Conference to bring graphic design to U.

UDesign, which connotes both “you design” and “universities of design,” will focus on the influence of individuals and society on design and graphic design’s ability to transcend multiple disciplines.

The conference, which will be held on March 1, is the first of its kind to take place on campus. It will be hosted by the Princeton University Student Design Agency (SDA), an organization founded in 2007 to fulfill the web-, graphic- and print-design needs of the University community.

Planning for the event began last October under SDA executive managers Alyce Tzue ’10 and Andy Chen ’09, with input from Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Thomas Dunne. The conference is a result of efforts to promote the presence of graphic design on campus in the absence of a graphic design major.

“Most people see design as a purely commercial enterprise where you’re always designing for clients or burdened with selling something,” Chen said. “We’re trying to get people to also view it as an art — as the ability to reconceptualize the world graphically, and to sort of take your existing imagination and traverse it into a different landscape.”

Elizabeth Cooper ’11, who plans to attend UDesign, said that she has been excited about the event since she first heard about it. “There aren’t any design classes at Princeton, which I found kind of odd, and I’m really interested in design and thought [this conference] would be a good opportunity,” she said.

The conference will bring together professionals in the field of design and students from colleges across the Eastern seaboard. It will focus, according to the event website, on four areas: brand identity, environmental design, web-based design and sustainability in design.

“A lot of the creative genius behind design is not only how to make something marketable, but how to make it economical and friendly to the environment,” Chen said.

Many of the featured speakers are award-winning graphic designers, including keynote speaker Paula Scher of Pentagram Design, Inc., who designed the logos for Citibank and Tiffany & Co.

“People see these identities everywhere but don’t recognize who’s the mastermind behind these very recognizable identities,” Tzue said. “The logos determine in part the success of the organization. You get to appreciate the power of one graphic, of one design.”

Cooper also mentioned the importance of understanding the impact of a logo. “We’re in such a visual society,” she said. “We’re just bombarded all the time with images, and I think it’s interesting to deconstruct and think how that image came to be.”

Other speakers include Jonathan Harris ’02, a computer program designer and founder of internet art website Number 27, and Donna Ching of ChingFoster Designs, the group that created the logos for Frist Campus Center and Richardson Auditorium.

Though many speakers are specialists in the field, the event should also appeal to “people that aren’t necessarily interested in or exposed to design,” Tzue said.

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“We wanted to create a forum where non-specialists could receive some insight into the field of graphic design,” Chen said.

Following the speeches, attendees will attend a discussion panel moderated by Tiffany Wey ’07, co-founder of the SDA. They will also participate in a design competition during which teams made up of both Princeton and non-Princeton students will have 30 minutes to create a T-shirt design based on a given theme. One of the main goals of the conference is to promote interaction among students from different universities.

The event will be run almost entirely by the SDA. Chen, also a co-founder, said that it was created “not only to serve as a business opportunity, but as a creative forum for people to get together to think about creative design.”

Though the SDA is a young agency, it has already secured a large client base, mostly through student groups and various departments. “If we continue to grow at this pace,” Tzue said, “I think we’ll make serious headway in design at Princeton.”

Tzue hopes that the event will raise momentum for the integration of a graphic design curriculum into the architecture school, with which design is closely intertwined. “You can’t think of the structure of a building and how it’s accessible to students without thinking about how it looks and its interior design,” she said.

Tzue and Chen estimate that between 80 and 100 students will attend the event and that slightly more than half will be Princeton students. Whether UDesign becomes an annual event depends on the conference’s turnout and overall success.

“[Organizing the event has] just been a really good team effort, working with so many people that are passionate about design and seeing the design culture at Princeton grow,” Chen said.

Registration for the conference, which will take place in Betts Auditorium, ends on Feb. 20. The event is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, the School of Architecture, the Office of Communications, Rockefeller College, the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Council of the Humanities.