MICA Graduate Admissions Materials - Wjerk: A Climate Design Studio

Two pieces for MICA’s graduate admissions. The mailer was printed in 2020 and went out for two admissions cycles. Slash, a full catalog, followed in 2022 and is still in use.

MICA’s in person graduate programs have little in common beyond the campus they share. They run as boutique studio environments based on the expertise and interests of their directors. How do you show that without flattening the differences, or printing a thick, generic catalog?

The mailer

The first piece went out during the pandemic: a die-cut zine that unfolds into a poster. We worked with Schmitz Press to find a paper that would take the folds well. That paper’s press sheet set the size of the zine. One cut down the middle made two posters, each die-cut and folded for easy mailing.

Both sides print from one set of CMYK plates. Print one side, flip and rotate the stack, run it through again. Printing efficiently is part of designing for the welfare of all life, as much as the content and the paper are. Every image and typeface is public domain or open source, as a receiver of the mailer, you could see where to get the design resources to use yourself. As a believer in the idea that higher ed is for the creation and sharing of information, embedding these open source values was important to me, and to the MICA grad admissions team.

As received — folded down to mail size

The zine side of the sheet laid flat, half its panels upside down so they read right once folded: a dense collage of engravings, color wheels and photographs of the Earth around the section headings “Encourage Risk,” “How to Apply,” “Application Deadlines” and “Contact.” — Unfolded to the whole “interior” of the zine

Line drawings in fifteen steps over a faded view of the zine: a flat sheet folded in half and in quarters, a slit cut down the middle, then folded up into a small booklet. — How it folds: one cut down the center, then a few folds, from flat sheet to booklet.

The full sheet uncropped: the zine side on the left, and on the right the poster side, its big question laced with pink boxes naming each graduate program, beside a welcome from the vice provost and the words “Design,” “Fine Art,” “Society,” “Culture,” “Etc.” — Fully open: poster side and zine side together on one press sheet. The whole stack flips to print the back.

Slash

The old Graduate Admissions catalog ran a few hundred pages, with lots of photography, long program descriptions, and a separate set of application instructions for every graduate program. Slash instead keeps the mailer’s minimal ideals. Whatever applies to everyone needs no repeating. The general information goes in the front and back of the book, in black only. This creates a real visual separation: general admissions content gets black ink and wide-ranging visuals, and each program gets its own spread in color. The front and back matter borrow from a deliberate hodgepodge of art and Baltimore historical visual sources. The visuals play out the cover’s idea in as many ways as they can: MICA’s grad students often work across practices, bringing different things together in new ways.

Each graduate program then gets its own two-page spread in color, a flag for what the program is and what it believes. The references come from the program itself, or from a more abstract formal idea that fits the program’s point of view. Flip through and the programs hopefully look as different as they are.

Slash is a much smaller and lighter form than the old grad admissions books. It uses less paper, less ink, and less fuel to ship, even though the old ones held more information. The bet was that one spread built for meaning can do as much as pages of student work and seemingly unending text on a grid.

Slash was also built to change one spread at a time, because some programs change every year and others may stay conceptually the same for a decade!

The cover — the slash as a mark and as a promise: nobody here is only one thing

Slash pages 2–3, the introduction: a dimensional letter M, a line-art open book, a guitarist cut out in halftone, an antique compass and a folded world map, with pull quotes from faculty and a mono-spaced welcome letter — Pages 2–3 — the introduction, in the hodgepodge of art history and Baltimore sources that runs through the front and back matter

Slash pages 4–5: a table of contents set in mixed blackletter and condensed display type, and a black-and-white pie chart of program types, with an engraved eye and sea dragon — Pages 4–5 — table of contents and program map, printed in black only like the rest of the front matter

Slash pages 12–13, MA Illustration: a sage-green spread with hand-lettered headings and organic blobs of blue, red, yellow and pink holding student illustrations — Pages 12–13 — MA Illustration: loose, hand-lettered, built from the students’ own drawings

Slash pages 20–21, Curatorial Practice MFA: five tall exhibition photographs across the top, vertical bands of green, blue and pink gradient, and a gray folded map at lower left — Pages 20–21 — Curatorial Practice: the gallery wall, with color bands running through it like light through a prism

Pages 30–31 — Mount Royal: tilted, crowded, a studio that has not been tidied for company

Slash pages 32–33, Photography + Media and Society: a bright yellow and orange starburst behind huge black condensed type, with starburst question labels beside three columns of text — Pages 32–33 — Photography + Media and Society: loud, mid-century, and written as questions answered by the founding director

Slash pages 34–35, Rinehart School of Sculpture: a plain bold headline over dense columns of text, and a grid of documentary photographs of students in critique, a garden visit, a studio and a demo day — Pages 34–35 — Rinehart: the oldest sculpture program in the country, so it gets the plainest page and a photo record of the work itself

Slash pages 42–43, Contact and Next Steps: two engraved figures on a looping telephone line, an antique map of Baltimore, a handshake, a contact block and a sustainability message above a list of typefaces used — Pages 42–43 — the back page, where the sustainability message and the open-font credits live