Calumet College of St. Joseph (CCSJ) proudly presented “The Hero Project” on Thursday, Feb. 10. The gallery featured posters created by students in the graphic design class taught by Tyler Bush.
Students were challenged to create a poster depicting their version of a hero, and through the process learned how to use tools in Photoshop to bring their ideas to life.
“Sports posters always celebrate the hero. I have a number of assignments that address the idea of representation, and who actually casts the protagonist in our culture. Naturally, we have a lot of sports posters and we also have a lot of pop culture references and comic book characters in here as well,” said Bush.
Bush pushes students to think outside the usual connotation of the word “hero.” One of the students designed a poster centered around an original character with Native American origins.
“Eagle Eye is a Native American video game character. Sam is building this as a part of our primal branding class that we’re teaching. It’s given him a chance to talk about his ethnicity and his identity in a pop culture character that he hopes to become a video game character,” said Bush.
Students are able to take the project in any direction they choose, as long as it relates to their idea of a hero. For some, it’s a comic book character. For others, it’s a friend on the dance team or their dog Mr. Boogers. No matter the hero, Bush was more than willing to help them create their vision.
“We get our fair share of CCSJ representation, as well as some people, do their dog. That’s the beauty of the project in a nutshell,” said Bush.
A student not involved in the program, Michael Munoz II, felt the gallery was an impressive display of creativity and personality. Munoz was specifically drawn to a poster of a robotic dragon shooting lasers out of his fingers and eyes in a background of colorful smoke and lasers.
“I love that I get to look at a lot of the people’s creativity and what they put into this project. I get to see some of the people’s personalities,” Munoz said.
A particularly impressive poster featured a scene from Spiderman depicted on “The Bugle,” the newspaper from the original comics. The poster was highly complimented by people passing by.
“I was actually inspired by one of my classmates. She gave me the idea to do “The Bugle,” said Skylar Pittman, creator of the poster.
With more students than computers in the design class, it can be a struggle to make sure each student is getting as much knowledge and experience as possible from the course. Bush works to ensure that students are learning as much as possible even if the class period isn’t spent working in the design programs.
“It takes a little bit of coaching one-on-one with some of them,” Bush said. “We’ve had to go with a hybrid class with 20 students and 10 machines. I only have an hour and a half with them each class. The homework assignments that they do on Blackboard will give them a quiz over the different steps they’ll have to go through when they come in to learn the tools that week, but then also some writing questions that start to prompt them toward heroes and to explore the media literacy, the representation, and the humanities side of the class.”
“The Hero Project” is both a testament to impressive proficiency in PhotoShop and the ability to think critically and creatively about their chosen subject matter. The posters are currently on display on the fourth floor of the Digital and Studio Arts Department and will be displayed until May 15th. For more information about CCSJ, visit https://www.ccsj.edu/