just the extra credit that keeps her coming back.

�The people here are really helpful too,� she says. �Whenever I have a question they just sit down and help you work it through. They don�t just tell you how to get it so it really makes me understand everything a lot better.�

What�s next for Math Gym? Neerchal and Harris are looking to target a wider range of courses, including those in disciplines beyond mathematics and statistics. They would like to build relationships with other departments and colleges so that students could come to work on math skills relevant for their subjects, such as chemistry, physics and economics. No matter the subject, the underlying math skills are the same.

And the key to mastering them, Neerchal says, �is doing reps. It�s all about repetition just like at the gym.�

(6/17/13)

World-Class Students

Five UMBC students have been awarded Fulbright grants, and two additional students have been named alternates for the prestigious program that takes students around the world to teach English or conduct original research. This ties last year�s number, which set a record for the most UMBC students to receive the award in one year.

Four students were awarded English teaching assistantships: Yasmin Radbod �13, Asian studies, for Nepal; Alexandra Mills �13, gender and women�s studies, for Malaysia; Hannah Kurlansky �13, English and media and communication studies, for Slovakia; and Andrew Holter �12, English and history, for the Czech Republic. In addition, Madeline Hall �12, environmental studies, received a grant to conduct research in New Zealand.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The Program operates in over 155 countries worldwide.

Holter said that when he learned he had received the award, he was both thrilled and humbled by the offer. �It was excitement paired with a really unexpected and satisfying sense of responsibility, since the Department of State doesn’t just hand these out so that 23-year-olds can take vacations,� he said.

Two additional students were named alternates for the awards, Abigail Bratcher �13, history and Russian, for research in Russia and Nathan Rehr �13, political science, for an English Teaching Assistantship in Turkey.

�I could not be happier for or more proud of our Fulbright recipients and alternates, and am thrilled that UMBC’s talented students are being recognized by the U.S. Student Fulbright Program,� said Brian Souders, the associate director of international education services. �It is rewarding to see that our students are recognized internationally for the work they do.�

�I have always been interested in exploring and learning from other cultures. I believe that no one person, nation, or group of people has a monopoly on knowledge,� said Mills, who plans to attend graduate school in public policy after she returns from abroad.

Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. At UMBC, the process of applying for a Fulbright starts six to eight months prior to the October application deadline. Students develop ideas for a research or service project, write essays and gather letters of support from UMBC faculty members and research mentors overseas. They receive advice from academic mentors and Souders along the way. Applicants also have an on-campus interview that is geared to help strengthen their final proposals prior to submission.

�This year’s cohort of applicants brought a unique set of academic interests, creativity and endurance to get through the Fulbright application process,� said Souders. �Almost all had participated in a semester-length study abroad program, and many wanted to continue research they started overseas, or give back as a teacher of English and cultural ambassador.�

Radbod, for example, has worked extensively with refugee populations in Baltimore, some of which are Nepalese immigrants. She also spent a year studying abroad in China.

Students� courses of studies and extracurricular activities on campus also contribute to the strength of their Fulbright applications.

�At UMBC I’ve been able to study language and communication in depth, which should help me in teaching English abroad. I’ve learned what can be accomplished when students work together and I’m excited to see how this translates for me with this experience,� said Kurlanski.

If Bratcher and Rher do not receive grants this year, they will be encouraged to reapply. One of this year�s awardees, Madeline Hall, was selected as an alternate last year but awarded a grant this year after tweaking her research proposal.

�I will be researching how sheep and cattle farmers in New Zealand decide whether or not to take part in carbon capture programs,� said Hall. �Carbon capture is still a very new field. Since New Zealand is ahead of the curve, it�s a really great place to get experience that I could potentially use elsewhere.�

(5/30/13)

Millions of people use the tool Ghostery to block online tracking technology—some may not realize that it feeds data to the ad industry.

Whenever discussion starts about how to hide from the tracking code that follows users around the Web to serve them targeted ads, recommendations soon pile up for a browser add-on called Ghostery. It blocks tracking code, noticeably speeds up how quickly pages load as a result, and has roughly 19 million users. Yet some of those who advocate Ghostery as a way to escape the clutches of the online ad industry may not realize that the company behind it, Evidon, is in fact part of that selfsame industry.

