Thesis II (DES-799-07)

Class Materials

• Syllabus
• Class Slides (password: pratt)

Resources

• What's a Compendium - Frances Pharr
• FROM PROCESS ARCHIVE TO LIBRARY SUBMISSION - Frances Pharr

Assignment 1

• Read Every Book Starts with an Idea - Armand Mevis and prepare to discuss it next week.
• Finish the Welcome Back Survey after restructuring your compendium and reading the syllabus.

Class Materials

• Class Slides (password: pratt)

Resources

• Remediation: Understanding New Media - Bolter & Grusin (excerpt)
• What is the history of the book? - Robert Darnton
• Print Culture as Distributed Social Network
• Aspen: The Magazine in a Box - Adam Synth
• Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) - William Gibson
• Between Page and Screen - Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse

Workshop Material

• Example Sketch

• Binder.js Docs

• HTML Basics

• CSS Basics

• HTML & CSS Cheatsheet

• Typography - CSS reference.io

• Using Google Fonts

Assignment 1

Upload the Finished File Here

• Using Bindery.js, create a web to print book using any Wikipedia page and customize the layout with CSS/JS.
• Bring the sketch to class next week to discuss and share with your peers! What did you learn from the process? What was challenging? How did it change the way you think about books and print media?

Assignment 2

• Bring 3 books you like to class. They can be physical or digital, fiction or non-fiction, old or new. We will discuss the design and layout of these books and how they relate to the content and the reader's experience.

Class Materials

• Class Slides (password: pratt)

Resources

• CAPSLOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design and How to Escape From It, Ruben Pater
• Women Scribes: The Technologists of the Middle Ages
• 31 Years of Amazon Website
• The 60 Best and Worst International Covers of Lolita

Workshop Material

• Introduction to the Paratext
• Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface - Johanna Drucker

Assignment 3

Upload the Presentation Here

• Drawing inspiration from your body of work, thesis question and the compendium, draft a very rough sketch of your thesis book. Using the 4 different materiality we discussed in class (Forensic, Formal, Distributed, Performative), how would you like to construct your thesis book?
• Is it an academic book? Is it a playful book? Is it a thick book or a thin book? Would it have a digital component? How would the materiality of the book shape the content and the way you present your thesis? The goal of this assignment is to start thinking about the "paratext" of your thesis book, and how the materiality of the book can shape the content and the way you present your thesis.
• Prepare a 5 minute presentation to share your sketch (it cannot be just refernce or just writing, it has to include some sort of visual representation or concept diagram) and your thought process behind it. We will share and critique each other's idea in class next week.
• The idea is to use the "paratext" as a guide to create limitation and constraint for ourselves, and help brainstorm how we create the content of the book. The materiality of the book will shape the content and the way we present our thesis, so it's important to start thinking about it early on in the process.

Class Materials

• Class Slides (password: pratt)

Resources

• Collaborative Workflows by Andre Castro
• Markdown to Indesign with Pandoc

Workshop Material

• Pandoc for People - generate ICML
• Hackmd.io
• CSS Typography Reference
• Markdown Guide

Assignment 4

Upload the Content here

• For this assignment, you will use either markup (.html) or Markdown (.md) to create a structured, readable version of their thesis content. Use any tool you like to write it, Google Doc, Notion, or any other writing tool that can export to HTML or MD.
• The content needs to include:
  • Annotated table of contents
  • A writing sample that demonstrates the structure and hierarchy of the content. This can be a chapter, a section, or a few paragraphs of your thesis.
  • A detailed writing plan (timeline, outline, or roadmap) for the next 2 months leading up to the thesis submission.
• Using either Bindery.js or InDesign, create a print-ready PDF of your thesis book using the content you created in the first part of the assignment. You cannot just copy and paste the content you wrote in the first part of the assignment. If you're using InDesign, practice using ICML to import your content and format it using InDesign's tools. If you're using Bindery.js, practice using HTML and CSS to format your content and create a visually appealing layout for your thesis book.

Class Materials

• Class Slides (password: pratt)

Resources

• InDesign Data Merge - Advanced Tutorial (Multiple records per page)
• InDeisgn Data Merge
• Aesthetic Programming
• Fork a book

Assignment 5

Upload the Content here

• For this assignment, you will source the content for you thesis book. This can be a combination of text, images, data, or any other type of content that you think is relevant to your thesis topic. The content needs to be organized and structured in google spreadsehet or any other tool (notion database etc.) that can export to CSV or Excel. You can use any tool you like to source the content, but it needs to be in a format that can be easily utilized later.
• Break your content into different categories or sections, and create a clear hierarchy and structure for the content. Think about what content you can pull from your compendium, your research notes, your interviews, or any other sources you have. The goal of this assignment is to practice sourcing and organizing content for your thesis book, and to create a clear and structured dataset that can be used for the next steps of the thesis process.
• Be prepared to discuss this along in 1-on-1 meetings next week on zoom.