Art and Design Commons^™

Potted Pals: A Coffee Table Book, Morgan E. Glazebrook

Graphic Communication

The purpose of this project for GrC 462 is to design and produce an image and information heavy coffee table book on the topic of houseplants. This book will not only include gorgeous photography sourced from the Internet and self shot by me, but all the information one could need to learn how to care for each plant presented in the book. Throughout the quarter, I documented my process and the steps I took in order to complete the entire project on time.

Wilde House Paper Brand Update, Claire Butler

Graphic Communication

For this project, I will be working with the team at Wilde House Paper to expand current brand assets and create an updated guide and collection of brand collateral. The goal of my project is to help the team at Wilde House Paper have a straightforward structure for their content and have these updated and organized design pieces at their fingertips. I am creating a comprehensive brand guide, organizing and updating a drive of assets, and expanding our collection of social media and email templates as my deliverables.

Visual Communication – A Designer’S Guide To Reaching Target Audiences, Timothy Lerch

Theses

Visual communication is the cornerstone of graphic design. All graphic design projects communicate a visual message. As with all forms of communication, visual communication is a two-way street. For a message to be effective, a designer must understand how to reach their audience. Scholarly design programs focus primarily on visual cues, while marketing programs focus on in-depth audience analysis and consumer behavior. This creates a problem for designers as they complete their degree program and enter the job market, particularly if they intend to seek freelance work. This guide is innovative because it presents components of visual communication from perspectives …

Community, Harana & Karaoke: Towards A Theatrical Design, Ryan Diaz

Masters Theses

Community, Harana, & Karaoke: Towards a Theatrical Design explores graphic design’s potential as theatrical staging for building community and practicing the difficult and complicated art of loving others through performance.

Studying graphic design as harana, the traditional Filipino custom of romantic serenade, offers a framework to view both mediums as social architectures that propose and transform proximities of relation between people. As in harana, graphic design facilitates in naming, grounding, and organizing social relationships; in taking these affective environments as content and form, both arts align with the nature of performance and staging. Through practice, research, and abstraction, the graphic …

Paperwork, Romik Bose Mitra

Masters Theses

This thesis is about the politics of identity and belonging. It is about the impact that practices of identification, government surveillance, and global systems of citizenship and nationality have on the people that live by them. Inspired by the various borders (both real and imagined) that I maneuvered around to get to Rhode Island, and enriched with perspectives gathered in conversation with theoreticians in the field, Paperwork is a set of documents and debriefs that details the work that I made in response to a migratory and investigatory journey. Through this thesis, I attempt to better understand various bureaucratic practices …

Future As Medium, Georgie Nolan

Masters Theses

FUTURE AS MEDIUM through critical examination develops a working premise for advancing designed visualizations of the future. In an effort to build new models of practice that consciously work towards the future, I undertake a set of delicate negotiations rooted in critical inquiry as well as creative production, all expressed across three temporal contingencies: yesterday, today and tomorrow.

I work the terrain of the past as an assembled archive of speculative worlds created by architects, designers, and artists, and problematize the mediation of futures through a close reading of their world-building tools. I use this archive to make sense of …

Parentheses Asterisk Ellipses, Everett Epstein

Masters Theses

Textual punctuation — those common marks that pace a text — are rarely static. They allow a message to flow, providing space and also emphasis. While words hold the stage, humble commas and periods coax the message.

This thesis urges another orientation to these tools, with the graphic designer assuming the role of one who principally punctuates. In Parentheses Asterisk Ellipses, punctuation becomes the primary driver of meaning — a perfect technology for rich associative networks of history, type, and the social. Tracing the grain of these forms, Parentheses Asterisk Ellipses offers a close reading of the three marks in …

Open Articulations, Matthew Bejtlich

Masters Theses

Open Articulations invites an exchange between human and environmental worlds through cycles of improvisation, reflection, and rebirth. It is a study of how exchanges emerge, what forms they can take, how they are mediated, and how we can sustain them with each other and with our surroundings. Through our coordinated immersion in landscapes and our spontaneous creation in them through frameworks encouraging play, we channel the spirit of a jazz drummer riffing with his midnight quartet, exchanging rhythms, images, sounds, movements, and textual fragments. A gentle breath, a flickering sensation, a gesture: expressions of a specific time rooted in a …

Refiguring Relations, Daphne Hsu

Masters Theses

Refiguring Relations sets conditions for interdependence and visualizes the affective relationships that people have with one another. Through scripts and participatory experiences, my work explores, challenges, and formulates expressions of collaboration. I extend spaces of overlap between individuals to encourage connection and alliance building, however temporary, slow, or small. In reading experiences, both print and digital, models of circulation and accessibility allow the audience to see and affect each others’ interactions. This thesis assembles methodologies and blueprints for reciprocal engagement, between designer and collaborators, designer and participants, and among participants themselves.

