The Senior Library was established by Richard Wilde, the chair of the graphic design and advertising department at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The intent of the Library was to showcase the best work done by the graduating seniors as well as to give a long-standing senior-portfolio teacher the opportunity (and gift) of designing the book with total creative freedom.

Months before I started to design the books, I asked each graduating student to provide me with a silhouette of their head/profile and hand, and a simple line drawing of their eye. What I actually would do with them remained to be seen. My instinct, though, was to somehow use them to illustrate the individual as well as collective voices of the students. This game of chance paid off beyond my expectations. What I got from the students was an amazing collection of images that gave me the tools to create collages and patterns ranging from minimal to abstract, resembling etchings and lithographs that ultimately stimulated the sensibility of the overall package.

I wanted the Library to be digestible and intimate so that it would avoid any semblance of an unwieldy, endless, run-of-the-mill graphic design annual. Therefore, the Library is divided into five easily digestible books. The first book contains the editorial pages that include the chairman’s statement, my statement, a roundtable discussion with design writer Akiko Busch and 10 seniors, a typographic “20 questions” interpreted by five SVA senior alumni, plus the above-mentioned “self-portraits.” The next three books are examples of the senior work in alphabetical order. They are meant to illustrate the impressive girth of the graduating seniors’ work, talent, ambition and intelligence. The fourth book is a single monograph representing the thesis of one of the graduating seniors, whose work, I believe, represents a singular vision of an exemplary SVA student.

Five-volume, slipcased set of student work from SVA. Beautifully colored and enigmatically stamped cases for each volume. In my day, we were lucky if we sent out a postcard for the senior show...