Teaching students how to write more clearly and powerfully in introductory writing classes is at the heart of the university’s mission. But technology is transforming the task, says James Polchin ’89, political science and English, who teaches writing and founded a website – WritingInPublic.com – that celebrates the contemporary essay. Polchin has taught in the Princeton Writing Program, the New School for Social Research, and is currently on the faculty of the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University. 

by James Polchin ’89

It has been nearly 30 years since I walked into a small, green-walled classroom in what is now the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Chemistry Building for my first session of English composition. The course included the usual curriculum of academic writing exercises and ended with a large research essay.  For my final essay, I wrote about the 19^th century British painter J.M.W. Turner’s influence on the French Impressionists. Along with my classmates, I created a stack of note cards scribbled with fragments of quotes copied from books and journals, organized the note cards, and then wrote outlines. Some of my peers had those early, boxy versions of personal computers, but I drafted my essay by hand and then typed it out, footnotes carefully measured, on an electric typewriter.  The Internet was still a sci-fi fantasy several years down the road.

Just about the time that I was tackling Turner on my typewriter, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh named David Bartholomae published an influential article entitled “Inventing the University.” It began with some provocative first lines: “Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion…. He has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that defines the discourse of our community.”

Bartholomae argued that each writing assignment did more than ask students to turn thinking into sentences and paragraphs, but rather it asked students to turn thinking into forms of academic discourse – a term that would later become common usage in my graduate school years in the 1990s, when exposure to Bartholomae’s essay helped shape my training and work as a future instructor of writing.

My own UMBC English Composition class had a focus on “inventing the university,” presenting us with isolated exercises in academic writing. Very few of my classmates wrote much beyond the work assigned to them. For many of us, writing seemed divided into either creative efforts (personal and often private) or class assignments that didn’t venture beyond the professor’s tote bag.

Teaching writing today is much different than in 1985. So what’s changed? Today, my students have access to a vast global archive of facts and figures both common and strange.  They have more evidence for writing an essay than at any other time in history, and certainly more than I did in the bowels of the Albin O. Kuhn library, searching for ideas about J.M.W. Turner.  My more sophisticated first-year students come into the writing class with their own blogs or online sites. Many share writing across borders in ways that I could have never conceived in English Composition.

In our digital world, where writing is increasingly more public than private, more social than solely anchored in classroom assignments or private journals, the teaching of writing, like most things today, is more complex. I am often wondering what are we asking students to invent when we ask them to write at the university today?

Recently I gave my first-year students an essay by cultural historian Neal Gabler entitled “The Elusive Big Idea.” Gabler argues that we are in an age where the concept of the big idea, such as Freud’s unconscious or Betty Friedan’s the “feminine mystique” have become passé. Information is more important than big ideas. “In the past,” Gabler explains, “we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful – into ideas that made sense of the information.”

I was surprised to find many of my students agreed with Gabler, and even believe that we have found all the great ideas already. “We are simply building on the big ideas from the past,” one student claimed. This claim is the echo of the information culture, where facts and sound bites and fragments of knowledge stand for knowledge itself.  It is a bit like having all those note cards with quotes and comments and ideas but not actually turning them into the essay.

If English Composition taught us the rigors of academic research, today’s writing classes have to engage with the very fragmented process of writing and thinking, a vast network of facts and figures and frauds. If big ideas are difficult to find today, the work of reflecting on evidence and ideas is even harder to grasp. Reflection requires a distance, a stepping back from all the information, getting out of the net.

For years I have been trying to recover the essay from mere assignment, or a tool used only to invent the university. I have wished to give it a more active and engaged place.  For my students, conversation, rather than pure self-contained argument, is crucial and necessary to the kind of writing they need to invent.  While many of us may have been taught how to form arguments, our students today need to find ways of becoming interlocutors.  They need to be able to gather facts, evaluate evidence, come up with ideas. But they also need to see how their ideas are in a larger conversation. They need to see that forming ideas is not the end of the process but a step along the way.

Those of us who teach need to confront this reality.  In her recent book, Planned Obsolescence, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, shows how digital technologies are changing the way we think about university scholarship.  In assessing the increasing demands of scholarly output placed on university professors, Fitzpatrick claims that “writing has been reduced from a process of discovery, exploration, and communication to a system for the assembly of more and more new products.”  Writing as product offers, in Fitzpatrick’s view, a disincentive to the dynamic nature of scholarly work.  She writes about how blogging, for example, can shift scholarly work toward a more public and more collaborative, international process.

Our digital lives are only just beginning to reshape our writing lives, and these changes are becoming more and more central to my work in the classroom. Last year, The New York Times published an article that wondered if the blog was replacing the term paper.  The conclusion was “not exactly” but the article pointed to a Stanford University study on the use of new media in writing education. “The students love writing for an audience, engaging with it,” the article noted in summarizing the study. “They feel as if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as if they do so only to produce a grade.”

Shifting perspective from grade to audience, from argument to interlocution and inquiry allows for new approaches to writing so crucial in our digital age. In many respects, it allows college students to invent the university in a whole new way.  While I can get nostalgic for English Composition, much of it now sadly feels as old as that electric typewriter.