Graphic Design Commons^™

Full Issue, The Anthology

The Anthology

This is the entirety of the 2013 Winthrop Anthology issue.

All Tied Up, Rhiannon Bode

The Anthology

Artwork

Full Issue, The Anthology

The Anthology

This is the entirety of the 2014 Winthrop Anthology issue.

Infographics On The Brain: Lightning Talk, Rachel S. Evans

Presentations

A 5 minute lightning talk discusses the benefits and potential uses for infographics in libraries.

How-To Understand And Create Hip-Hop Art, Joshua Wolcott

Graphic Communication

Typography is an essential component of Graphic Communication. The purpose of this study was to bridge typography with hip-hop art. To bridge the two disciplines, hip-hop art was presented in the context that it is actually practiced by these artists. The use of a questionnaire and a drawing lesson was intended to bring the subject within its true context. Presenting the art form in its true context enabled participants involved in the study to understand the art form with the perspective that the discipline, like typography, involves the use of lettering. Participants that were interested in drawing were able to …

Rapid Response, James Chae

Masters Theses

Rapid Response is a design practice that responds to the accelerating speed of consumption. It holds a reflective and responsive mirror to our culture of overconsumption. With an informed critical eye and kleptocratic hand, I consume, sample, and render the visual energy of commerce and respond directly in the stream on available platforms and on a number of scales.

Central to this research-based practice is a desire to expand discourse. Through a close examination of commercial language, the visual techniques of corporate branding, and the aesthetic narratives of commercial spaces, I study the persuasive forces of advertising, subvert the myths, …

Continuum Of Significance, Diane Lee

Masters Theses

At the intersection of multiple simultaneous timelines, Continuum of Significance is a graphic design practice that acknowledges time and meaning as fluid, shifting variables. By challenging notions of obsolescence and assumed valuations, the work brings forward stories and experiences that might otherwise go unnoticed, or quickly fade from memory.

This body of work explores various attempts at reconciliation, vacillating between faster modes of production, and a practice deeply anchored and concerned with history, research, iteration, and contemplation. Materials gleaned from the mundane: the expired historic archive, and the vivid digital cache, are recomposed to invoke a slow read in our …

Dimensional Flatland: Beamer, Drone, Flash Drive, Scarlett Xin Meng

Masters Theses

The impact of the Internet and digitization is pervasive and pervious. Users constantly interface with a constructed virtual world of worlds, simulated by signs and representations. The web content appears to exist but only fades into oblivion. Digital imageries promise the HD real but can never be as phenomenal as our physical experience, and instead render an alternative fantasy of deceptive factuality. This is a hyperlinked network of data and pixel information that takes no solid permanent shape, and claims zero responsibility for altering and molding our consciousness in this technological fiction.

Dimensional Flatland: Beamer, Drone & Flash Drive responds …

Traversing Languagescapes, Desmond Pang

Masters Theses

To maneuver is to design. As a multilingual graphic designer, I maneuver across different languages and their respective scripts. My work invites my audience to take a leap with me into unknown languagescapes.

Through sampling, analyzing similarities and differences, switching applications and contexts, challenging functions, inserting and overlaying recognizable visual systems as well as combining disparate language scripts, I become a guide for my audience, assisting them, regardless of mother tongue, to attain a degree of understanding when faced with an unfamiliar language.

My thesis asserts the critical role graphic designers play in demystifying and cracking language barriers. Every graphic …

Live Edges: All Possible Adjacencies, Rebecca Leffell Koren

Masters Theses

Edge is a deceptive word. It suggests lines, borders, designations—a kind of certainty. I see edge instead as a porous adjacency—the noise at the intersection of planes that adds meaning, rather than separation. Live Edges is a design research practice that is hyperobservational and multi-planar. Equal parts training ground and methodology, what began as an effort to derive graphic form from the intangible qualities of place developed into an approach to parsing complexity.

Setting locality as my origin point, signifiers of place—materiality, behavior, orientation, architectural form—serve as catalysts for graphic response. I interpret landscape in order to construct my own, …

Hyphen Nation: A Reconciliation, Lynn Amhaz

Masters Theses

As a transnational living between Beirut, Lebanon, and Providence, Rhode Island, in the United States, I use my design practice to negotiate, reconcile and inform a cultural identity defined through an equation of two different nations. I am open to what comes from this reality between. Linguistically, a hyphen simultaneously binds and divides a compound term. As a designer, I view the hyphen as a shifting axis for telling stories. In the process, I approach the hyphen as an indeterminate zone — a productive site for authoring systems and suggesting narratives linking two nations — their cultures, languages, times and …

Practice Makes Practice, Gabriel Melcher

Masters Theses

Graphic Designers today must operate independently of specific tools and media. Modes of production are democratized, and so it is in the ways we choose to operate within these modes that define the value of the field. Practice Makes Practice is a response to this condition, refocusing attention from the products of design as endpoints of process to visual evidence of persistent questioning by the designer.

Through my work I question roles and media, enfolding audience, client, and collaborators into my process. My practice is improvisational, quick, and performative in its response to the specifics of site and circumstance. Through …

Full Issue, The Anthology

The Anthology

This is the entirety of the 2015 Winthrop Anthology issue.

America's First Subway - History Of The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Kelsey Lynch

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Casting Forward: Proactivist Studies In Projection, Lisa J. Maione

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Visions: Chaos In Naango, Katarina J. Klask, Hunter Gibson, Taylor Roseberry, Summer Shigetani, Mattie Coccia, Alena Siu, Caitlin Mihm, Gaston Dondero, Sophie Rudell

Honors Thesis

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxjqjJNMSFQ

Website: http://www.visionsthegame.com

Development Blog: http://visionsthegame.tumblr.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/visionsthegame/?fref=ts

Twitter: https://twitter.com/visionsthegame

Email: [email protected]

Model Behavior: The Mathematics Behind Three-Dimensional Modeling And Animation, Kathryn Duff, Vivian Cyrus

Celebration of Student Scholarship Poster Sessions Archive

No abstract provided.

The Art Of The Silent Story, Caitlin J. Walker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I created a one minute 2D, hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animation with an original music score utilizing Toon Boom to demonstrate my ability to convey an interesting story without the use of any dialogue.I relied instead on pantomime, expressions, and context clues to communicate the story to the viewer.

Recalculating: Navigating In Mediated Spaces, Jessica Tzu-Ying Huang

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the navigable surface of media interfaces as a site of engagement and experimentation – for creating experiences that highlight or subvert the spatial and temporal orientations to which we have become accustomed. An interface often erases the traces of its functioning between user and content, however I am interested in probing this exchange of relations. I look at the threshold as a site, exposing and what happens when the mediation is made visible. Screen and page become performative spaces for enacting perceptions of time, gesture, tactility, scale, and for formal outcomes to arise.

Form, Content, And Form As Content, Bon Hae Koo

Masters Theses

Form, Content, and Form as Content demonstrates form as a tool of communication used to explore the role of aesthetics, play, and order in giving form to design. This thesis maps the journey of an aesthetic critic who makes visible and explicit the structures and symbolic meaning valued in the graphic forms we experience.

The practice draws upon the properties of the kaleidoscope, rearranging form to produce new content that questions the reliability of standards, from corporate ranking to color palette trending. Bearing witness to culture, I closely observe and highlight identities and trends that command high stakes in culture. …