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Dannell MacIlwraith

Designathon 2022

The 15th Annual KUCD Designathon was a great success! Thank you to faculty, students, and clients for making it happen. Special shout-outs to Professor Doll-Myers and Professor Meloney for spearheading the event and leading us to the finish line.

After a hiatus from the event for a few years, it was refreshing for many to experience the team spirit of KUCD . Although this year has been the shortest sprint yet with only 12 hours to complete it all, it was a marathon that everyone enjoyed. Kickoff began at 9am on April 1 and wrapped up at 9pm. We provided work for a total of 20 non-profit clients. Throughout the day, students hunted for Easter eggs, won raffle prizes, and of course, fueled up with lots of delicious food.


The field day branding for this year was designed by KUCD junior Anam Khan.

Scroll through to see some of the great work from this year!

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Faculty Feature and Farewell: Ann Lemon

Professor Ann LemonAfter a decade at Kutztown University, Professor Ann Lemon has retired and is moving on to new exciting life adventures. Congratulations Professor Lemon! 🍋

Ann is continuing her work with The Amos Lemon Burkhart Foundation as executive director. “The mission of the Amos Lemon Burkhart Foundation is to sustain and promote the legacy of the artist Amos Lemon Burkhart and create a new conversation about creativity, mental illness, and addiction in order to help young artists stay alive and make art.” The foundation provides scholarships, support, treatment, and programs to art students who have struggled to overcome problems. A recent show just closed at the Richmond Art Museum in Richmond, Indiana titled, “You Miss 90% of the Shots You Don’t Take / Against the Wind.” You can keep up with the foundation’s happenings at the link above and keep up with the Amos Lemon Instagram @amoslemon_art.

Here at KU, she leaves behind the tradition of the Creative Royale, which began in 2020. It is an annual art-making extravaganza open to all students to spread the message, “stay alive and make art.” She also was involved with the KU Landis Letterpress in SH103, the 2D IDEA Lab. Students and staff have been inspired by Professor Lemon to fall in love with letterpress and 2D Image-Making. She visited campus recently on March 25, 2022, to host a mono-print workshop with students and staff. The photos below are from this workshop!

We will miss you Professor Lemon!

AIGA Guest Speaker Jessica Hische

Illustrator, author, and letterer extraordinaire Jessica Hische hung out with students, and staff for a virtual event hosted by AIGA on Monday, March 7 2022. She took us through her career journey that began right here in PA and has led her to owning her own business based in California. We even got to have story time with her NYT Best-Selling book, Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave.

Watch the webinar recording here.

You can keep up with Jessica on Instagram @jessicahische or visit her website.

Thank you Jess for joining AIGA and making this event happen!

promotional photo for AIGA event with Jess Hische

Faculty Feature: Josh Miller

Josh Miller

Josh Miller has been a professor at KU for 10 years teaching web, graphic, and interactive design. In 2021, he had an interactive installation at Dlectricity in Detroit called Sound the Deep Waters.

“A collaboration between Angela Fraleigh and myself, Sound the Deep Waters is an Interactive Victorian Flower Language dictionary that invites visitors to submit secret messages via onsite tablet— love letters, prose, slogans, inside jokes, etc. will manifest as bold, brilliant, larger than life flowers, associated with their meaning.

Floriography, or the language of flowers, is the use of a flower as a means of expression. Thought to have originated between Turkish women, under the watchful eye of harem guards during the 18th c. the usage of floriagraphy as a coded language spread like wildfire during an emotionally repressed Victorian age. A specific type of flower may reference an individual’s trait, intention, sentiment, social concern, or condition. Purple lilac indicates the first hints of love while clover is associated with happiness. To the experienced, such intentions are known; to others the implications remain hidden in plain sight.

In Sound the Deep Waters, the Interactive Victorian flower language dictionary plays with this notion of subversive decor and helps shed light on language as a perceptual domain exploring how images and ideas intersect and experiments with how meaning is made and beliefs are constructed.”

interactive light show installation


Photos from the DLECTRICITY 2021, projected on the Detroit Institute of Arts. Photos by Josh Miller, drone photo by Nadir Ali.

Fun fact about Professor Miller: he does not approve of fun.

You can check out his work at josh-miller.com.

AIGA Guest Speaker Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Finding Your Path as a Designer in Tech


AIGA was happy to host a virtual event on Thursday, February 24, 2022 with Sara Wachter-Boettcher. She spoke with students and staff about roles in the tech industry like UX, product design, content design, and user research. She also led discussions about the ethical considerations of working in tech—how you can spot problematic companies, avoid toxic workplaces, and confidently raise issues like bias and exclusion in the design process. You can watch the recording from the event or view the slides from her presentation.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher is an author, speaker, coach, and strategist dedicated to changing design and tech for good. She’s the founder of Active Voice, a coaching and training company helping organizations build radical, courageous leadership practices.

Her most recent book, Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, was named one of the best tech books of the year by Wired. She also wrote Design for Real Life (with Eric Meyer) and Content Everywhere, and has been published in The Washington Post, The Guardian, and McSweeney’s. Find her at home in Philly, on Twitter @sara_ann_marie, or at sarawb.com.

Thank you to Sara for joining AIGA to make this event happen!

2021 MFA Projects

We are transitioning back to “normal” at KUCD! The MFA Show was held in the Atrium of Sharadin. If you missed it… check out our two newest MFA grads: Valerie Nyby and Amy Bolger-Santucci.

View Amy Bolger-Santucci’s Project

View Valerie Nyby’s Project