Cal Swann: Professor of Typographic Design and Legacy

Lefteris Heretakis

Paul Blackburn on Design Education, Studio Culture and the Loss of Depth – Design Education Talks

In this episode of Design Education Talks, I speak with Paul Blackburn, founder of Studio Blackburn, about what really forms a designer beneath the surface of projects, portfolios and professional success. This is a conversation about studio culture, typography, process, boredom, business, AI, educational character and the slow formation of creative judgement. Paul takes us through his own journey from Barnsley College of Art and Design to Ravensbourne, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Central Saint Martins, each institution offering him a different philosophy of what design could be: disciplined, rhetorical, cultural, experimental, commercial and human. Through these experiences, and through his later work with major clients and young designers, he reflects on what design education once gave students through time, proximity, osmosis and studio life, and what may now be disappearing through modularisation, standardisation and the reduction of education to service delivery. At the heart of the conversation is a powerful question: how do we prepare students for professional reality without reducing them to employable operators? Paul reminds us that the studio is not a timetable, a room booking or a sequence of modules. It is an ecology of attention, conversation, discipline, making, repetition, frustration, discovery and becoming. In an age of AI, where the so-called boring junior work may disappear, this question becomes even more urgent, because hidden inside that repetitive work was apprenticeship, observation, patience and the development of judgement. This episode is not a nostalgic look backwards, but a serious invitation to rethink the future of art and design education around depth, character, human intelligence and the conditions in which young people can truly become designers.Support the showSince its inception in 2019, Design Education Talks podcast has served as a dynamic platform for the exchange of insights and ideas within the realm of art and design education. This initiative sprang from a culmination of nearly a decade of extensive research conducted by Lefteris Heretakis. His rich background, intertwining academia, industry, and student engagement, laid the foundation for a podcast that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of educational discourse.See all of our work on on https://linktr.ee/thenewartschoolFollow us on twitter at @newartschoolRead our latest articles at https://newartschool.education/and https://heretakis.medium.com/Equipment used to produce the podcast:Rodcaster pro IIRode NT1 5th generationElgato Low profile Microphone ArmMonster Prolink Studio Pro microphone cableThe rest of the equipment is here 👉https://kit.co/heretakis/podcasting
  1. Paul Blackburn on Design Education, Studio Culture and the Loss of Depth
  2. Lauren Alexander – Designing with Care, Complexity, and Responsibility
  3. Design as Experience: Ksenija Miļča on Interiors, Branding and Education
  4. The Education of Attention: Esen Karol on Design, Publishing and Joy Teaching Designers to See: A Conversation with Esen Karol
  5. Simon Collins – What Design Schools Get Wrong About the Real World

Cal Swann attended art school in his hometown at Leicester College of Art in 1951. Specialising in typography under Tom Westley for the last three years, he gained the National Diploma in Design (Typography) and Full Tech C&G in Typographic Design in 1956.

RAF National Service followed, and then quick career moves in print design, a couple of advertising agencies and eventually lecturing. Job chasing took him to London and elsewhere around UK. He produced his first book Techniques of Typography in 1969 while lecturing at Manchester College of Art and Design. An interest in linguistics was enhanced with an MA in Applied Linguistics, Lancaster in 1986, resulting in his second book Language and Typography in 1991, also with Lund Humphries.

Cal was Head of Graphic Design at Saint Martin’s School of Art in Covent Garden from 1981-86 and his last position in UK was as Dean and Professor of the Faculty of Art and Design at Liverpool Polytechnic.

He moved to Australia in 1989 as Head of Design at the University of South Australia where he was awarded a Professorship in Typographic Design. Cal was in 1996 appointed Professor of Design at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia where he launched the first totally online Master of Design in 1998. Retiring from fulltime professoring in 2001, he was still active in design and teaching and developed and taught three typographic design units online for Virtu Design Institute until 2019.

He is continuing writing and designing (and playing a little amateur jazz on vibraphone) and enjoying a relaxed retirement with his wife Sandra, about 50K south of Perth and next to the Bush, in Western

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Published by Lefteris Heretakis

Navigating you through the disruption in #art, #design and #designeducation.

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