You go girl!

Awhile back, I mentioned in passing (ok, maybe I gushed a little bit) that my lovely and talented wife had transcended her role as a graphic designer, and had landed a university-level gig teaching the tools and methods of her trade to a class of eager graphic design students.

Zahava cut her design teeth during that innocent period just before computers took the graphic design industry by storm. No sooner had she learned the ‘black arts’ of hand drawing and paste-up than the first design programs placed many of the ‘exotic’ skills of her trade into the hands of amateurs who had not paid their dues.

A brief struggle ensued between the Luddites who resisted computerization and the progressives who saw this as an entirely new design tool with infinite possibilities. Luckily Zahava was among the trained artists who embraced the new technology. Rather than making her knowledge obsolete, each new generation of design software took her skills and talent to ever-higher levels.

However, along with previously unheard of conceptual and execution possibilities came the pretenders. Just as the advances in ski equipment have allowed even the most untalented skiers to ‘shoosh’ and ‘carve’ their way down even the expert trails, the plethora of low cost desktop publishing and graphics programs heralded an era where nearly everyone with access to a computer began calling themselves Graphic Designers.

Despite the fact that most of these newly minted ‘designers’ had no foundation in concept, color or composition from which to launch their careers, a sizable portion of the marketplace eagerly embraced their bargain-basement prices.

Over the years, Zahava has been fortunate to have always worked for high-end design firms and clients in the upper echelons of ‘the corporate world'. For the most part, this helped insulate her from the cannibalization that was taking place in the parts of the industry closer to ‘the street’. However, when our kids got old enough to need a parent home before and after school, Zahava made the sacrifice and launched her freelance career.

I have listened quietly as Zahava has struggled to educate her freelance clients in the basics of good design principles. Sometimes she’s been successful, and other times the job has been lost to a brother-in-law with ‘PageMaker’ on his new home computer. The most frustrating thing for her has been that many of the clients couldn’t tell the difference.

Another phenomenon that Zahava discovered was that many young religious Jewish women were going into the graphic design field. On the one hand, this was wonderful, as Zahava had first hand knowledge of how the profession lent itself to people with family responsibilities. Unfortunately, most of them (even the very talented amateurs), were eschewing formal art training because it entailed exposure to Christian culture, co-educational classroom environments, and nudity (not theirs, of course)... basic elements that are part of nearly any organized art program.

The teaching position that Zahava landed is an opportunity to right a multitude of wrongs. It is part of a very ambitious design curriculum for religious design students who are spending their junior year of college in Israel.

The subject she has been assigned could not have been a better fit: Typography. In order to understand the perfection of this fit, you need to come with us some time to the movies. Zahava’s idea of a ‘movie trifecta’ is:

1. Authentic period costumes
2. Tears running down her cheeks
3. Being able to shout the name of the font the instant the credits start to roll

Seriously, she knows the name of more fonts (not to mention their history and creator) than I know…um… well, I don’t know anything quite as thouroughly as she knows typography!

So, why this… and why now?

Because today is Zahava’s first day teaching and she left the house this morning with a bad case of self-doubt and jitters. I, for one, am quite sure she will blow these students away and infect them with the passion she has for the subject and the profession.

To say I am proud of her doesn't begin to describe my feelings!