Art and Design Commons^™

Is Retro Packaging Making A Comeback? Is Old The New “New”?, Andrea Hodgson

Graphic Communication

The purpose of this study was to investigate consumer perceptions of retro packaging vs. modern packaging. A survey was administered to different groups of people around Cal Poly asking participants which packages they preferred in terms of design and perceived quality. The participants indicated their preferences and then expressed their views freely with an open-ended question.

The results of this study indicated that consumers had a strikingly high favor to modern packaging design over retro in terms of design and perceived quality. There was no difference across generations.

Although retro packaging may look appealing, customers are not likely to purchase …

Creating Pixel Luxury: Research And Design Of A High Quality Resource Website, Kendall Dea

Graphic Communication

The purpose of this study was ultimately to create a website featuring useful resources for designers and creative individuals. This paper examines past studies dealing with user interface and design fundamentals of web design, and then applies their results when planning the basic layout of the final website. The website was then coded and uploaded online with the name, Pixel Luxury. After finishing and uploading the first version of the website, some of the primary challenges that arose during the creation process were documented, as well as many of the useful tools that aided the overall design and coding process. …

Red Rope Magazine: A Sustainable And Creative Model For A Magazine For Chinese Students In The U.S., Kexin Zheng

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Last year, China surpassed India for the first time and became the leading country of origin of all international students studying in the United States. With the increasing number of students from China, American students are getting used to the amount of Chinese faces on campus, and the growing Chinese community has created a comfort zone for the newcomers to live a familiar life within their native language. However, the fundamental issue lies in the need for a stronger sense of empowerment.

Red Rope magazine, with red symbolizing happiness and rope symbolizing binding, will be the first general-interest magazine in …

The Small Overlooked Hindu Street Temples Of Madurai, Elina Berzins

Honors Capstone Projects - All

When I first walked around downtown Madurai, down its narrow and dusty streets that led into more lanes and alleys, I noticed a trend of small street temples that were usually built outside stores and apartment houses. When I asked an older man who sat next to a one of these temples that was modest in size and consisted of a Ganesha, Hindu elephant god statue, he told me that as a Western woman, I shouldn’t waste my time studying these small insignificant temples. He insisted that I focus on the grand and large Meenakshi Temple, which Madurai is famous …

Suitcase Magazine, Victoria Wolk

Honors Capstone Projects - All

For my Honors Capstone Project, I chose to create an original magazine. Our campus has many publications, but there is no travel magazine for students to contribute to. I decided to create a campus travel magazine, one that would focus on trips in the general area of Syracuse. I want to be a magazine writer and editor in the future, so this project was a great way for me to gain experience in the field.

I asked friends to help with writing some of the articles, taking photographs, creating original artwork, and helping me to design and layout the magazine …

Branding And Web Design For Inkululeko: With Freedom Comes Hope, Allison Clark

Honors Capstone Projects - All

My Honors Capstone Project is entitled “Branding and Web Design for Inkululeko: With Freedom Comes Hope.” I worked with a Syracuse native, Jason Torreano, who recently started up an education nonprofit in Grahamstown, South Africa. This program is called Inkululeko, which, in the local Xhosa language, means “freedom.” The organization seeks to combat the inequalities in education that are a result of Apartheid in South Africa. They operate under the belief that anyone deserves a quality education, and that education is the key to success in a place where people have been denied it for so long.

This project allowed …

Visual Narratives: Storytelling In The Digital Age, Stevie Dutson

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This research will identify the components of visual narratives in 2D and 3D animated films and their relation to elements in literature and other earlier forms of storytelling. Over the course of 150 years animation has evolved from phenakistoscopes and flips books to full length feature films. Today, stories need not be grounded by realities in order to be told visually, as in theater. Specialized artists and programmers can create and modify every aspect of environments and characters in order to convey a story most effectively. However, the act of transforming an idea into computer data and later to a …

The Secret Life Of Things, Maja Savic

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses the work presented in The Secret Life of Things, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, from March 18th through 22nd, 2013. The exhibition consists of sixteen illustrations (four of these are digitally enhanced photographs) and one animation that show the artist’s interest in bringing household objects to life. Pieces in the exhibition can be characterized as humorous with a strong narrative and attention to details. Savić’s ideas are based on traditional education with contemporary influences. All printed work is twenty inches wide, sixteen inches tall, framed, and hung in …

Blue Book, Daniel Cole

Theses and Dissertations

Alain De Botton writes in The Architecture of Happiness, that “any object of design will give off an impression of the psychological and moral attitudes it supports.” Interpreting design then is done by understanding the attitudes of the designer, which either will or will not resonate with the viewer. I may consider the formal and conceptual merits of an object of design, but ultimately my attitudes determine whether the object will have resonance with me. These “attitudes” are, anthropologically speaking, values: what a person finds most good, proper, or desirable in life. Values are the key to the creation of …

Re:Creation, Heather Boone

Theses and Dissertations

This intent of this project is to explore the importance of handmade objects in the age of information.

