Art and Design Commons^™

Bakeneko: A Look Into The Origins Of Japan's Supernatural Cats, Cedar Taulbee

University Honors Theses

Cats are strange and mysterious creatures. Cultures all around the world have created myths and legends surrounding house cats, stories laden with superstition and usually a touch of fear. In most of the West we have black cats and their association with witches and black magic. In Ancient Egypt, as most of us know, cats were worshipped as sacred animals. And in Japan there are bakeneko.

I use bakeneko as a general term, but what I am really referring to is kaibyo, which is a Japanese word used to describe supernatural or "strange" cats. And Japan has a …

Introduction To Volume Xiii, Laura Golobish, Andrea Quijada, Amy C. Hulshoff, Eleanor Kane, Breanna Reiss, Jeannette Martinez

Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas

No abstract provided.

Making Common, Elaine Lopez

Masters Theses

Making Common sets conditions for communication around cultural diversity and inequality. Through my practice, I create new ways to share, honor, and celebrate the stories that have been neglected for too long due to white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of structural oppression. I create immersive graphic design experiences that challenge people to question and expand their worldview. This methodology models an alternative way for designers to work towards a more just society

Interface Philosophy, June Yoon

Masters Theses

During a Grad Studio II crit in the spring of 2018, I presented my project Measurements of Space and Time (page 132) and right after I finished, someone said, “This is like interface philosophy.” I didn’t even know what that meant, but it just felt right. At that very moment, I knew Interface Philosophy would be the title of my thesis.

Interface Philosophy was built as much as it was written and designed. Its function is to define “interface philosophy.” To describe interface as a meeting point for communication; philosophy as a cognitive reasoning of structural patterns. What I have …

Among : A Series Of Enactments, Joel F. Kern

Masters Theses

AMONG captures the practice of a constructionist designer, one who oscillates between the characteristics of typography, multi-materiality, and spatiality yet does not attach solely to the physical or digital. The fundamental principles of this practice include open platforms that foster generative collaboration through modular systems. AMONG straddles the borders of graphic design, environmental design and social sculpture. At its core, this practice encourages new ways of connecting communities.

Placefulness, Ellen Christensen

Masters Theses

Graphic design has been referred to as a tool of inquiry — a method of thinking visually. Design can polish, beautify, hierarchize, eliminate, prioritize, propagandize, or disseminate. Using spatial inquiry as a primary mode of investigation, I argue that graphic design is also a process of attention and care. How can graphic design be a tool of expansion and inclusion?

By encouraging spaces of attention and listening within the built environment and virtual worlds, we can think critically about power dynamics, interiority and exteriority, and subjectivity and objectivity. Within this phase of late capitalism, I focus on leftovers, scraps, and …

Lingua Franca, Tatiana Gomez Gaggero

Masters Theses

Lingua Franca examines how graphic design and art are used as a common language between people who speak the same language, speak different languages or have distinct cultural backgrounds.1 Understanding languages as living systems that are in constant movement and in direct relation with cultures, this thesis looks at graphic design as a platform for coding and decoding language, shaping and reshaping it.

My fascination with the relationship between culture, language and linguistics led me to investigate topics such as context collapse, the evolution of Spanish in Latin America, and notions of identity, gender and translation. In a moment of …

Monument For Feeling : Notes From The Archivist, Melissa Weiss

Masters Theses

I’ve always loved the conjunctions unless, yet, however, although. Grammatical interventions, they subvert all things certain, rational, and indisputable, opening a series of syntactic doorways into new, undetermined possibilities.

The pieces in the Institute fo? Contempo?a?y Inqui?y’s archive function like those conjunctions. They refuse and destabilize easy categorization, pointing, like a rhizome, toward a thousand different possible pasts — and just as many futures.

To be clear, the Institute fo? Contempo?a?y Inqui?y does not have a physical site. It is a network of psychic locations materialized through its archive. It is, in other words, what I have gathered.

