Graphic Design Commons^™

Vinyl Advertisement In The Uni Bookstore Windows, Emma Wilker

Honors Program Theses

At my initial meeting with my client representative we discussed his interest in a perforated vinyl advertisement. We met at the UNI Bookstore so I could see these windows in person. The UNI Bookstore windows are divided into sections by thick bars. There are equalsized divisions vertically while horizontally they are divided into three sections: a large middle section and smaller top and bottom sections. He envisioned perforated vinyl on the middle sections of the windows, possibly all of the north facing windows and half of the east facing ones.

The Attention Crisis Of Digital Interfaces And How To Consume Media More Mindfully, Kristen M. Liu

Scripps Senior Theses

Digital forms of media are monopolizing individuals' attention spans, utilizing visual strategies that demand our interactions. Throughout the history of media technology, mediums have become increasingly immersive, presenting more information than ever before. The user interface designs of digital platforms can damage our ability to focus and distribute attention in meaningful ways. Through analysis of our digital media consumption, this capstone project ultimately proposes mindful practices that help us lead more balanced lives and thrive in the digital age. The second half of this capstone project is a digital zine with digital illustrations, animations, and editorial-style articles. The digital zine …

Designing A Website For A Non-Profit Organization, Kristen Lauck

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this honors project is to redesign and launch a website for the nonprofit organization Better Future Facilitators. Better Future Facilitators is a 501c3 non-profit organization that helps homeless men and women start their own businesses by providing them with the education, skills, and support necessary to be successful and break the cycle of homelessness.

Starting June 3rd, I will be writing website copy, taking photographs, reorganizing content, and designing a simple website layout for betterfuturefacilitators.org via Wix.com’s website creator. This website will allow the organization to better communicate with their target public and create a secure place …

2.8: Designing Visitor Experience For A Narrative-Oriented Exhibition, Kseniia Leshchenko

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis proposes interactive visitor experience with social media and fake news references at 2.8 thesis exhibition at West Virginia University. 2.8 refers to the distance between the United States and Russia borders in the Bering Strait and suggests that switching a point of view helps conflicting groups find common ground. By designing a space in such a way that a visitor constantly faces an alternative point of view, which in this case represents my own, I investigate whether this experience contributes to the viewers’ outlook change. Another aim is to see whether adding interactive elements to a show improves …

The Day Is Just Another Surface, Brooks M. Heintzelman

Theses and Dissertations

Within a practice founded on both typographic form and language, I have continued to push myself to make work that is more sensitive to place, more contextual, more (hopefully) generous toward a public audience. These pieces might serve as useful instruments of institutional critique, resources for comprehension, or moments in which to interrogate preconceived modes of seeing. I deploy original texts in public spaces in order that they might force viewers to decide how to personally resolve the content they encounter. Is it language or object? Literal or figurative? Graphic design or art? The further I develop this body of …

A Thesis Is A Product Is A Tracking, Yixue Li

Theses and Dissertations

In this work, I discuss how global products/ identities are made, transported and consumed, and the inevitable ‘mis-’ in acts of transmission. This research ranges from the miscommunication in languages and linguistics, to the gap between production and consumption. I investigate how things and humans are misread, mispronounced, misfit and mistranslated when they traverse social and cultural borders, arriving at a place in between languages, holding on to and letting go of things that are familiar to neither and both cultures. This work explores diverse media such as publications, videos and installations, and examines how they maybe used to address …

The What If Collection, Aisha J. Daniels

Theses and Dissertations

The What If Collection is a visual narrative that confronts white supremacy, the social, economic, and political ideology used to subjugate black civilization via colonial rule and enslavement in history and via structural racism today. Many white people have been socialized into a racial illiteracy that fosters white supremacy. This racial illiteracy fails to realize and understand the destructive effects of Western dominance on the rest of the world, particularly on past and present Africa and her diaspora. In response, utilizing discursive design, the collection constructs a counter-story that depicts a shift in the power structure in which the white …

This Must Be The Place, Eve White

Theses and Dissertations

This publication is the companion piece to “This Must Be the Place,” a 3D realization of my conceptual photography work exhibited in the Anderson Courtyard at VCU's 2019 School of the Arts MFA Show. I photograph scenes from nature and reproduce these images onto flattened plexiglass planes, arranging them in new, natural environments and photographing them again. The outcome is a scenic collage in which two unfamiliar locations become superimposed. It is my hope that as people experience the work they become a part of the texture of it.

Untitled Unknown, Taylor Simone Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

This article is the first of a series exploring domination culture through the ways narrative has been indoctrinated as reality and weaponized as a holding cell for captives. Within this exploration, the narrative of domination is placed in relation to higher dimensional realms of the unknown; this being the before and after of domination culture. This positioning will allow for the reality of a simultaneous existence within the labyrinth of domination and a higher dimensional unknown to be framed. Within this series of articles, I question the roll of the rogue characters shamanistic agents of resisting domination, the fear of …

Spaces In, Outside Of, And Between, Michelle Peterein

Theses and Dissertations

My practice involves leveraging analog and digital techniques from many disciplines, but especially graphic design, craft/material studies, and sculpture. I embrace reproduction and repetition as both tools and means to visualize what is often unseen, and to recognize not only what is made, but what supports making— from the straightforward and immediate to the complex and conceptual.

