Graphic Design Commons^™

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 …

This Is Public Work, Nick Adam

Masters Theses

This thesis positions graphic design as an integral form of public works.

T his is public work regards the causal relationship between graphic design and its publics as an opportunity to explore the formal maneuvers to enhance an artifact's visual codes. The idea is an experiential one: rich and meaningful form can lead to rich and meaningful experiences.

The designed artifacts of our world function across informational (effect) and emotional (affect) modes. The complexity of these operations take on an infrastructural role — what we see day-to-day shapes our experiences and understanding. The opportunity of a designer to practice in …

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), …

Anachropomorphism!, Carson Evans

Masters Theses

Folks, the Truth is hard to know—if can be known at all.¹ Conventional Western wisdom tells us: stick to the facts. (I’m looking at you, Enlightenment.) We privilege the written word as an objective and reliable vehicle for communication. Useful, yes, but we over-rely. I counter with this: bodily performativity and purposeful inaccuracy that produces, paradoxically, narrative accuracy. These methods roil in our gut or tug at our heartstrings—instead of recoiling, we should embrace them.

I like to unpack “the stories we tell ourselves,”² our personal and societal mythologies, with a particular eye to how the past plays a role …

Unbound 2018 Program, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library, Olivia De Salve Villedieu

2018 Print

No abstract provided.

Unbound 2018 Program, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library, Olivia De Salve Villedieu

2018 Print

No abstract provided.

Unbound 2018 Exhibitor Biographies + Collection Descriptions, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library

2018 Print

No abstract provided.

Unbound 2018 Exhibitor Faqs, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library

2018 Print

No abstract provided.

Unbound 2018 Program, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library, Olivia De Salve Villedieu

2018 Print

No abstract provided.

Scripting Allographs, June Shin

Masters Theses

Scripting Allographs* examines typographic principles and their pervasive impact on ways of seeing and making through design. This body of work demonstrates the many faces of typography and type design and the way they inform allographic thinking. It employs type as the primary tool and medium for scripting possibilities, embracing their differences, idiosyncrasies, and imperfections. Beginning with a focus on close observation of small details and ending with an approach that invites and celebrates variability, this thesis offers a glimpse into a design practice from the lens of a typographer, type designer, and educator.

Design Syncopations, Mary Yang

Masters Theses

Design Syncopations is an inquiry into space and intervention. Central to this work, is the orchestration of scenarios to prompt visual, auditory, and physical engagement. My background as a musician strongly informs this practice as I borrow from and disassemble musical structures—time, rhythm, composition, and counterpoint. Through designed prompts and invitations, I incorporate musical themes of chance and improvisation, setting up programs, altering spaces, and interrupting existing conditions. Working at the intersection of sound and design allows me to conduct audience-led musical performances, reprogram gallery spaces, and collaborate with artists and musicians. The ensemble of works adds up to a …

Content-Aware : Investigating Tools, Character & User Behavior, Llewellyn Hensley

Masters Theses

Content—Aware serves as a platform for investigating structure, corruption, and visual interference in the context of present-day technologies. I use fragmentation, movement, repetition, and abstraction to interrogate current methods and tools for engaging with the built environment, here broadly conceived as the material, spatial, and cultural products of human labor.

Physical and graphic spaces become grounds for testing visual hypotheses. By testing images and usurping image-making technologies, I challenge the fidelity of vision and representation. Rooted in active curiosity and a willingness to fully engage, I collaborate with digital tools, play with their edges, and build perceptual portholes. Through documentation …

Identity Production, Boyang Xia

Masters Theses

What are we talking about when we talk about identity? People are likely to define themselves in terms of what is relevant to their time and place, in other words, context. This indicates that identity is not a fixed definition, but more of a malleable construction; it develops its attributes via context. I am constantly recalibrating the relationship between the two. Context is ubiquitous, unnoticed, coexistent and interchangeable. Identity is reflexive, fragmented, shapeable and fluid. Identity Production explores and unveils how identity is adapted and manifested in contemporary conditions, as well as its external validation which paradoxically defines this indefinable …

Otra Vez : Hierarchy As Designer, Jordyn Alvidrez

Masters Theses

Methods of hierarchy are often represented in graphic forms. They shape our world into subjective places/spaces of belonging or oppression. The need for order is a human condition. There is constant tension between the utility of ordered systems against the manipulative and ultimately subjective manner in which they are created. Where there is a system, there is a story. The narrative the hierarchy tells is just as crucial to me as the mechanics.

