Every Thursday this summer, for three-and-a-half very long hours, I am served a hearty helping of humility. It is often quite uncomfortable, leaving me with the undeniable desire to hide in a corner, give up or scream. All this from a design class I couldn’t wait to take.

I had been wanting to take continuing education classes since I started my job in February 2007. I requested course catalogs from three schools, which I happily received and promptly read, flagging every course that interested me. Photography. Typography. Color Theory. Letterpress. My desire to go back to school was strong. But I held out until my one-year mark at work, when I became eligible for tuition reimbursement from my employer if I passed the class (an “if” that has already been in question because grades aren’t consistently recorded).

What attracted me to the typography class at a reputable school in NYC was the description, which said we’d be creating book jackets, CD covers and movie titles, among other things. A secret goal of mine has been to design the credits for a movie, so I thought this class would be a perfect match.

Before my first day of school, I was incredibly nervous. I had picked out my outfit the night before (I know, I know. What am I? 12?) and wondered what my classmates would be like. I thought they’d all be artsy, and I wanted to fill the part too.

The class, as well as the teacher and my experience, has not turned out to be anything like I expected. My teacher is a legend in the field of typography and has been teaching since the Vietnam War. This means he’s very old and lacks tact, especially when critiquing our assignments.The focus is not on designing these projects (which is what I expected and wanted), but the letters themselves, how they look and how they’re spaced. We’re even taking fonts and changing them on the computer, making them thinner or straighter or rounder, something that is extremely challenging for me because I’m a novice in Illustrator, the program we use. I started a countdown to the end after my first class. (There are three weeks left, not counting tonight.)

I always think I take thorough notes in class, but when it comes time to do my assignments, I’m utterly confused. Is this supposed to be all caps? Am I supposed to just pick how much space to leave between letters or did he specify? Can I use color or does it have to be black? We don’t have a syllabus or textbook - just our memory and notes. And while I thought both of mine were quite adequate, they’re repeatedly failing me. One assignment on creating shadows left me so perplexed that I asked four coworkers for help. All have much more experience and computer knowledge than me and were equally at a loss for how to complete the assignment according to his instructions.

We can spend nearly two hours of each Thursday going over the assignments as a class, which was mortifying in the beginning. Everyone would be able to hear how I did. Upon receiving one person’s paper, our teacher immediately threw it in the air and exclaimed that if the student had been working for the teacher’s agency, he would’ve been fired.

No matter how hard I stall, I’m usually the first one at his desk, where he’ll greedily grab my assignment. As he rips it apart (verbally, though I wouldn’t physically put it past him), I try not to let my pride get ripped to shreds as well. Oftentimes I can figure out what I’ve done wrong, but I just can’t accurately do it in Illustrator. I have been so frustrated that I’ve contemplated dropping the class — even though I’d be out $500.

Last week, we had to take a font without feet (sans serif) and add feet from another font (serif) to it. I didn’t figure out a short cut until the day it was due - and my execution was still a little rough. When I showed it to my teacher, he didn’t think I even used the correct serif font.

“What font is this?”
“Baskerville,” I told him.
“Your head is in Baskerville!” he exclaimed.

Then he launched into a story about how a guillotine works, which reminded him of when he used to accompany his grandma to the butcher to pick out a chicken. Once she’d squeezed them and found the right one, the butcher would chop off its head and the chicken would run around. He told us that sometimes this happened to people after the guillotine had its way with them. I was able to piece together how he related the guillotine and the butcher, but I’m still clueless as to how my assignment prompted that story. Maybe he could sense that this class makes me feel out of my mind.

But last week, after I got my head out of Baskerville, I had a revelation in class. Our instructor spent the end of the period handwriting our next assignment with a paintbrush and ink. “Don’t think computer type,” he said. “You are it.” So he devoted a single page to each letter of the word “magical,” writing it over and over. Once each letter had been written, he went back and picked the best, which he assembled into one perfect word.

As I watched, amazed at how beautiful these letters were turning out, he told us “Don’t be afraid. Let your brains out. Have fun.” And I finally realized that at last I had an assignment that I was truly interested in and excited to do. Many of the blogs I regularly read relate to handmade arts. As much as I’ve been inspired by all them, and saved every link to every cool project I want to make myself, I have never actually bought the supplies or made anything. Now my class was giving me a reason to buy a brush and ink and let it out.

I’m not sure how my assignment will turn out; I haven’t held a paintbrush in my hands since elementary school (except one summer in college when I had the urge to watercolor, which I attribute to spending my time with little ones at summer camp). I very well could screw this one up too. But I’m not giving up. As much as I want to quit, and as hard as I fight myself to do homework and hate not being right when we review assignments in front of the whole class, I need some practice in being confused and imperfect and out of my comfort zone. Even if it means sacrificing my pride.

4 Responses to “Your head is in Baskerville!”

1. Seth Says:
   July 31st, 2008 at 11:08 pm

   Jacky: Wow this sounds like a challenging experience! I bet though that at the end of it, you will gain something quite significant. Maybe not what you expected — but maybe something even better! Thank you for linking to my blog! Much appreciation. Seth

2. skippy Says:
   August 2nd, 2008 at 2:31 pm

   i fully support carefully picking outfits out the night before big events. i literally had my roommates take a photo of me in front of the fireplace the first day…of my sophomore year of college.

3. Alice Hill Says:
   August 3rd, 2008 at 4:08 pm

   Jack, Thanks for sending this. We enjoyed seeing you, and the movies. You will learn from this and stick with it and grow - that’s your nature.

   Love,
   1/2 of the g-unit

4. This Ordinary Day » Primary colors Says:
   October 23rd, 2008 at 12:02 am

   [...] an unpleasant experience this summer in a continuing education class, I haven’t held a paintbrush since elementary school. I never chose art as an elective in [...]

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