Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Learn The Terms: A Visual Glossary, 2020 Edition, Gayle Schaub, Vinicius Lima, Jessica Jerue, Claire Mooney

Open Teaching Tools

Understanding a discipline requires a fundamental understanding of its concepts, theories, and terminology. Critical to academic success, these are often assumed to be widely understood by students.

The students of Graphic Design V, fall 2020, created a poster to help students understand one of the ACRL Framework’s concepts, searching as strategic exploration. The bold, eye-catching informational poster, used both in and outside of the Library, promotes learning through an innovative design created by students for students.

Gracie King: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Gracie King

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• 18 x 24 inches, vertical
• Mixed-media digital collage

Macaira Pucci: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Macaira Pucci

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital design
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Claire Pawlecki: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Claire Pawlecki

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high
• Mixed-media analog and digital collage

Megan Emery: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Megan Emery

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Ekua Bransah: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Ekua Bransah

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Laura Cahill: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Laura Cahill

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Ellie Westerheide: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Ellie Westerheide

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• 19 inches high, 20 inches wide
• Mixed-media digital collage

Jason Sullivan: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Jason Sullivan

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Laura K. Barrett: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Laura K. Barrett

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 x 24 inches, vertical

Shahd Salem: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Shahd Salem

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Max Benson: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Maxwell Benson

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Caroline Hokanson: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Caroline Hokanson

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Melina Durham: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Melina Durham

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Grace Hughes: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Grace Erin Hughes

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Brooke Baker: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Brooke Baker

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Yamilet Perez Aragon: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Yamilet Perez Aragon

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 x 24 inches, vertical

Daveauntae Cotton: 1918 & 2020 Pandemic Poster, Daveauntae Cotton

COVID-19 Graphic Design: Posters

• Mixed-media digital collage
• 18 inches wide, 24 inches high

Ancient Hyper Present, Sophie Loloi

Masters Theses

My practice, especially this virtual garden, is a collage made of media, images, and virtual space across different eras and time signatures. Graphic design can exist in a gallery, on the screen, inside headsets or in the streets. Like a lucid dream, it can be disorienting as it opens up to a more-than physical ground of experience; within the virtual, within shared memory. This reflective practice arises as a form of “anachronism.” Before I could arrive at my transdisciplinary practice that considers experiences of exile and diaspora, I had to grapple with a singular question: what does it mean to …

U+16e99, Bobby Joe Smith Iii

Masters Theses

The general understanding and professional practice of graphic design have been shaped by the perspectives, needs, and desires of white, cis-gendered, heterosexual men in imperialist, capitalist societies. The tools, substrates, professional networks, institutions, processes, theories, grammars, and values that have come to define the discipline have been formed from this position. Consequently, graphic design primarily serves the needs of the settler in settler colonial regimes like the United States. This reality has prompted many designers like myself who come from colonized communities or whose identity troubles this rubric to question the framework of the discipline and our position within it. …

Oh Wait, Is This A Loop?, Carl-Gustaf Ewerbring

Masters Theses

When Photography as a medium arrived, it changed our world. It caused us to reinvent many things, one of them being the medium of painting. All of a sudden, a realistically painted picture was no longer the best possible way to document and archive visual qualities. New styles of painting evolved, and the medium grew into something bigger than before.

The web arrived more than three decades ago. What mediums has radically changed since then? Or more important, what mediums should we reinvent because of the web? This book is an systematic attempt to investigate that question.

What I knew …

Skew-Morphic Dream, Yoonsu Kim

Masters Theses

Skew-morphic Dream explores design approaches that shift one’s viewpoint, that agitate the familiar with a daydream. The doubling disjunctions presented here frame an ‘unreal real’, a skewed perspective on the function-driven interface design represented in skeuomorphism. To achieve this effect, a kind of perceptual halt, I implement defamiliarization. Within these spaces, there emerges an opportunity to think differently about perception, tools, and interfaces.

This thesis catalogs three methods used to create ‘skew-morphic dreams’: utilizing familiar tools with inverted functions, opening portals to defamiliarized landscapes, and developing platforms that require the audience to behave in unfamiliar ways.

