Graphic Design Commons^™

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, …

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 …

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 …

Exploration In Design, Graphic Communications And The Creative Process, Starla A. Stensaas

Masters Theses

In lieu of the traditional thesis, I have chosen to culminate the Master of Arts in Related Arts program with a creative project and a paper that describes and evaluates the completion of the project. The project involved a personal aesthetic and technical development of the aesthetic in graphic design and communications. Documentation of the creative arts project is presented in a portfolio which includes graphic designs, publications, and news feature stories. The project is interdisciplinary in that it involves skills in art (design) and English (writing) as well as effective interdisciplinary communication skills necessary to produce interdepartmental publications.

Included …