Design Students + Writing

We're designers. We make images, we think about what things look like, and that's it. Right?

Well, hopefully not. We write, too. We communicate in the most appropriate way possible. Sometimes it's an image, sometimes it's a photograph, and sometimes it's an aptly written introduction to a book, some cleverly written copy, or a headline that just KILLS!

Over at aiga.org is a new article by David Barringer called 21 Writing Prompts for students. Barringer is the 2008 recipient of the Winterhouse Writing Award for Design Writing & Criticism, given annually by AIGA for exceptional communicators and critics.

He offers a bunch (21 to be exact) of prompts to help students improve their writing skills. My favorite is the first one:

Write a found interview. Make a list of 10 questions lifted from real magazine interviews. Imagine these questions are asked of you. Answer them using only writing you have already written, such as in emails, on blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter or other online places. Edit for punctuation and grammar to fit in with the style and format of the magazine interview, but keep your answers conversational and as unaltered in substance as possible (that is, you must rely on what you have already written, and include citations to where you originally wrote your text, e.g., “email to C.B., 12/4/2007”.).

Head over there. Get some practice for your writing sample for your Sophomore Portfolio Review. Perfect your interviewing skills for the time when all of those design blogs come knocking.

Comments

[alex boyd]

I love the idea of a found interview! So clever!