Two seasons of lectures
The Intra-Disciplinary Seminar is The Cooper Union's free public lecture series, part of the Robert Lehman Visiting Artist Program: talks by artists, theorists, scientists, activists, and writers who work across disciplines. It also runs as a class. Students take IDS for credit, and with the public invited in, hundreds of people attended. Ana Valeria Castillos and I co-designed the identity across two seasons, Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, twenty-four lectures in all, and I developed the website.
The speakers
Poets, curators, linguists, anthropologists, historians, artists, architects, designers: Layli Long Soldier, Grada Kilomba, Jasbir Puar, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Anthony Huberman, and Forest Young, among many others, organized by Leslie Hewitt and Omar Berrada. The premise of the series is that the most pressing questions in contemporary thought belong to no single field, so the speakers came from many. One visual identity represents a variety of ideas.
Ten colors per speaker
The central rule of the identity: every speaker gets their own scheme of ten colors, applied to the same logo and poster system.
I built a color generator into the site itself, controlled with the number keys: one key picks two random colors and blends a ten-step ramp between them, another picks ten fully random stops, and others invert, swap, and reshuffle the scheme. Every result applies directly to the live logo, and a timeline saves each palette so we could click back to the good ones. We generated and reshuffled and tweaked schemes found with this generator. I later gave a lecture at NYCxDesign about how we chose color here.
Here is that generator, rebuilt for this page: every speaker's real scheme from both seasons, each with a line from their lecture. Browse the seasons, or generate your own:
Animated everything
The logo is animated. The posters are animated; I made those. Here are all of them:
The site
One data file holds every lecture: speaker, title, date, abstract, bio, and the ten colors. The server renders a page per speaker from that file, so each page loads with its scheme already set. Moving between lectures transitions all ten colors on the inline SVG logo. The layout is fully responsive, and on mobile you swipe between speakers.
The stack
| Layer | Choice |
|---|---|
| Server | Node.js, Express, express-handlebars, hosted on Glitch |
| Rendering | Server-side; one data file, one generated page per speaker |
| Color | CSS custom properties (--cls-1 through --cls-10) driving inline SVG |
| Motion | GSAP fill transitions; animated logo and posters |
| Client | Plain JavaScript; touch handlers I wrote for mobile swipe |
| Type | DIN, ITC Avant Garde, Trade Gothic |
Credits
Organized by Leslie Hewitt and Omar Berrada for The Cooper Union School of Art. I co-designed the identity and the site with Ana Valeria Castillos, an awesome collaborator, and I developed the site and animated the logo and posters.