Courtney Hurst-Windham—An Educator to Watch!

If you’re going to do it, do it big and on the cover. That’s “Educator to Watch” Courtney Hurst-Windham – the College of Architecture, Design and Construction’s graphic design rock star.

The Auburn Graphic Design program has been on Graphic Design USA’s radar for some time now. Editors took notice when Auburn students and faculty won numerous GDUSA awards over the past few years and began including the program in their list of “Top Design Schools” each year since 2014. When they gathered names for their first “Educators to Watch” list in 2017, Courtney Hurst-Windham, who has won several GDUSA American Design Awards and GDUSA Web Design Awards, was included.

The honors didn’t stop there. Hurst-Windham is featured on the cover of the June 2017 GDUSA print issue, and her website design for The Women of Auburn Industrial + Graphic Design, which was chosen from more than 1,200 entries as an American Web Design Award winner, is included in the same issue.

“I am so honored to be included in this list of educators, partly because I am relatively new to this career in teaching and because many of those included on the list are well known or from schools in large cities in the U.S.” says Hurst-Windham. “On the list are legends like Richard Wilde (School of Visual Arts, NYC) Mary Scott and Phil Hamlett (Academy of Art University, San Francisco), and Ellen Lupton (Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore). I’m even more honored that they would feature me for the cover—not something I had ever dreamed
would happen!”

Hurst-Windham joined the faculty of the School of Industrial + Graphic Design in 2012. She teaches courses in Interactive Media, Kinetic Typography, Package Design, and Branding. Before teaching, she was a professional designer in Atlanta, Georgia, where she specialized in corporate identity and branding, marketing, web design,
and information design.

Currently, Hurst-Windham is working on learning the art of screen printing for the purpose of developing a new way of approaching her collage and poster designs. “It’s an unpredictable process at times, which can lead to some interesting outcomes,” Hurst-Windham explains. “One goal is to use this method to develop a collaged set
of letterforms that be screen printed into various poster designs. I’ll be posting these experiments on my portfolio website periodically so stay tuned.”