Welcome
Welcome to my faculty website at Palomar College. It is here that you will find information about the classes that I teach, as well as resources on graphic design and web development.
My goal is to give students a foundation in design principles, creative thinking and conceptual problem-solving techniques in order to integrate them with the technology of electronic media so that they may generate ideas and concepts for communication programs. Graphic design is a form of communication which combines written language and imagery into messages that are visually attractive, connect with people on intellectual and emotional levels, and provide them with relevant information. As a result, graphic design identifies, instructs, informs and even persuades viewers to do something. Students will learn to create intelligent and thought-provoking designs in order to communicate complex ideas in a simple and effective manner. It is my hope that with these skills, students will contribute to the cultural force of visual communication through their singular vision of design.Gregory Kelley, MA
Palomar College, Adjunct Faculty
Graphic Communications Department
Typography
Few typefaces are better known, more admired, or more widely used by graphic designers than Paul Renner's Futura. But there are few figures in design history as important as Renner about whom so little has been written. Even though Futura first appeared in 1928, little is known about man who created it.
Renner, a German typographer, book designer, teacher, and design theorist, was born in 1878 in northern Germany. After his mother's death during his childhood, he was subjected to the uncompromising strictness of his father, a Protestant minister who dogmatically required all his children, in Renner's words, "to scrub their little souls clean far too severely," which completely erased "the bloom of uninhibitedness and security."
Like many of his design contemporaries, Renner began his career as an artist. After attending three German art academies, he married and settled in Munich. While earning his living as a painter, he enrolled briefly at a school of applied art to study what was called Graphik: drawing, illustration, graphic art for printing, book decoration, and typography.
Design
Ladislav Sutnar was one of the many European artists who emigrated to the United States before and during World War II. Sutnar was born on November 9, 1897 in Pilsen, in what is now the Czech Republic. Sutnar's education in art was at the Prague Academy of Industrial Art and the Technical University, also in Prague. In 1923, at the age of twenty-six, he became a professor of design at the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague, and in 1932, he was named director of the school. Sutnar taught himself constructive and functional typography; commercial and industrial advertising; poster, magazine, and book design; industrial design; and exhibition design. In the early 1920's he visited the Bauhaus and became a staunch supporter of its functional approach to design and by the early 1930's he was known as the originator of modern design in Czechoslovakia.
By the time Ladislav Sutnar arrived in America in 1939, he had absorbed the ideas of the Bauhaus and believed that design should apply to every dimension of life and the every design problem should be approached on its own terms with an unbiased, fresh and flexible attitude. He embraced Constructivism which believed that every design solution must have a logical structure, as opposed to being spontaneously improvised or influenced by personal feeling. He was also a proponent of Jan Tschichold's New Typography, with its asymmetry, its use of white space and contrast, its use of rules and bars to demarcate informational units, its simplification of letterforms, its use of bold initial letters to enhance the communication of the message, and its preference for photography, machine set type, and primary colors.
