What if high schools replaced shop classes with results-driven, full-scale architectural projects, where the goal was to collaborate and make something substantial for the entire community? If it sounds idealistic, perhaps it is – the reality on the ground can be full of setbacks and surprises, as this film illustrates in evocative detail. The title of the documentary in perhaps intentionally open-ended, because, unlike the phrase’s cinematic inspiration (Field of Dreams), what will happen if you build something is never quite clear until you try.

Directed by Patrick Creado, If You Built It is the compelling story of a one-year design/build program set in a small American town – a story that is both inspirational and heartbreaking. Its protagonist teachers are enthusiastic visionaries who are exceptionally driven. Its director shows these strengths but is unafraid to also highlight their steep learning curve, right alongside that of the students, who struggle at first to understand what two outsiders want to teach them and why.

Studio H, a collaboration of designers/builders Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller, is named for its focus on “humanity, habitats, health and happiness”. Its mission is born of a noble desire to enable people to change where, how and how well they live, all through design.

Of course, working with a community as outsiders is challenging, as this pair learned when they moved to Bertie County, North Carolina, for the first year of their program. Their mission: to start small and build up to a student-decided project for the community, which turns out to be a farmer’s market inspired by contextual farm architecture.

In the press, idealized renderings and carefully-staged architectural photographs often gloss over the gritty reality of designing and building projects, as well as the slow change in thinking that comes with learning to design. Likewise, a look at highly-funded architectural programs and never-to-be-built college-student projects can make it easy to forget we have an opportunities to educate high school students everywhere through designing to build.

For anyone not educated in design, this movie provides  a unique window into how it can be taught and how understanding design processes can help us see unrealized possibilities in our everyday lives and built environments. For the broader public, the documentary also provides fascinating insights into the present and uncertain future of rural America.

In the end, the film is neither a tale of outright success or total failure, but it does show how even the best intentions may not work in every situation. In a key flashback, we are shown scenes of a home built for charity by Miller as a thesis project that ultimately failed in practice but also provided him critical real-world feedback on projects where the owner is just a passive recipient. Anyone interested in the intersection of architecture and education should watch If You Build It and sign up for screenings to share it with students.

A synopsis: “IF YOU BUILD IT follows designer-activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller to rural Bertie County, the poorest in North Carolina, where they work with local high school students to help transform both their community and their lives. Living on credit and grant money and fighting a change-resistant school board, Pilloton and Miller lead their students through a year-long, full-scale design and build project that does much more than just teach basic construction skills: it shows ten teenagers the power of design-thinking to re-invent not just their town but their own sense of what’s possible.”

Children already at risk may also risk further abuse if they are seen to be seeking help, hence this twist on lenticular printing – a message that reads one way to tall adults, and another to small minors.

The ANAR Foundation needed a way for potential victims to read their communication secretly (including the unspoken visual content – bruises on the portrait), without alerting those accompanying them on the street.

Shifting from one perspective to the other slowly reveals an increasingly different image as well as additional text, including the helpline phone number.

Lenticular images are often used to create dynamic billboards that shift as people walk or drive by, but this variant flips the typical format on its side and gives it a higher purpose than mere marketing.

(Above Designs, Clockwise from Upper Left via:  Pinoy Athena, iKnod, Mukhtar & Bloc)

Much of what we feature on WebUrbanist is the culmination of an artistic or designer process, but it is worth seeing that sometimes pieces of the process itself is as creative, compelling and eye-catching  as the final product. Webist Publishing (WebUrbanist & WebEcoist) is currently engaged in a remarkable design contest, of which the end result will be brand new logos for both sites!

As exciting as this is, the various submissions to 99designs (like the simple-but-evolved series of designs by sixsixsix above) are equally or more so – they show an extremely impressive range of unique logo design work – even if only one can win in the end. See some of the best below and if you like their work, remember: you too can run a 99designs competition for a logo or other designer needs (and crowd-sourcing is so chic!).

One approach has been to create a separate-but-integrated iconography – identity through a symbol that is either directly or indirectly tied into the text of the design. In some instances, the more graphic-oriented portions are similar in scale and tone but different in color, details and other features while being similar in overall font and style – straight versus curved, rectilinear versus circular and so forth. The first pair above was produced by jminig and the second set was created by bobot.

The kinds of designs discussed in the previous paragraph raise an important core question about iconography, symbols and text. Some designers tackled potential approaches head on with variants of each type – such as the above design sets by adbas in which the more graphic portions are either explicitly isolated or entirely integrated as letters.

Some ideas showed a particularly artistic approach, combined with a creative use of negative space. While they may be a bit too casual in some cases for these particular sites, they illustrate a great variety of design personalities in practice. In order, the above were designed by DemonAce, Pistacho and Asiku.

One of the most ingenious proposals using negative space (as well as positive) has been presented in two forms by KingFelix – a more horizontal continuous-text version and a stacked-on-top variant. One of the neatest aspects of this particular design is the way it uses similar overall strategies but differing details to define the logos through similarity as well as difference.

There are many ways that designs can evolve over time, as some of the aforementioned designs have already illustrated. In some cases, the process is not necessarily linear from ‘worse’ to ‘better’ per say – meaning: both the first and final product can be engaging in different ways, sometimes through simplicity on the one side and complexity on the other. JawsofSteel created these in sequence, but each is worthy of praise in its own right.

Last but certainly not least is the work of Marius Jivoin – the same talented individual who created the unique logo design you see on Gaijtz. His work manages to be a great combination of creative and professional – it is not overly artsy, but is also not stuck in the overly-corporate mode typical of many logo designers (who are, to be fair, used to working on more corporate projects).