Ctrl Shift, Kit Son Lee

Masters Theses

CTRL SHIFT makes a case for design under contemporary computation. The abstractions of reading, writing, metaphors, mythology, code, cryptography, interfaces, and other such symbolic languages are leveraged as tools for understanding. Alternative modes of knowledge become access points through which users can subvert the control structures of software. By challenging the singular expertise of programmers, the work presented within advocates for the examination of internalized beliefs, the redistribution of networked power, and the collective sabotage of computational authority.

Elsewhere: Impressions Of Sense & Nonsense, Madeline Woods

Masters Theses

I’m not going to give it all away up front, but here are a few things you’ll find inside: a flower that tastes like peppermint, a book that smells like sunscreen, a silver orb that purrs, a woman becoming a tree, a shy rainbow, and a hat that is also a disguise. There are lists, letters, dreams, and notes. I hope there aren’t typos, but I’m only human, after all. There is sense, and there is also nonsense.

If you decide to join me here, we will wander elsewhere — across different kinds of terrain, into sensory experiences, between mediums, …

Jettisoning The Frame: Strategies For Designing At The Threshold, Will Mianecki

Masters Theses

Jettisoning the Frame: Strategies for Designing at the Threshold explores graphic design’s capacity for facilitating critique and understanding of accelerating systems of technological control and complexity. Working across archives, architectures, and infrastructures, designing at the threshold is an approach that takes the opacity of systems and subjects alike as a starting point from which new possibilities, configurations, and relations emerge. It is a loose methodology predicated on shifting, jettisoning, and reorienting the role and frame of the designer from objectivity to subjectivity. From neutrality to implication. From scientific to messy. From solutionism to something else.

Remembrance, Nhu Ngoc Quynh Dao

LSU Master's Theses

The artwork in the collection, “Remembrance,” is a collection of three-dimensional paper toys inspired by the culture of Dong Son civilization. The study was intended as an investigation into a mysterious, once-lost kingdom that flourished in the northern delta region of Vietnam. The designs and art motifs found on bronze artifacts from Dong Son have been scrutinized, then compared with stories in Vietnamese legends to decipher their hidden message and symbolism. I collected and translated the design motifs digitally as part of the creative process before analyzing their philosophies and intentions to not only introduce the culture but also accurately …

Mixed (F)Ixed Messages, Lauren A. Verrett

LSU Master's Theses

Many individuals have an understanding that our lives have a timeline, and this timeline is full of objectives that we perceive as absolutes. Through personal observations it has become apparent that there are many amazing men and woman that are stagnant because they were raised to believe that meeting these goalposts are a priority. In an age of individualism, it is evident that every individual has control of their own life through their actions. However, in this same age of technology and social media, the anxiety of not meeting certain requirements or standards is even more apparent than previous generations. …

Waves: An Exploration Of Emotions, Aminatta Mbow

Honors College Theses

Emotions are at the core of every human being. They can dictate the decisions we make whether we are aware of it or not, and can be shown in many ways. For my honors thesis, I created a magazine that explores emotions. I utilized my skills and knowledge in portrait photography to showcase the complexities of happiness, sadness, anger, and anxiety. I also employed my skills in design to not only present these feelings but evoke that specific emotion in my audience with ideas such as color theory and photographic psychology. Color theory encompasses a multitude of practices on how …

Cleo’S Crown: An Original Illustrated Children’S Book, Rachael Mion

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

As children, our imagination is extremely vast and unpredictable, and the

books we read influence how we view the world. As we grow, many people slowly

lose the ability to get lost in their imagination. With Cleo’s Crown, I wanted to bring

back some of the magic that inspired me as a child, and the art is heavily influenced

by physical representations of magic and creativity. This project was created to spark

others imagination and remind them of their childhood. Even after the book and my

exhibition is completed, I am determined to share and hopefully publish Cleo’s

Crown. I …