Rats Constructing Labyrinths

In their first week, and within the first ten minutes of their initial Typographic Enquiry class, our new MA Graphic Design students are informed that the first few pieces of work they make with us will be published in a book.

This is the moment the students realise their MA is going to be quite different from their BA. From now on, they will be consciously operating at a more sophisticated, more enquiring and more imaginative level than before.

Why produce a book rather than, for example, a series of Instagram posts? Because it gives our students first-hand experience of practical design and editorial considerations, including copy editing and proof reading, originating print-ready images, imposing pages, assembling dummies, and exporting print-ready PDFs.

It also gives them their first experience of being edited. It’s one thing to produce a one-off book for a BA project but quite another to make something to a publishable standard that can withstand professional scrutiny.

With the book printed and delivered (funded by the Course Directors Fund and printed by our friends at Langham Press), copies are brought to a special session for BA Graphic Design third-years, in which we explore some of the principles underpinning the course as a whole and the Typographic Enquiry module in particular.

We discuss the work featured in the book, debate its strengths and weaknesses, and show some of the later student work inspired by these initial experiments. Finally, we give a copy of the book to each student.

We hope that this session, and the discussions generated by it, will inspire curious undergraduate students to take the book home and give it a closer reading. From there we hope that it will provoke an interest in the MA – if not with an immediate formal application, then a request for a further one-to-one discussion with course tutors about its benefits and opportunities.

Our MA Graphic Design is exciting, challenging, and carefully designed to foster new ways of thinking and making. Rats Constructing Labyrinths sets out our stall and promises a series of distinctive creative challenges that they will not find elsewhere.

Vol. 2 images

Vol. 1 images

Editor: Nicholas Jeeves

Contributors (Volume 1, 2024): Shruthinaya Kumar, Gab Mendes, Beena Qureshi, Shinaza Taghian

Contributors (Volume 2, 2025): Taiwo Dehinsilu, Jonathan Nicholson, Sarah Pooley

Backpage Blurb:

What is an MA in Graphic Design for?

For students at ARU, at least, it is a chance to develop new ways of thinking and making: to expand frames of reference, to challenge creative habits and inclinations, to explore complex ideas they may not fully understand, to begin making more nuanced intellectual and imaginative connections, and to bring all these to bear on the perceived boundaries of design practice — their own, and of the design profession more widely.

With such thoughts in mind, the first project our students undertake with us is called ‘Rats Constructing Labyrinths’, in which we invite them to interrogate not just the role, purpose and value of an MA, but of design and the designer. To do this they must first be prepared to question all their assumptions and accumulated design habits — setting aside the idea the usual concerns of problem solving and beginning instead to engage with the more interesting business of problem creation.

The methods we use to engage with ideas of problem creation — namely chance, constraint, disruption and automation — are explored both in studio workshops and as part of independent practice. It is all intended to be a deeply experimental venture, the products of which are documented in this book. Some of these products are assured and others more tentative, but in every case, the process of assembling them has provoked deep learning and a rapid branching of yet more interesting questions, such as: what is an idea? What is creativity? What are mistakes? And perhaps most interesting of all: what is a graphic designer?