The aesthetics of Hip Hop and Design come from radically different places. Typography and design is largely shaped by commercial culture, and is largely guided in recent times by corporate interest. Hip Hop comes from a place of struggle, and as a dance form emanates the social realities of urban inner-city communities. Dancing (popping, locking, breaking, wacking, krumping, etc.) is one of the five pillars of Hip Hop culture. Hip Hop as a cultural narrative is loaded with resistance; to racism, to poverty, and to prisons.

The High School students who are participants in UCLArts ArtsBridge program relate to the different media in different ways. The program is located in Los Angeles, a city which is still ripe with segregation. The project connects UCLArts scholars with inner city schools where they engage in standards-based arts curriculum. While some of the students consciously choose to subvert the media's traditional uses, others stay inside the box. All of the students engage in the media in different ways, but overall the effects of the media are stark in contrast in engaging the students in different pedagogical processes.

The media utilized in classroom projects creates a pedagogical framework which influences all classroom dynamics. For example, while digital design translates the students' experiences and mirrors them back in a personally edited form, dance engages students' bodies and minds in a cultural ritual. Marshall McLuhan states that media act as extensions to human sensory organs. In essence, design is a medium which acts as an extension to our visual organ, the eye, and dance acts as an extension of our tactile sense, creating three dimensional human sculptures which interact with each other.

In engaging in different forms of media, the students sample different narrative structures and ways of interpreting their lived experience. The media acts as a syntax which programs the dynamics of the classroom. For example with Hip Hop dancing comes from a culture of struggle and resistance to oppression. While students learn the dance steps (which matured into fruition in their city of residence, Los Angeles, as well as other urban centres in the USA) they learn about the politics of racism and the power of the underground community culture of Hip Hop.

Students do not only learn steps, they watch videos and discuss the five pillars of Hip Hop: Breaking, Graffiti, DJing, MCing, and Knowledge, as defined by the Zulu Nation, one of the original global Hip Hop movements. The first Hip Hop activist was Zulu Nation founder Afrika Bambaattaa. According to Bambaattaa, "Hip Hop Culture was created to be about peace, love, unity and having fun, in order to help people to get away from the negativity that was plaguing our streets." In reality no media acts in isolation. To dance involves other forms of communication. Students are also asked to write about their experience, giving feedback on their relationship to Hip Hop. Getting the choreography is not enough to really do Hip Hop. You must know and be active in the many elements to engage in the media form. In essence, Hip Hop is multimedia.

Design acts in much the same way. While Hip Hop dance is only one element in a larger force, Design has its own aesthetics which may seem invisible to those who are immersed in our commercial Western World. Much as the syntax of Hip Hop has an aesthetic structure, Design calls for order, combining both text with images ranging from painting, to illustration, to photography. All media align together with a mandate of clear communication. Fonts communicate mood and images invoke desire and other surface emotions. Our typical interactions with digital design are in the form of commercials. We see them on TV, on the street, or on public transportation. We are unconsciously programmed to know what good design is, and we are drawn to design which acts as a mirror for our own selves; the target market.

As Marshall McLuhan so aptly states; "The medium is the message."