A Systems Approach To Graphic Design Practice, Parisa Farmoudehyamcheh

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Over the past few decades, design issues have gotten more complex, and designers got responsible for solving more significant problems, from object-level problems to system-level problems to societal-level problems. This thesis is an exploration of employing a systems approach for solving these complicated issues. The systems approach helps designers to look at matters as a whole and consider all connected pieces in a network all together. In this way, proposing solutions to those problems will address all those parts and will solve them at the same time. In this thesis, I will study and analyze case studies such as Canva, …

Audio To Architecture: House Music As A Form Generator, Polina Timchenko

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Contemporary music undergoes similar process of creation to that of the design process through computation and variation. House music as a representation of contemporary culture has a layered structure that allows specific characteristics to identify it as house music. Song components can vary and mix in different orders that form new dynamic compositions. I am going to explore the idea that every house music component can be translated into geometry with the use of parametric design techniques.

How To Create A Stunning Video Orientation By Hand, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

This article describes the multi-faceted approach UGA Law Library took with their fall 2018 first year student orientation. It describes the process of the creating a virtual tour experience, pairing it with a hybrid face-to-face event, and assessing the impact of all aspects of the orientation. The creation of the video itself involved a multi-media approach using a combination of visual arts and technology to animate a product that has a longer expiration than traditional video or in-person library orientations offer.

Growing A Healthy Childhood: The Value Of Cultivating Young Minds Through Gardening Using Design, Sarah Hoyt

Masters Theses

This research analyzes the effects of introducing gardening as an educational and developmental tool in early childhood. Research includes an in-depth exploration of the benefits of gardening regarding physical, mental, and social health. Furthermore, the research studies why parents do not already implement gardening. The thesis delves into the power that artwork can have as a call to action. The thesis concludes with a visual solution that is intended to draw out a desire for parents of young children to introduce gardening in their home.

Technology And The Printed Book: Pursuing A Holistic Human Experience With A Sacred Text, Rachel Dugan

Masters Theses

There exists a sort of gravitas attached to a book that is printed and bound by hand that gets lost on the production line. When holding a hand-printed (or hand-written), hand-bound codex next to a mass-produced book, there is between the two a visible and tactile difference in quality and harmony between form and content. With the modern technological advancements now available, how can the craftsmanship and beauty — the gravitas — evident in books of the past be replicated in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, harmonious in message, and reflective of the present time? As objects, books are …

Equals: Redefining The Way Graphic Design And Narrative Film Combine To Create Visual Metaphor, Kevin Harris

Masters Theses

This paper provides a methodology for combining Graphic Design and Narrative Film together in a way that creates a type of visual metaphor that is central to the story and characters of the film. Because visual mediums of communication are so intrinsically tied to verbal means of communication, this methodology is grounded in the linguistic study of poetry and metaphor. Thus, the concept of metaphor will be analyzed thoroughly in language, poetry, fine arts, and modern arts. The ways in which metaphor is created visually through the art forms of graphic design and narrative film will be of upmost interest …

Perceptions Of Shop Operators On Packaging Of Made-In-Ghana Products, Agnes Decardi-Nelson Dr, Adam Rahman

Journal of Applied Packaging Research

The importance of packaging in the marketing of a product cannot be overemphasized. It raises the appeal of the product and becomes its silent salesman. Proper packaging is a less expensive means of advertisement and leads to a direct reduction in production cost and indirectly increases sales by attracting the final consumer. The use of packaging as a marketing and sales promotional tool has been very well developed in the advanced countries with developing countries such as Ghana lagging far behind. In Ghana, many products are poorly labelled and packaged. This paper seeks to ascertain the views of sellers/traders about …

An Investigation Of Web Atmospherics In Online Luxury Branding, Emilie E. Jones

Honors College Theses

Having an online presence for a retail store has transitioned from serving as simply a new avenue through which a profit can be made, to a tool that can be harnessed to express a brand’s personality. So how do luxury brands manage to maintain a high-end, exclusive status on the highly available landscape of the internet? The intention of this research is to identify whether luxury brands are currently taking advantage of differential web atmospherics cues, in a way that significantly sets them apart from non-luxury brand websites. To do this, we measured elements including screen space, reduction of elements, …

Library As Publisher, Chronicler, And Archiver: The Evolution Of Amicus Briefs, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

This article shares the rich history of one library newsletter. It also discusses lessons learned over the years including the archival value of a newsletter and the tools used to create and share them.

Taking (Birth) Control: Empowerment Through Contraceptive Education, Meghan Saas

LSU Master's Theses

TAKING (birth) CONTROL is a body of work that educates women on their options for contraceptives, and empowers them to claim their right to choose if—and when—to have a child. Utilizing graphic design and letterpress printing processes, I created a visual system consisting of carefully honed typographic, color, and graphic styles. The bulk of the materials make up an educational toolkit for use at Delta Clinic of Baton Rouge, one of only three remaining abortion providers in Louisiana. Delta Clinic was in need of comprehensive and affordable materials for their patients on the subject of contraception. The toolkit consists of …