Recap of Mikey Burton's Mark Making Workshop

Recap of Mikey Burton’s Mark Making Workshop

FoGD was really fortunate to have Mikey Burton last week to hang out with us! He came to talk to students about their work, shared his process of his thesis project during Show & Tell, and hosted an all day mark making workshop where students created an *almost* portfolio ready logo in one day. We even declared “Mikey Burton Week” as a official national holiday.

The challenge of the Mark Making workshop was to create a thoughtful, meaningful mark through the process of brainstorming and sketching within one day. Our assignment was to create a mark for a festival for a randomly drawn city and festival type. Some examples include New Orleans Sandwiches, DC Doughnuts, Honolulu Comic Festival and other crazy festival concoctions.

Mikey emphasized the importance of the “napkin sketch phase” to push as many ideas out as possible before stepping near a computer. We learned that sketching out ideas can help solve problems faster. Sketching provides the freedom to explore lots of ideas, both good and bad before narrowing down and finalizing the better marks on the computer.

During critique, everyone posted their sketches on the wall and walked around marking with post-it notes which one we liked best and why. It was great to see which ones everyone gravitated to, and the dialogue it created between the designer and the feedback from the group.

After the critique, everyone took their feedback and started finalizing their marks on the computer. Perhaps the most difficult part of the workshop was bringing the concept of the sketched mark into the computer, especially in such a short amount of time. Some marks communicated better as a sketch, and some marks translated well digitized. We had to work lightening bolt fast! Kind of like, in the real world job market thing.

Overall, it was a great learning experience of how to quickly solve problems through design and it was super fun to hang out with Mikey as well!

Here are some of the marks that came out of the workshop: