Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) Artist’s Guide
The Artist’s Guide is a key piece of MICA’s collateral that helps attract new students—in addition to the Prospectus and others. The book is formatted as a small, pocket-sized guide to art schools in America, in addition to specifics about MICA. We built a system, borrowing only the bright colors and the MICA logo from the existing system, to playfully communicate key application dates, course offerings, and school statistics. Introducing and concluding the guide are a collection of prompts calling on the mostly high-school recipients to _______ what they are holding. In a crowded landscape of printed matter from colleges and universities, this piece is to pick up the inquisitive student and shake them a bit. The Artist’s Guide, as it appears here, will be in circulation for the next 3 years.
The guide is 106mm x 148mm and has 160 pages. It includes 10 illustrations to help communicate 10 prompts. The illustrations were created using a variety of tools including but not limited to pencil, VR drawing setup, and C4D.
The yellow and black “hockey puck” is a graph, a table, and a placeholder throughout the book.
The book uses a special swiss binding to expose the spine and show the thread of the book. This also allows for the book to sit flat on the table, as a reference guide for programs or while performing the prompts. Same as the Prospectus, the Artist’s Guide was printed in Zagreb, Croatia and features fluorescent spot color(s). The Artist’s Guide uses PMS 803 and PMS 804 and is printed on Heaven 42 from Sappi, a wonderful paper stock with a soft blue tint reminiscent of the clear morning sky over Zagreb after a long night out.
The Prompts
The prompts at the beginning and end of the guide prominently feature a bright orange, PMS 804. Each section of the book uses a different background technique—full floods of color or thin diagonal lines to name a few. The changing backgrounds distinguish the text blocks and shouts to the teenagers that they are in a new section. The typography used throughout the book is the same as is used in the Prospectus and includes typefaces from some contemporary foundries including Milieu Grotesque, Type Supply, and Binnenland.
Introduction
Programs
Details
