Graphic Design Commons^™

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 …

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

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Activate The Margins: Framing In Multiple Perspectives; Exploring Marginalia; Intentional Moves And Unintentional Consequences, Hyein Jung

Masters Theses

Today, we are surrounded by multiple, simultaneous narratives with various coexisting perspectives. Within these myriad relational scenarios there is always an unfolding and reordering between inside and outside, center and margin. Margins are not minor. Yet for many reasons we deem them secondary. Activate the Margins redirects attention to these peripheral stories.

As designer, I develop ways to reimagine peripheral content, supporting different angles for understanding the complex relationships at play in contemporary culture. By retracing, reorganizing and reframing the margin, I activate a dynamic interplay between foreground and periphery to destabilize power dynamics. Paratext is the surrounding material alongside …

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. …

Over Several Networks: Designing Intimate Technologies, Sarah Jean Recht

Masters Theses

Digital dualism, a term coined by Nathan Jurgenson in 2012, suggests that there is a divide between physical off-line and digital on-line realities. With the influence of social media on how people network there is a shift in how we understand this play between realities. Jurgenson believes that the divide is, in fact, a fallacy. Boundaries between the physical and digital are fluid and overlapping. We are working out a new spatial paradigm and system of exchange.

This thesis takes as its focus how our bodies are interpreted and reformed continuously in relation to the network and the discourse. Putting …

Intertwined Pluralities: Designing In The Third Space, Sarah Mohammaddi

Masters Theses

I designed my thesis book to reflect the inquiry at hand—a non-linear, fragmented narrative that can be observed in multiple perspectives. I welcome viewers to read in a traditional manner, following the Contents page as displayed, or engage in a new read of the material by navigating the book using the Live Index.

Yellow pages on the left side display a collection of running quotes from Homi Bhabha's most recent lecture, Translation and Displacement where he spoke of the role of the translator within a multi-centered culture. These quotes can be read in sequential order or in relationship to the …

Speculative Politics -Fictionalized Spectacle, Prin Limphongpand

Masters Theses

Speculative Politics—Fictionalized Spectacle posits an alternate model for design practice. Borrowing from the genre of science fiction, this design approach activates consideration of possible realities and cultural forms. It raises questions and invents problems instead of solving them. By imagining technologies, policies, laws, and conditions that do not yet exist, design becomes an agent of investigation to highlight current and future social, cultural, and political conditions.

The projects within this thesis reconsider our present situations through methods of speculative documentation. The act of documentation becomes a process of manipulating notions of truth to render fictions from reality. Using subversion, instigation, …

Multiple Influences: From Witnessing Language To Performing It, Viviane Jalil

Masters Theses

5The relationship between language and tools has always been one of influence. Our devices—pens, keyboards, smartphones—make language visible and affect its form and structure. But this exchange goes both ways: all acts of reading and writing are mediated by our expectations of content, and the instruments used to access it.

As modes of communication evolve, so too do the ways in which we think through language, creating a dynamic of perpetual adaptation. With the growing impact of technology upon our behaviors, this dialogue is becoming imbalanced, affecting how we engage with others, how we approach our machines, and how we …

Not Not Real : Exercises In Styling, Sophie Mascatello

Masters Theses

As a generative process of visual form, styling and artifice are co-dependent. Styling mediates visual and sensorial elements for aesthetic benefit, and artifice produces a fantasy otherwise unattainable. Together they are a rebus — an orchestration of symbols and shifted realities — that impacts modes of representation and subsequent shifts in taste.

In Not Not Real, the logic of “real” life is moot. Relevance and subjectivity are the only fixed parameters that govern stylistic intuition. The image produced — however candid or authentic it may appear — is artificial. But this imagery supersedes reality in provoking aspiration, rendering the …

Learning To Live In Thick Interface, Jonathan Hanahan

Masters Theses

As media platforms shift towards more dynamic interfaces, the separation between user and content grows infinitely. While advertised as thin, light, and seamless, these platforms mask a thick and complicated space in which society must navigate. This is what I call the “Thick Interface.” The Thick Interface is the portal we use to toggle back and forth and through which we communicate. It is solid and porous, physical and digital, enhancing and diminishing. It may also be a combination of these things simultaneously, or none at all. My work highlights—rather than masks—the complexity of this space through interaction, participation, and …

Speculative Archives : An Index, Sameer Farooq

Masters Theses

Building an official archive, a comprehensive depository of cultural memory, is an impossible pursuit.My work centers around the question: what gets lost in the capture ? Responding to this problematic, I create “speculative archives”— setting the practice of archiving against the archive. In doing so, my display systems (including photography, film and writing) reveal countless ruptures, even blind spots, in the smooth surfaces of the archive: the invisibility of the archivist, the challenge of capturing ephemera, the inherent value bias in collecting, and the inexhaustibility of documenting a subject.

