DESIGN HISTORY SPOTLIGHT: Sister Corita Kent
At HUB, we kind of hate arbitrary expectations or generalized standards. Our instinct is to reject how things are “supposed” to be; as a workplace, as designers, as creative strategists. And that’s not to say that we don’t rely on and follow tried and true methods of strong, functional typography, or deep dive into proven research for a strategic community assessment—but as a team, as people, we refer to our studio as the “Island of Misfit Toys” for a reason.
Unsurprisingly, we admire figures who buck convention and use their work to transcend the confines of their prescribed role. This month we’re getting inspired by Sister Corita Kent: an American artist, designer, educator and most unexpectedly, a former religious sister. She was a social justice advocate who, much to the Catholic Church’s chagrin, used her affinity for screenprinting to communicate her anti-war messaging in the 1960s while pushing the boundaries of what screenprinting was thought to be capable of.
Sister Corita’s characteristic boundary-pushing is apparent in her work, where searing dayglo typography bends and lurches on the printed plane, lending it an illusion of volume and inertia. She’ll often use these undulating forms as the structure for a larger piece—using them to contain poetry, or clip other typographic forms to give words new contextual meaning. Like Corita herself, the work is beholden to few rigid confines.
Sister Corita Kent and a sampling of her amazing art.
More than 60 years after Sister Corita’s peak of prolificacy, I still find her work so energizing and life-giving. It’s work like this that makes me thank the universe that I can see in color. And the best part is, it breaks almost every design rule in the book—words are upside down and reversed, colors vibrate on top of one another to the point of illegibility, there’s rarely a straight line in sight—and yet her message remains so totally clear. It’s a reminder that some aspects of graphic design go deeper than legibility and structure, and operate on a level of emotion, reaction, and intuition.
Sometimes I find that separating myself from what’s expected or stereotypical is required for good design work—detaching from how I think a project is “supposed” to look in order to more fully open myself up to what will fulfill a client’s goals. So often, the expectations I have of the end result of a project, the types of work I thought I’d like, or even how I thought a client would behave could not be further from how they manifest in reality. Pushing through the arbitrary boundaries we place on ourselves throughout all phases of the design process, from conception to execution to presentation, can only serve to strengthen a message and access the purest core of what design is meant to do.