Launch

This blog will fall into the learning experience category. After a good number of years as a college art director and designer, I still think of myself as a novice, and I have the same hunger to learn and improve that I did when I started. So consider this an invitation to anyone who shares that hunger and can help to satisfy it in some small measure to join me in what will hopefully be a dialog. I envision the nominal focus as design and art direction as it relates to institutions of higher learning, but anything remotely relevant to institutional branding — a subject of growing fascination for me — is fair game.

I chose the name A4 for lack of anything better, but I think it can provide an organizing motif for a range of topics and viewpoints that will I’m sure prove hard to rein in to a cohesive discourse. A4, as most of you already know, is the paper size most commonly used for letterhead in the European Union, and is based on the proportion known as the golden rectangle, a ratio of width to height that has been advanced for centuries in the art and design world as a standard of classical beauty. This proportion is one of the few “universal principles” of design (whatever that means) that we have stuck with throughout the course of civilization and across cultures. It’s as appropriate for an i-pod as it is for a Japanese tatami mat or the Parthenon. Every graphic designer has at least a passing familiarity with it, and those who work for universities probably milk it more than others because of its classical and dignified associations. Beyond that, it provides a basic unit for modular assembly, and thus a good metaphor for the way a blog — and indeed the blogosphere as a whole — is built.

But don’t let me spin too far off in a philosophical direction. This is at least as much about the day-to-day nuts and bolts of giving form — visual and otherwise — to the various messages of the academic world.