Wanderings, Jetter Jorge Silva

Theses and Dissertations

While it implies aimless movement, the act of wandering is an act of discovery and can become a search for the unexpected. Wandering, as a metaphor for making, creates opportunities to work in ways where the final outcome is unknown. This can be accomplished by the creation of methods and instructions designed for wandering-the act of discovery. In the field of design, these ideas can be incorporated as methods for making that guide the design process in ultimately unknowable ways, resulting in products that bear little trace of preconception. The role of chance and indeterminacy as methods for relinquishing control …

Community As Client: Defining Social Design As A Means Of Designing For Good, Ryan Kough Gibboney

Open Access Theses

Approaching the design field today is a significant quantity of societal needs that have potential to be resolved through systematic design initiatives. There is increasing curiosity around the designer's role and responsibility within society; a belief that designers have the power to make social change happen in their own communities. Many neighborhoods with driven community members and professional designers are working together to turn to design as problem solving, as social activism on a local scale. But how do we make this sustainable?

To create a systematic change, designers must rethink the processes in which they view the problems and …

Auras, Adele Ball

Scripps Senior Theses

Auras is a series of illustrations of Carlos Fuentes’s novella, Aura, a horror love story about memory, obsession, desire, corporeality and immortality. Defying narrative conventions, the story is told through second person. You are the protagonist, Felipe Montero, and are employed by a 109-year old widow to edit her husband's memoirs. Inside the pitchblack house, you fall in love with her beautiful and bizarre green-eyed niece, Aura. The gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

The story seems to take place within the confines of the …

Under A Pale Grey Sky: An Interactive Timeline Of Iroquoian Warfare And Its Impact On The Acceleration Of American Colonization, Thomas Weaver

Theses

Early American settlers thought the Iroquois to be a violent, forceful and barbaric amalgamation of Native American Nations. Their organization of warfare, community, and politics allowed them to remain one of the most powerful nations for many years. Conflict with other tribes was a normal part of life for the Iroquois and the surrounding nations. However, as the American settlers began moving towards the frontier, Iroquois conflicts with the Algonquian begin to rise in frequency. This led to weakening of the Iroquois population and allowed the American settlers to usurp land from the Six Nations without considerable opposition.

Arabic Typography Play, Sarah Alfalah

Theses and Dissertations

I believe that spoken and written languages are verbal and visual expressions of cultures. Language is used to convey and sustain values and the belief system of people. Arabic is a language of complexity and formal beauty that is being disregarded and pushed away by its own native speakers. It is losing its value in the Arab world. In other words it is dying. Both the written and spoken language is being affected. As the world is interchanging, integrating, and becoming closer, there has been a strong impact on many societies, threatening their original culture. Arab cultures are abandoning the …

What?: Visual Interpretations Of The Miscommunication Between The Hearing And Deaf, Virginia Shou

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis visualizes the communication challenges both latent and obvious of my daily life as a hard of hearing individual. By focusing on a variety of experiences and examples I demonstrate the implications of a hard of hearing individual’s life. The prints, objects and videos that I have created for my visual thesis aim to enrich the understanding of a broader public on issues regularly faced by Deaf people. At the heart of my work my goal is to generate mutual empathy between the hearing and the Deaf.

Experience As An Experiment, James Walker

Theses and Dissertations

My work is an exploration of new media that demonstrates the influence a community has on visual communication. The community reveals content as objects go unnoticed after they become a permanent part of the landscape and assumptions are made from cultural archetypes. Through exploration, immersion, and reflection, I am able to recognize the invisible and expected, establish a familiarity with a community, and design responses that communicate directly to it.

Autonomous Systems, Karolis Kosas

Theses and Dissertations

The ubiquity of digital media provides an unprecedented possibility to redefine the process and methods of design. Through experience from a series of creative projects, I investigate how certain aspects of the web allow for design to attain a degree of autonomy, thus producing results that go beyond anticipation and expertise of the author. Utilizing an unlimited capacity to store the content and retrieve immediate feedback, the designer’s role can be shifted to that of an initiator defining rules and boundaries, from which the process can evolve independently based on the input of users and data. The design output in …

Multi-Culturalism & Alzheimer’S Disease: Patient-Centered Design As A New Care Model For Multi-Cultural Patients With Alzheimer’S Disease, Sang Ryu

Theses and Dissertations

The multi-cultural demographics of those who are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease should be closely examined. From a designer’s standpoint, its cultural traits can foster positive behaviors that lead to better quality of life for patients and caregivers. A patient-centered approach in design was explored in order to shape community-based care that empowers (1) individuality in care services, (2) interpersonal connection in caregiver–patient activities, and (3) a communal culture of being valued via humanitarian approaches.

Transforming Narratives, Lucia Weilein

Theses and Dissertations

Narrative, often considered synonymous with “story,” can be viewed from a structuralist perspective and analyzed independent of any particular content. Breaking narrative into categories of story and discourse, this autonomous structure makes possible a translation of content from one form to another. The various media and form types common in graphic design can serve as both recipient and translator of narratives, converting content into a framework that includes the concept of craftsmanship, aesthetic components and specifications, legibility and composition, and the physical form of the designed object. To examine how this framework functions in practice, I have developed a series …

Narrowing The Margin: The Role Of The Black Superhero, Julian S. Strayhorn Ii

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Comic books can be understood as a visualization of popular culture in the U.S. For a long time these tales were formed by a white power fantasy, circulating in mainstream culture as over-exaggerated narrations. To give an example of white power fantasy, Dwayne McDuffie, a prolific writer in popular entertainment states:

“…if I write, as I have many times, a story where Daredevil, who doesn’t have powers, gets the drop on Thor, who has unbelievable powers, people go Oh, that was so cool! Daredevil was so clever! If I have Black Panther do the same thing that’s impossible! It’s like, …