Intro

When I studied communication design in Münster in 2011, there was a course in Creative Coding that everyone I asked found deadly boring. The lecturer covered the technical and logical concepts of programming, but didn’t realize that there was one question that was really on the students’ minds: Why should a Graphic Designer learn to program at all? When I landed my first job to give a course in a design university in 2018, I focused intensively on this very question. I formulated the answer in a kind of manifesto for my course, which I called “Programming Posters”.

The poster, the major medium for visual communication in public space for centurys, experiences fundamental transformations. Today it is much more than a surface with type, colors and images on it: It is an interactive application, animated, audible, data-driven and intermedial. It involves all senses and disciplines. And it melts together graphic design with cutting edge technologies.

To make the idea come alive and experiential, I invested a few weeks of time to find out what’s possible. Here’s the result of this visual research.

Teaching to program posters was so much fun and it resonated a lot with the students. The idea of the poster developed with code thus became a very important pillar of my teaching.

Since years traditional media formats are evaporating and designers need to learn to craft systems instead of rigid media artifacts. Code is the ideal language to create and understand visual systems.

Are you ready? Let’s get started!