Eleven students, associate professor Dannell MacIlwraith and associate professor Summer Doll-Myers attended the American Advertising Awards Thursday, March 13, at Cedar Crest College in Allentown. Communication Design students received 20 awards, including Best in Show, five Gold and 14 Silver Awards. All gold Addy winners will automatically be entered into the national Addy Awards.
Our 34th Annual Communication Design Senior Portfolio review was another smashing success last night. From 6–9pm, 27 design agencies, with 51 designer and creative director attendees, reviewed 46 students’ portfolios. The attendees were highly impressed with the students’ work, with some noting it was the most outstanding they had seen among art and design programs in the region. The clients provided valuable feedback and encouraged the students to approach graduation and entry into the professional workforce with confidence. Several also expressed interest in following up with students for potential interviews.
As a bonus, 32 of the 51 attendees are KUCD alumni, ranging from 1999–2024. WOW! We are very grateful to have a supportive alumni network. Several of our emeritus faculty attended as well.
I would like to thank our KUCD faculty, Margaret Noel, Kathy Traylor, and Dean Brad Shope for their continued support of this event. I couldn’t do it without all of you!
You can view our graduating students’ portfolios here: https://kucd.kutztown.edu/alumni-showcase/. Notably, Ian McDonald was awarded the prestigious Young Ones Portfolio Award by The One Club for Creativity, an internationally recognized competition. He distinguished himself among graduating students through multiple competitive rounds to earn the top honor—an exceptional achievement.
On Friday, February 21st, the Communication Design program (Art & Design Department) hosted its 17th annual Designathon from 8 AM to 10 PM, our largest event of the year. We had 107 students registered, ranging from freshmen eager to become part of the CD family to seniors who will act as team leaders, as well as 8 alumni to create designs for 23 local nonprofits. In addition, 8 faculty members oversaw the design teams.
The event began with breakfast and sign-in at 8 AM, followed by the client kickoff at 9 AM. Students then brainstormed, sketched, and created final designs with production ready files for the clients, culminating in a presentation for the clients at 9 PM.
This year, the design projects ranged from logos for a cat rescue organization to a social media campaign aiming to reach the Guinness World Record for the largest soda tab collection by an organization. As always, our goal is to foster a sense of creating for the greater good. It’s crucial for our designers to engage with the community, and this event offers them the invaluable opportunity to work with real clients, gaining hands-on experience that enhances their learning — all while having a bit of fun!
Designathon Team:
Professor Vicki Meloney
Professor Summer Doll-Myers
Office Manager Kathy Traylor
Senior CD student organizer Lein Nguyen
Every year in October the IlluXcon (aka IX Art Show) show at Goggleworks in Reading attracts 90 of the most prestigious Fantasy Illustrators in the country to display their work and converse with anyone interested in their process. Art buyers travel from across the country to purchase art directly from the creators.
On October 21st Professor John Gurney drove a van full of students to spend an afternoon viewing the work and chatting with the artists. They had an up-close look at art created in a variety of traditional media, including oil paintings, watercolor, colored pencil, scratchboard, and resin sculpture. They even attended a scratchboard workshop lead by Ruth Sanderson, renown illustrator and award winning scratchboard artist. Perfect timing, as the Intro to Illustration students just began their scratchboard unit!
Many of the artists and illustrators at IlluXcon have been creating illustrations for science fiction and fantasy books for decades, as well as roll playing games and collectables. They are adapting to the times and learning to be entrepreneurial, cultivating the growing circuit of “cons” (conventions) to sell their original work, posters, prints, books and obtain commissions. Everyone has heard of Comic-con, but there is also Horror-con, Fantasy-con, Gencon, etc. IlluXcon is the only major show in the country that focuses exclusively on “Imaginative Realism”, which is the general term used today to describe fantasy art. These venues allow the creators to interact directly with each other, and with their fans in an informal setting. It was a great opportunity for Kutztown Students to chat with the creators, to view amazing work up close, and experience this important component of today’s art market.
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.
Scroll through to see some of the great work from this year!
After 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!
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!
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.”
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.
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