Students Give Clipper Card an Artistic Twist
The Bay Area tech community is famous for disrupting entrenched industries and services. Now a Bay Area graphic design teacher has taken it upon herself to do a little disruption of her own, engaging her students in an exercise to design artsy versions of the Bay Area’s Clipper® transit fare card.
Introduced by MTC in 2010, the Clipper card features white sails on a blue background, a nod to a historic mode of transportation that revolutionized travel — the clipper ships of yesteryear. From time to time, MTC has also produced special editions of the card in limited quantities to commemorate major regional events, such as the America’s Cup race and the opening of the new East Span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The nearly 1 million active Clipper card users collectively make more than 20 million transactions a month with the card, which is accepted on 13 public transit systems in the Bay Area, with more coming on board soon.
So it wasn’t too far-fetched when Rachel Smith, who at the time was teaching graphic design and illustration at the University of San Francisco and UC Berkeley Extension, challenged her students in 2013 to come up with a card design to celebrate the upcoming reopening of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The only requirement was that the students select a specific historical art movement as their inspiration, with their designs spanning the Arts and Crafts, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Art Deco and Art Nouveau periods, among others.
While Smith has since moved on to teach at the Solano Community College, the project continues, which students now having produced some six dozen designs. The project, collected on a blog site titled “The Modern Museum of Clipper Cards,” existed in relative obscurity until this week, when the Bold Italic website shined a spotlight on it.
“The blog is an homage to my students’ amazing work in their graphic-design classes, a celebration of art and design history, and part of a larger vision to incorporate art into our daily lives,” Smith says in the Bold Italic piece.
The expanded and transformed SFMOMA is scheduled to reopen May 14, 2016, at its location at Third and Mission streets in San Francisco. Coincidentally, MTC is also moving to San Francisco’s South of Market area in early 2016. How these major milestones for the two neighboring institutions will be marked remains to be seen, but in the meantime, Smith’s students’ creations offer visual food for thought and enjoyment.
— Brenda Kahn
On June 2, 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art closed its doors for remodeling, with an expected re-opening date of early 2016.
At this time, I was teaching Graphic Design to students at the UC Berkeley Extension in downtown San Francisco, commuting by train every day. The museum had been a valuable resource of inspiration and for student field trips, and we were disappointed to learn of its closure.
Shortly therafter, on July 1, 2013, BART workers went on strike, and traffic jams cropped up all over the bay area. With SFMOMA — and now BART—- temporarily missing, I wanted to create a project that combined them in an interesting (albeit, hypothetical) way.
Enter the Clipper Card Project, with the following creative brief given to students:
“For the celebration of its grand re-opening, SFMOMA and Clipper/MTA have created a commemorative Clipper card, and a piloted program that would allow riders to choose, from the Clipper website, different designs for their card for a small extra fee. These cards celebrate the museum by drawing their inspiration from design and art movements throughout history.”
Students had to learn about art and design history in the class, so this seemed like a good way to pique their interest. I have done this project continuously in graphic design classes since 2013, and has resulted in some impressive, inspiring student projects, as you can see here.
— Rachel Smith
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