Adjust Your Margins
MFA students create a social network for artists.
Five inspiring graduate students from the Graphic Design MFA program are creating a project that will address missing voices in the graphic design field. Margins (launching early 2017) will work as an online platform for lesser known designers to share their work, backgrounds, and influences with other artists and the art community.
Alicia DeWitt (CFA’17), Nicholas Samendinger (CFA’17), Padmini Chandrasekaran (CFA’17), and Alex Creamer (CFA’17) are not only credited with creating the mission behind Margins, but are the winners of the 2016 Spark Award. Last May at an event at The Hawthorne in Kenmore Square, these student entrepreneurs stepped into the CFA Spark Tank, presenting their business proposals, and taking home the grand prize for the innovation behind their idea: a $1,000 grant award to build the site, and make Margins a reality. Since then, the group has added a fifth member, Josh Duttweiler (CFA’17), who’s experience in web design made him an asset to their team.
According to DeWitt, the group wants “Margins to be a place where people can find inspiration and discourse, but not in the traditional canon. We’re collecting interviews from people whose work encapsulates our mission and creating a platform for that to be easily located by anyone who’s looking for that sort of information.”
The idea came to fruition when the students discovered an issue while enrolled in a design theory course: the missing voices of women and international artists. Creamer rationalizes that “they’re only teaching us very specific work about a very specific type of people.”
The team started reaching out to people in their networks here on campus because of the diversity within the Graduate Graphic Design program. From there, the project spread to artists from their hometowns. They hope to feature ten interviews coinciding with the website’s release that show an assorted range of work to epitomize their mission of artistic networking.
“We don’t want to simply come up with just a checklist of ten questions,” Samendinger says. “We definitely have some aspect of the designer’s backgrounds and influences that we want to cover, but it’s a much more organic conversation that will really highlight why we think that their work and who they are will be a resource for other designers.”
Chandrasekaran focused on the fact that this website will be a way for artists to learn from each other and become inspired by other designers in their field. The team, through bringing these artists together, hopes that they will further enhance the conversation.
“A goal for us is to make this more of a network,” she says. “Hopefully it will become a place where we’re showcasing other people interviewing other people. It’s not necessarily always going to be us facilitating the conversation. We want it to be a community for designers where lots of different voices are heard.”
The team says that winning the Spark Award last spring was an important next step for their project, though not an essential one. They had agreed beforehand that even if they didn’t win, they had to follow through with Margins because of how important it would be to the art community. All five students are extremely passionate about the project and are dedicated to seeing it to completion.
Chandrasekaran emphasizes that the grant only fueled their passion; “it’s important that it’s not just about winning the grant, the money is only a tool to help it happen. The grant only put us in motion.”