I position myself within various hierarchal systems as a way to understand the logistics of their becoming, but also, to manipulate (or justify) my cultural and ethnic …

Frame-Work, Drew Litowitz

Masters Theses

We view the world through a series of frames: contexts, mediators, constructs, oversimplifications. We place frames around things to isolate them and better understand them — to control them and define a context for our audience: magazines, book covers, wayfinding, signage, graphic overlays, subtitles, logos. These frames label, augment, enhance, and explain things for us. They also become habitual frames of mind, granting us fluid access to familiar subjects through consistency and reliability.

But how does the time we spend inside these controlled, reductive frames affect the way we interact with and interpret our realities? What is left out of …

Space As A Practiced Place, Elizabeth Leeper

Masters Theses

This thesis examines and retraces ways in which graphic design is fundamentally concerned with relational space, and tests spatialized theories, methods, and potential for praxis.

My practice investigates the relational qualities and dimensions of graphic design at three distinct scales.

1. Spatial logic (format) within a design object [Design space, book space, format, structure, sequence, counterforms, etc. (authority structure vs agency of user) within the design].

2. Spatial relations (sequence) between participants across a network. [Space to hear & see each other; to relate and connect].

3. Space within the world (circulation) [Space as composition, product, relational; not container, not …

Our Measured World : A Poetic Translation, Minryung Son

Masters Theses

Twenty-seven years alive. Sixty-one inches tall. One hundred forty-nine days abroad. How many more units would it take to describe me? What value is derived from this quantification? What quality of understanding does it offer? As human beings, we are constantly measuring our lives and implementing systems of standardization. Throughout history, measuring systems have served as frameworks for our comprehension and navigation of an increasingly complex world. This thesis approaches measurement as a means of revealing and processing this complexity of human experience rather than one that merely simplifies and distills. Through the lens of graphic design, my translation of …

Playgrounds, Cem Eskinazi

Masters Theses

Playgrounds defies the idea of singularity and control through a practice of design aiming to offer generous universes3 for one to explore freely. Building blocks of cognition such as modular thinking, hyper-linking, recursion, repetition, self-referencing and self-representation are utilized for designing honest and slightly uncomfortable experiences in order to keep the reader awake and aware.

Double Takes : Secular Magic & Empathic Vision, Lake Buckley

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the ways that a history of secular magic has shaped contemporary culture and design lexicons. It reviews modes of secular magic as design principles as well as the terms by which the meaning and value of these modes changed over time.

I carry on the legacy of magician filmmakers who thoughtfully questioned the material nature of their surroundings and tools in order to unearth new modes of visual experience. With film, delight drives invention which in turn strains vision and perception, requiring a certain collusion with the audience. My work celebrates the notion of the double take …

1:1: Intertidal Thinking / (One To One: Intertidal Thinking), José R. Menéndez

Masters Theses

One to One presents a dialogue between humanities. It also presents the fundamentals of defining a design problem in order to provide a direct solution. The Intertidal Zone is the space between the water and the land that is exposed or covered between low and high tides.Intertidal Thinking is a metaphor that urges cross-disciplinary interaction. It represents my academic experience of teaching across disciplines and being a student simultaneously.

This body of work offers many gestures–acts of design. Graphic design in this thesis is seen in the context of generating proposals through research, making form, and creating solutions for …

Standard Deviation, Wooksang Kwon

Masters Theses

Through my work, I highlight both peripheral and intrinsic aspects of graphic designers' quotidian lives to reveal new ways of thinking about design tools, media, and processes.

As a creator who always seeks for novel perspectives, I keep observing and interpreting irony in aspects of the world. Using storytelling methods, I portray a certain object, machine or system in a way that deviates from its intended purpose.

I animate static media to convey sequential stories. I use familiar tools of designers to discover their inconspicuous characteristics. I translate graphic elements that we usually experience through two dimensions into three dimensional …

Unbound 2017 Program, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library

2017 Print

No abstract provided.

Unbound 2017 Exhibitor Biographies + Collection Descriptions, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library

2017 Print

No abstract provided.

Thank You For Your Interest In This Subject, Paul Soulellis, Library Of The Printed Web, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Graphic Design

46 unnumbered pages : color illustrations, 28 cm. Cover title. "Printed Web Crisis Editions, February 2017" "A selection of web pages at whitehouse.gov before and after January 20, 2017."-- page [4] of cover. Page-by-page comparisons of 21 whitehouse.gov web pages from the Obama and Trump administrations on issues such as civil-rights, women, education, seniors and social security, disabilities, immigration, veterans, climate change, health care, etc.

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 …

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, …

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, …