After just one semester at West Virginia University, graduate student Kofi Opoku discovered that posters he had created for a class had earned him an award in an international competition.
Three poster designs he created for a class last fall were judged best in the Print Ads category of a competition sponsored by the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund— backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation among others—that works to solve the problems of global poverty.
The fund challenged designers all over the world to make people take a look at poor sanitation and its world health risks.
Kofi’s award-wining poster designs were subsequently featured on Good Magazine’s blog and on the Design Observer blog, which is a highly followed and well-respected resource for designers.
Kofi’s admiration for famous graphic designer Saul Bass, who died in 1996, led to the award-winning designs he created at WVU. He created the designs in the same style that Bass used in film titles in the 1950s and 1960s.
Bass’s memorable titles, created for films such as Otto Preminger’s “The Man With the Golden Arm,” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho,” totally revolutionized the film industry. His titles for “The Man With the Golden Arm,” in particular, caused a sensation when that film was released in 1955.
“Saul Bass was awesome,” Kofi said. “I chose to develop these ads in his style as tribute to him, because I admire his work so much.
“Bass was not just a movie title designer. He was one of the great graphic designers of the 20th Century. He really influenced my life as an artist because I do video, graphics and animation. He was a graphic designer who also worked in film.
“I really think of him as my mentor, at this stage. When I came to WVU, I asked graphic design professor Eve Faulkes if she had heard of him, and she said that she had met him.”
Kofi came to WVU last fall from Ghana, where he received a bachelor of fine arts degree in graphic design from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in 2003.
Until the fall of 2010, he worked for six years as an art director and creative coordinator at Origin8 Saatchi & Saatchi, the Ghana affiliate office of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide.
It was in Faulkes’ class “History of the Poster” that Kofi created his award-winning designs. Faulkes assigned the class to respond to Metropolis Magazine’s call for design that would make people take a look at poor sanitation around the world.
“The twist I gave it was that the students had to create the designs in a style used in the time period from the 1950s to the 1980s,” she said. “It was Kofi who based it on the style of Saul Bass movie titles.
“The designs were first accepted by the Ads of the World website, which is also an international venue and very hard to get accepted into.”
Kofi considered several design schools in the United States before deciding to attend graduate school at WVU. His wife, Sophia Baisie, also received a degree from WVU in instructional design.
One of the strengths of WVU’s graphic design program is Faulkes, who received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has been teaching graphic design and book arts at WVU since 1979.
Other faculty in the program include Chris Barr, whose work spans various media including networked performance, installation and video, and Joe Galbreath, whose interests include exploring and documenting vernacular design traditions, manual design making processes and independent publishing.
WVU’s MFA program in Art and Design has also been ranked among the top 100 best fine arts programs in the country by the 2010 U.S. News & World Report’s Best Graduate Schools edition.
The ranking recognizes WVU’s professional-track degree in studio art, placing it ahead of many well-known programs twice the size.
“Here at WVU, I’m trying to rediscover myself as an artist,” Kofi said. “I’m not sure yet where that will lead me. I love advertising so much, but I may branch into film. I like to integrate design information into film. I like design that integrates both platforms.”
See Kofi’s designs online at the Design Observer blog: http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=23268
See more of Kofi’s designs online at Ads of the World: http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/world_sanitation_loud
More info about Saul Bass: http://designmuseum.org/design/saul-bass
-WVU-
CONTACT: Charlene Lattea, College of Creative Arts
304-293-4359, Charlene.Lattea@mail.wvu.edu
Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.