Speculating on the archive has consequence for design practice. From the …

Re-Inscribing History, Yoonkyung Kim

Masters Theses

Most images and informational data from historical records and databases remain unseen because there is a massive over-saturation of visual material. This material has not been thoroughly investigated or understood. Historical archives offer opportunities to discover stories that reposition history in more intimate terms. I explore what remains unseen by revealing new routes that these "facts" can take.

Exploring the boundaries between the public and the personal, I visit archival documents, public databases, and historical collections. Fascinated by their stories' multifaceted nature, I critically examine these primary sources that nourish generations of new histories.

My intention is to redefine our …

Procedural Pleasures: An Algorithmic Manifesto, Jerel Eugene Johnson

Masters Theses

This thesis engages with algorithms through five interlocked arguments: 1) algorithms are an operating condition of our current era; 2) algorithms are the engine of scripted systems; 3) designers create verbal, visual, and scripted systems; 4) there is procedural pleasure in the creation and execution of systems; 5) algorithmic acts are political acts.

The algorithm in its various forms is the subject and verb of this thesis investigation. Therefore, the projects in this thesis pivot on both strict and loose definitions of the algorithm. Projects move from narrowly-scoped, tightly controlled algorithms to open, search-based algorithms. Furthermore, I set out to …

In And About: Investigating Graphic Design In And About The Digital Landscape, Brienne Jones

Masters Theses

Book 1 : Projects as texts, pgs. 1 - 54 -- Book 2 : Projects as images, pgs. 55 - 128 -- Book 3 : Projects as links, pgs. 129 - 148

The web continuously increases our capacity to access to high fidelity representations of the real world. The forms of these representations are manifold: from high resolution photographic imagery to interactive panoramas that simulate walks; from static-yet-infinitely- customizable-maps to geolocational mobile apps; from blog posts and news articles to cinematic, multimedia narratives. These tools often position themselves as proxies by which one may experience a location or an event. …

Reconsider Everything, Hyunjin Kim

Masters Theses

This thesis is composed of three overarching chapters that exploit conventions as a tool to reexamine our social and cultural habits. Observing commonalities in our everyday experiences, this body of work explores subjectivity of rules of convention, questioning assumptions and common values.

In the first chapter, "Formal Conventions," I observe formal qualities and definitions of existing objects and explore alternative meanings and the performance of form. In the second chapter, Limits of Vision," I look at imperceptible subject matter to explore limitations of default modes of human perception. In "Boundaries of Techniques," I search for possibilities of expanding graphic design …

Readily Available, Ali Shamas Qadeer

Masters Theses

Today, there is a massive framework in place to share and build ideas and information, and yet the status of the public domain is being eroded legally and ideologically. In the digital age, we are constantly creating datasets, leaving physical and ideological trails of whatever captures our attention and experience. However, massive, disorganized archives are prone to becoming unnavigable storehouses of information—or worse—privately traded commodities. In opposition to the idea of our lives as privately stored and sold as imaginary capital stands The Commons — the vast network of our collective cultural memory that is readily available to the public—at …

Events Of Assembly: Exploring The Terms Of Co-Production, Chloe Lee

Masters Theses

Graphic designers, by nature, create sets of rules or conditions to establish relationships between disparate parts. The product graphic designers produce is thus an assembly of materials organized by these rules. In the context of our increasingly networked culture, there is an opportunity for graphic designers to reconsider how we orchestrate relationships. Rather than establishing conditions to make discrete objects as singular designers, this thesis proposes methods for generating new content and new form in collaboration with others.

Through rule-based design and trans-disciplinary collaboration, this body of work explores the terms of co-production. Using site-specific events, I assemble small networks …

S., J.J. Abrams, Doug Dorst, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Graphic Design

xiv, 456 pages : illustrations. Konfidentiell letter (2 leaves) [insert between pages viii-ix] + Pollard State University : VMS accused of ... (1 leaf) [insert between pages 10-11] + Xerox copy of journal article (1 leaf) [insert between pages 20-21] + Newspaper clipping (2 pages) [insert between pages 32 -33] + Telegram (2 leaves) [insert between pages 54-55] + 1 newspaper clipping/memo (1 leaf) [insert between pages 68-69] + Letter from Desjardins (1 leaf) [insert between pages 86-87] + Letter from Jen (4 pages) [insert between pages 100-101] + 1 Brazil postcard [insert between pages 112-113] + 1 photograph of …

Graphic And Gutsy, Liisa Silander, Risd Xyz

RISD XYZ Fall/Winter 2013: Out of Bounds

Some people just can't help themselves. They've got an indefinable restlessness—a drive to do things most people don’t. By the time she was 26, Jessica Walsh GD 08 had pushed the proverbial envelope enough that esteemed designer Stefan Sagmeister (who had been in the business since before she was born) invited her to become a partner in his NYC-based firm.

