RIP, Mr. Kesler

Phil Kesler, a graphic design professor at JSU passed away this past Thursday after a very long battle with cancer. I cannot begin to express how sad I am at his parting, but how blessed I feel to have been his student. He was not only an amazing artist, but was an amazing individual as well. I honestly do not know any other person that can compare to his goodness and kindness. He was quiet, thoughtful, kind and an amazing inspiration. I was always amazed at how he seemed to balance his work, family, and faith, especially during his battle with illness. He was always positive, even when he wasn’t feeling well. He will always remain an incredible inspiration to me, and I am sad that I am unable to complete my classes with him. I learned so much from him. He was truly amazing and I will do my best to work hard and create work that he would hopefully be proud of.
Thank you Mr. Kesler, you are dearly missed. RIP

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Memories of Mr. Kesler

I had Mr Kesler for three classes: Graphic Design 4, Graphic Form & Illustration, and Web Design. Had he not fallen ill I would have had him for Graphic Design Workshop this semester.

Graphic Design 4 was a great class in which he helped introduce us to Photoshop. We worked on a poster design dealing with consumer debt, created a book cover design for Helen Keller, and then finished with an experimental illustration in photoshop. I had so much fun in Mr. K’s class. He was so nice and I along with others couldn’t help clowning around a bit in class in order to try to get him to laugh or smile. I can not recount the number of akward yet funny times that someone in class would curse and Mr. Kesler would immediately rephrase what they said into something silly and not profane and pretend he had not heard what they actually said. This was so classic!

Critiques in Mr. K’s class were always interesting in that they somehow managed to take up the entire class period. Mr. K did not like to harshly critize our work and would take his time thoughtfully contemplating suggestions and ideas, while trying to encourage us to give feedback to each other. At the end of this first class I felt more comfortable with Mr. K than I had with other professors whom I’d known longer and had more classes with. He was just that nice, it was impossible not to feel comfortable and delighted around him.

I had the pleasure of taking his Graphic Form & Illustration class in May, and I believe it was the first time he taught it. It was such a ton of fun, and very well planned. We managed to do a ton of fun stuff in class and the projects really helped me see and appreciate the shape of a line. “A line is a shape…” is something he repeated over and over. We did all kinds of sketching in this class, morphed shapes, a movie illustration, portraits, and etc.

I took Mr. Kesler’s webdesign class this past fall and I know he did not get to cover as much material with us as he would have liked due to being absent for treatments, but I am so glad I was in it. I did get to learn some solid basics from him which really helped me understand basic html and the fundamentals of CSS, something I had struggled with before when trying to learn it on my own. In this class one of my projects was a design for a children’s website on bald eagles which I affectionately wanted to give a pirate theme by giving the bird an eye patch, while the design was cute, Mr. K advised against it and I relented saying that I would eventually put the pirate patch back on after I got my grade. At the end of the class the class did feedback via email and in Mr. Kesler’s final critique for me his last sentence was “Where is the patch?”.  🙂