Steve Jones is a graphic designer and associate professor of Design and Industry. He is featured in Real Role Models, a book of exemplary African Americans for the 21st century, and in the Oakland Tribune’s Good Neighbors column August 12. His Community Arts class pairs undergrads with nonprofits to design materials for local clients. This year, Jones’ class teamed up with Art Professor Mark Dean Johnson to submit designs for posters advertising the Gothenburg Book Fair in Sweden. Jones divulges some of his philosophies on design, teaching, identity politics and working with small businesses.
I saw an interview with you on the American Institute of Graphic Arts site, and it seemed that when you were a student at the California College of the Arts, and later as an M.F.A. student and beyond, the issue of identity and design was consistently raised. Is this something you try to cultivate in your students now?
I do it probably in a lot more subversive, technical way. I think that anything with racial politics, if you are too up front, people don’t tend to gravitate. I know this from experience. I’ve taught classes where it’s explicit: This is a class on identity politics, and no one will sign up. But in my typography class, they all do their final projects as big commemorative box sets, and the people I assign aren’t your traditional models that (other) art schools would assign. It’s everybody from Audre Lorde, lesbian poet, black, to Sylvia Plath or Ishmael Reed.
You could probably advertise the class as a class on identity, when they’re really learning type, but they’re learning all these people’s biographies, their cultural origin and so on. They get to influence the whole packaging of materials to typefaces to print layout. It could be local folks like Harvey Milk, who most folks might know, to Gwendolyn Brooks, to Rabindrath Tagore.
It’s cool, because coming from a writing background, I don’t tend to think very visually. When you’re describing these projects, it’s cool to see how these ideas become physical objects.
It is a type class, so all I’m really grading them on is the type setting. They learn how to use grids and style sheets, but they do have to do the research. It’s a commemorative box set, so they have to think of this thing as a special night for a few thousand people. For example, this is the Leonard Peltier set. He was a Native American activist accused of killing an FBI agent, so he was in jail. This student actually got shells from the rifles, Native American feathers, the leather, the rabbit pelts. This is where I’m saying how that person’s biography starts to inform the whole materiality layout.
Can you tell me a little bit about your design studio?
It’s called Plantain, like a big banana. I started with a friend of mine. My background is Jamaican, and his background is Puerto Rican, so we thought Plantain was a good name. It was also in opposition to a lot of studios at that time: Pomegranate, Celery, Tomato, all these cool-sounding fruits and vegetables. But you know, I actually eat plantains. I eat at least one a week, and we liked the idea of it being the staple of our diet and using produce as a symbol to produce work.
Most of the work is with nonprofits, small businesses. I’ll do a lot of work for developers, or I’ll do stuff for Alameda or San Francisco county, but that allows me to take on the smaller jobs, for groups that are doing interesting work, but might not have a big budget. It’s good to take on a couple of bigger jobs to help with the smaller ones. The client I’ve been working with recently is a nonprofit that does art in West Oakland schools, and they don’t have money. I’ve been donating posters.
Tell us a little more about your affiliation with AIGA.
The AIGA has what’s called Design Journeys. Designers are notoriously 90 – 95 percent white, and even though the organization has been around for more than 80 years, there was no archive on designers of color. About two or three years ago, they decided that they should documenting this stuff. I was part of the advisory committee to help choose, and I didn’t even know, but they picked the first 25 and I made the list.
What artistic skills do your students need to produce your assignments?
It’s all graphic. Typography, Gestalt — most of those students have done Design I, Design II and have probably done computer classes to learn the programs. You have to know Illustrator, Photoshop, In Design to do this stuff. They’re still learning, but it’s good to have that base of knowledge when they’re in the class. Then we can start teaching them proper typesetting.
But then with the Community Arts class, that’s actually a real-world situation. We have to go over kickoff meetings, when you’re meeting with a client for the first time. And not just any client—These are mostly clients from underserved communities, mostly women and minorities, small businesses out of Bayview, Hunters Point, the Mission....
In the Community Arts class, every week there’s a reading on issues of identity because when I first started teaching that class, the issue was a lot of times folks would go into these communities (unprepared).
For the most part, they were white designers, and of course I’m a designer of color. I noticed that first of all, the designers weren’t talking to the community, they just walked in and said “I’m the designer; you have to take what I give you.” Then I started teaching the class and talking about typographies, color, identity politics, and students didn’t really understand. Why is that offensive to Latinos? Or why do blacks think this is this way? I made a reader to get them up to speed. We watch documentaries about everything from Asian representation in mass media to Native Americans. It’s eye-opening for these guys. They’ve never even thought about it before. They used to do this, they used to do that, and now they know. It’s an educational process.
—Julia Halprin Jackson