It Is Almost That (Box), Siglio Press, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Graphic Design

8 booklets, 1 leaf , 2 sheets : illustrations (some color) ; 22 cm. A boxed set of nine folded and saddle-stitched booklets with photocopies or silkscreened dust-jackets signed by authors / artists. Found Pages from Antinova's Memoirs / Eleanor Antin -- Nude film / Fiona Banner -- Time / Ann Hamilton -- Inspection / Jane Hammond -- Psychic / Susan Hiller -- Dorchester boxers / Helen Kim -- A house of dust / Alison Knowles -- Notes for the translation / Molly Springfield -- Hexen II; 4 diagrams / Suzanne Treister -- From the journal Notes on living locally …

Forming Process : Design Through Layered Visual Systems And Multiple Collection Methods : A Thesis, Jen Magathan

Masters Theses

"Do not hide the structure, celebrate it in the form" ; "Approach design from multiple points of view."

These adages, so important in my architectural training, reverberate with intricate practicality in my work as a graphic designer, both as a way of building my design and as a means of developing a design process which explores multiple ways of organizing content through visual systems. Forming Process is defined by three conditions: celebrating the visual systems which organize the design, archiving content from multiple ways of collecting, and creating work by which the process of design is implicit in the design …

I Read My Mind Through You: Designing Personal Communication In The Public Realm, Or, I Made This Thesis For You, Mary Banas

Masters Theses

As graphic designers, we're trained to be rational, systematic, and concise. In contrast, human emotion is irrational, passionate, and complex. By projecting personal experience into the public sphere, this study explores the tension between these two mindsets. I Read My Mind Through You elevates the voice of the banal to a call for empathy and renewed sentimentality.

I Read My Mind Through You elevated the voice of the banal to a call for empathy and renewed sentimentality.

This body of work originates from a love affair with turns of phrase, an affinity for the absurd, and the current cultural obsession …

Shv, Irma Boom, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Graphic Design

[2136] pages : illustrations (some color). Book commissioned by Paul Fentener van Vlissingen, chairman of SHV Holdings, and designed by Irma Boom in editorial collaboration with art historian Johann Pijnappel to celebrate the centenary SHV. Edition of 500 copies in English and 300 copies in Chinese. Printed by Rosbeek, Nuth, Netherlands. Three sheets of stamps are mounted inside the front and back covers. Decorated fore-edge papers with a poem in Dutch and a color illustration of a field of tulips. SHV Energy is a family-owned multinational organization that consists of a group of specialised energy companies

Charles Meunier's Plaquette, 1900, La Relieuse | The Bookbinder : A Rare And Beautiful Depiction Of The Bookbinder In Medallic Art., Henry Morris, Charles Meunier, Maurice Favre, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Graphic Design

1 folded leaf; 1 pewter plaquette. Text written and plaquette created by Henry Morris at the Bird & Bull Press. 1 folded leaf in blue cloth case stamped in silver. Pewter plaquette fits in frame in case. The promotional plaquette of bookbinder Charles Meunier is a reproduction of a work by Maurice Favre exhibited in 1903. It depicts a bookbinder at her sewing frame. Lettered on reverse "Aux amis la maison du livre 1900, Ch. Meunier." (To the friends of the 1900 book house, Ch. Meunier.). Gift of the Joseph Paulsen family. Curated title for Fleet Library Special Collections exhibition …

Cronkite: The Way It Was | The Sixties, A Scrapbook For Ear. Cbs Stereo Cassette, Lou Dorfsman, Cbs Corporate Entertainment And News Divisions

Lou Dorfsman CBS Archive at RISD

CBS News Television Division Education Department Teaching Supplement 1968. Informational illustrated catalog and two shrink wrapped audio cassette tapes © 1983 CBS Inc. featuring Walter Cronkite.

Cbs 1980 Presidential Workbook For Concerned Citizens, Lou Dorfsman, Cbs Corporate Entertainment And News Divisions

Lou Dorfsman CBS Archive at RISD

CBS Television News Division Election Department 1980 Promotion Literature. Informational 1980 presidential election workbook designed to promote CBS coverage of the 1980 election; also claims "If you make the effort to fill out the Workbook, on election day you will be much better equipped to vote intelligently and, as a bonus, you will have an excellent scrapbook of the 1980 Presidential election".

Tie Lines From Dupont / Featuring Qiana® Nylon, Alden Willard Cole, Fleet Library, Visual + Material Resources, Dupont

Alden Cole Fashion Illustration Archive

No abstract provided.

Élégance Fashion Portfolio, Alden Willard Cole, Fleet Library, Visual + Material Resources

Alden Cole Fashion Illustration Archive

folder with individual folded pages