I have …

Constellations, Maria Rull Bescós

Masters Theses

In this book you will find a collection of projects that both reflect and simultaneously reinvent my personal way of seeing the world, which I consider to be a space that is complex, diverse, and in continuous transformation.

Graphic design is the lens through which I examine and understand this complexity, and it is also the medium through which I translate this huge realm into navigable systems of ideas, tales, forms, and experiences.

I have been inspired to produce my own systems in response to those I discover through actively observing my environment (territory), reflecting upon my personal background (origin), …

Field Guide : Collected Studies Of A Symbiont, Jennifer Livermore

Masters Theses

Field Guide is a collection of studies that explore how symbiosis relates to graphic design. These studies investigate how visual language constructs — and is constructed by — ideas about nature.

As a manipulator of language and imagery, I borrow the ecologist’s methods in order to make sense of our relationship with the natural world. My techniques include observation, collection, mutation, framing and recombination. I use these methods not to celebrate them, but to expose their subjective nature.

I approach visual language, technology, and our ecological home as an entangled set of ideas rather than estranged categories. My work investigates …

Space, Junk, Brandon Olsen

Masters Theses

Space, Junk acknowledges and embraces the world as a chaotic and uncertain place. Graphic design often directly contrasts the messiness of humanity. Clean and ordered composition can conceal the muddled nature of a subject. The designer's role isn't to force perfection, but to create an aesthetic that accurately represents content. I place value on rips, smears, blurriness, and distortion as well as feelings provoked by variability. Through works created in multiple spaces (book space, architectural space, web space, etc.) this thesis focuses on finding worth in undervalued junk, using mess as a means to represent convoluted issues, and utilizing fun …

Squishy Play, Lauren Traugott-Campbell

Masters Theses

Work is part of our identity and dictates how workers spend most of their time in the US. This obsession has truncated our imagination and ability to conceive of alternatives. As a tactic to reclaim free time, I offer a practice I refer to as squishy play in which participants momentarily adopt new social norms to collectively discover new ways of engaging with the world and each other.

I use squishy play as a lens to investigate the power structures, social norms, and material output of late capitalism in the US. Squishy play is generous in its frivolity. It is …

Less Realism : More Meaning : Evaluating Imagery For The Graphic Designer, Stuart Medley

Stuart Medley

Typography' as a defining term has become interchangcable with 'graphic design'. and while font choice and application is seen as of paramount importance. image choice, virtually half , . of the communication design equation, is neglected in the theory and in pratice is left to the instinct of the designer. In this thesis I try to find approaches for graphic designers to understand image to the degree that they understand type. These approaches are tested through assignments for graphic design students and the results recorded and analysed. I seek to address the paradox that we are able to communicate more …

Book Of The Year, Aajay Murphy

Aajay Murphy

Poster created for the Book of the Year and The Great Books of KSU Project. For 2013, the chosen book was "College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What it Means for Students" by Jeffrey J. Selingo.

Creational Graphic Design, David Versluis

Pro Rege

Erratum: This article misspells the name of Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff on p. 17 and 21. We apologize for this error.

A Needs Assessment To Determine How Professionals Rate The Functions Of Photoshop, Eric Nelson Wilkinson

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

This study determines that rating of various Photoshop functions by professionals who use Photoshop in their occupation. These participants were given a survey which asked them to rate the functions of Photoshop in three ways. First, they were asked to rate the function by its frequency of use, then they rated the function by its importance, and finally to rate the function as to whether or not it would be needed at entry to the occupation.

A Series Of Prints Using Selective Print Techniques And Graphic Communications, Theodore Parks

All Master's Theses

The primary purpose of the study was to produce a series of original prints, using several selected techniques, and in certain instances combining with these an imagery to achieve the communication of predetermined concepts.

The Voice Of The Phi Sigma -- 1925 --, Phi Sigma

The Voice of the Phi Sigma

This item is part of the Phi Sigma collection at the College Archives & Special Collections department of Columbia College Chicago. Contact archives@colum.edu for more information and to view the collection.