Strata : Lessons In Latency, Mukul Chakravarthi

Masters Theses

Every visual artifact, from a street sign to advertising commercials, is an event of culture, a cross-section of time. Crucial to my work as a designer is to build an interpretive understanding of these images as more than surface, more than banal. Embedded in their construction are dense, unseen contextual latencies— social, economic, and political forces — that combine to define a cultural moment.

This thesis offers a series of lessons in making visible visual infrastructure. It emphasizes design’s semiotic potential to examine and leverage a view on what these visual signs represent as ideological constructions. Through a conscious un-layering …

A Very Large Array, Hilary Dupont

Masters Theses

The Very Large Array is a radio telescope in a remote area of western New Mexico. An array is a single telescope made out of multiple satellite dishes. The satellite dishes move in and out on tracks to focus on different distant points in the solar system. These multiple dishes are functioning together to look at one single point, the combined powers of the satellite dishes results in a sharper focus.

This book is an array. The objects included are my observations, interests, experiences and ideas. My thesis is a point in the distance, and I am looking at it …

Temporal Collisions, Lizzie Baur

Masters Theses

We live during a time of smoothly effortless design that encourages instant gratification. In this sea of pre-existing content, most of which we experience through layers of mediation, my practice encourages drifting. As a graphic designer, I try to decondition myself from reductive thinking. In response, this thesis operates on the fringe, cycling attention to unexpected associations, harnessing temporal collisions and formal play towards diminishing cultural baggage and preconceived notions. I deliberately attune the reader to the labyrinthine as an experience by which to interrogate common sense and steer the imagination towards moments of uncertainty.

This work engages a kind …

Counter Formation, Fabian Fohrer

Masters Theses

Counter-formation establishes a foundation to envision a more accurate shape and field of inter-relations across disciplines and contexts that are not only receptive but appropriative and elaborative.

By approaching the space of the counter-form, my ambition is to generate a responsive structure and an archive of fragments to build upon - a blank canvas with a variable format to recast vision and action.

Counter-formation places emphasis on the transformative, liminal space that allows one to encounter contexts from within, between, and around to organize or break them in a different fashion.

How To Do Things With Things, Emily Guez

Masters Theses

Humans have always done things with things. It’s at the very origin of who we are as a species: we’ve gone from being bipedal homonins to people who live in complex societies by making rocks into tools. Things can serve a practical function, but they also carry cultural and symbolic meaning: they can tell our personal stories, allow us to connect with each other, and be the outer manifestations of our inner lives. The things we use in our every day lives, by implying a set of actions we can take when interacting with them, participate in shaping our reality: …

My Millennial Asian Fetishized American Fantasy, Seyong Ahn

Masters Theses

The perspectives that I present throughout My Millennial Asian Fetishized American Fantasy are South Korean-centric, biased, absurd, skewed, unfair, and real.

Instead of being nostalgic, the contents introduce questions—ones that persist as I examine my design practice. They open a process of dialogue with the present, while provoking a consideration of the future:

1) If I am a product of capitalism and globalization, how might I better interrogate and define my cultural DNA?

2) What is my approach to the evolving conception of graphic design under new (technological, ethical, ontological) conditions?

3) What interests and concerns truly engage me, such …

Binge [Fantasy Reality], Elena Foraker

Masters Theses

[My appreciation for mainstream pop culture is genuine, but I am not a passive consumer.]

[Drawing from embodied experience and contemporary feminist theory, I design as a participant, cultural surveyor, and critic.]

[From these vantage points, I binge-watch to discern the tropes of media such as reality TV romance and dead girl shows.]

[My data bingeing leads to a process of archiving, de/recoding, and making visible the algorithm structuring pop culture.]

[“Fantasy” is derived from the Greek phantazein, meaning “to make visible.”]

[In this thesis, I demonstrate that the reality-fantasy relationship is not an either/or.]

[Reality TV challenges this notion …

Ethnographemes, Vaishnavi Mahendran

Masters Theses

Spoken and written languages are living processes. As with our own natural systems, they are born, evolve in stages, yet also face the eventuality of death. Current research indicates that there are 7,111 spoken languages in the world. UNESCO lists a total of 577 languages as critically endangered.

This thesis examines the role of graphic design and its potential contribution to the preservation of endangered languages and writing systems of indigenous communities. My interest lies in exploring possibilities of the script serving as a vessel to share and celebrate deeper stories of each of these communities’ heritage.

Through my practice, …