Graphic Design Commons^™

West Coast Workshop To Southwest Institute, Hannah Marie Cerne

Art & Art History ETDs

This thesis considers Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico (originally established as Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, CA), and its contributions to collaborative printmaking. Originally founded in 1960 by June Wayne with Clinton Adams and Garo Antreasian, Tamarind Lithography Workshop (the precursor to Tamarind Institute) revitalized lithography through structured collaboration between artists and master printers, alongside rigorous training programs. This thesis provides an institutional history of the workshop during its relocation to the University of New Mexico, highlighting its transformation into a university-based institute that integrated education and professional production. Using social and labor-based methodologies, this study analyzes how …

Color Shift: A Graphic Design Process Book Exploring How Color And Motion Influence Emotional Perception And Brand Connection In Affordable Women's Fashion Jewelry, Elizabeth Voight

Theses

This study examines how manipulating color and motion within a single brand identity system influences consumer emotional response and brand consistency. Using a fictional modern jewelry brand, Quanta & Co., the research isolates color as the primary variable by applying nine distinct mid-range color palettes to identical layouts, logos, and structures across both print and digital touchpoints. These collateral assets include jewelry packaging, vehicle wraps, digital advertisements, and an animated logo. A quantitative survey was executed to capture real-time audience impressions regarding brand traits, perceived quality, and the overall alignment of each color variation with the brand's identity.

The findings …

Junk Journaling For Graphic Designers: Analog Play & Process In An Increasingly Digital Design Landscape, Kristina Rosgen

University Honors Theses

This thesis explores junk journaling as an accessible analog practice for young graphic designers experiencing digital fatigue, creative stress, and perfectionism. Through historical research, a hands-on workshop, and an interactive Readymag website, the project shows how junk journaling can help designers reconnect with play, process, physical materials, and the joy of making.

Navigating Filipino-American Identity Through Philippine Foodways, Jenelle Kirsten De Leon

University Honors Theses

This thesis examines the complexity of Filipino-American identity and investigates how Philippine foodways can function as a meaningful pathway for cultural understanding, identity formation, and intergenerational connection. Shaped by colonization, cultural hybridity, generational divides, and limited representation in Western education and media, Filipino-American identity is often difficult to define and navigate, leaving many individuals without accessible entry points to explore their culture, history, traditions, and more.

Through an analysis of existing literature, primary research, and a survey of Filipino-American youth, this study finds that Filipino cuisine operates as a powerful site of cultural and historical knowledge. The narratives embedded within …

Ra Hub: Streamlining Resident Advisor Workflows Through A Mobile App, Samantha Danahe Gonzalez

Graphic Communication

This project explores the need to improve the workflow experience for Residential Advisors (RAs), specifically focusing on polychat logging and event planning workflows that currently rely on multiple disconnected software platforms. This fragmented system creates confusion and makes it difficult to complete responsibilities efficiently and accurately. Survey findings revealed frustrations with tracking tasks, managing workflows, and navigating between systems. In response, this project proposes a centralized workflow system designed to create a more organized, accessible, and userfriendly experience for RAs.

Redesigning Rhapsody In View's Website For Improved Storytelling And Navigation, Christine Ha

Graphic Communication

Rhapsody in View is a family-owned and operated hotel boutique in Morro Bay that offers bespoke rooms and warm hospitality. Their current website has the opportunity to improve the layout design for ease of navigation and improved storytelling. This project aims to deliver a high-fidelity interactive prototype that showcases a visually appealing website design, improved user journey and expression of Rhapsody in View’s story, and refined navigation flow.

Let's Talk Twenties, Yuwa R. Tennen

Graphic Communication

“Let’s Talk Twenties” is a senior design project that explores what it really feels like to be in your twenties...the highs, the lows, and everything in between. It focuses on creating an open, relatable space where conversations about identity, relationships, and personal growth feel honest and normalized. The goal is to break away from the pressure of having everything figured out and instead highlight the shared experiences that define this stage of life.

Through thoughtful short-form content, branding, and storytelling, the project combines engaging visuals with real, meaningful content to connect with young adults. It emphasizes authenticity, inclusivity, and emotional …

Independent Apparel Brand Launch Campaign Strategy, Nick S. Schottenfeld

Graphic Communication

Soleil Lune is an independent California apparel brand with an established visual identity, a growing social media following, and a live product collection but lacks a coordinated marketing system to connect those pieces into a unified launch. Without that structure, the brand’s Instagram, Shopify store, and print materials were operating independently, making it difficult to build consistent customer trust or drive sales. This project developed a full launch campaign producing a print and digital lookbook, 10 Instagram campaign assets, a printed poster, and a branded care insert card all designed to work together to tell the brand story, grow the …

Designing A Mobile App For Mr. Turtle: Increasing Membership And Building Sustainable Refill Habits, Mira Pinto

Graphic Communication

Mr. Turtle is a sustainable soap and detergent refill station service. Instead of buying new plastic bottles, customers bring containers to a Mr. Turtle refill station and fill them up with products like dish soap and laundry detergent.

The stations are located inside local retail partner stores and on the Cal Poly campus, making it easy to refill. In the SLO area, Mr. Turtle has locations in the SLO Food Co-Op, Market Poly Canyon, and Swish & Swirl. Mr. Turtle’s mission is to reduce single-use plastic waste by making refilling simple and convenient.

For my senior project, I created a …

Advertisement Recognition And Recall In Urban Environments, Carson L. Ambrose

Graphic Communication

Why is it that certain advertisements are so much easier to remember than others? And how can places like Times Square actually be communicating effectivly through the dense amount of different ads? This project aims to get closer to finding out how design and environmental ad density effect advertisement recognition and recall. To capture the real-world feeling of a dense city, a 3D printed one was created to allow for custom testing and various locations meant for displaying custom advertisements. These ads would be created using a variety of design characteristics such as color, hierarchy, composition, typography, and over all …

Cor(E) Brand Direction, Jake T. Tokatlian

Graphic Communication

COR(E) is a new record label founded by an artist named Lil Uzi Vert, and for my project I have taken the initial steps to develop their brand identity and create physical products for the label. To achieve this, I made a brand book to help define COR(E) and provide a set of design guidelines, a Spring issue of a quarterly magazine that provides news and behind the scenes of the label’s artists, and a CD design including a cover and tracklist. I believe there is a gap in the market for bringing physical media into the music industry and …

Why Choose Green Burial: Raising Awareness About An Under-Utilized Method Of Body Disposition, Gretchen Mahlberg

University Honors Theses

Green burial, the process of human burial in a biodegradable vessel without embalming, is a simple method for disposal of remains that has been used around the world for centuries, yet it is chosen less than 5% of the time in the US today. The stigma about discussing death has led to a lack of awareness about options and created an environment where morticians, as the sole sources of information, direct the bereaved towards the options most beneficial to themselves. Previous methods to raise awareness about green burial have had limited reach, being focused on people who are already researching …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

The Frame You're Holding, Andrea Mato

Masters Theses

The Frame You're Holding explores how my photographer's eye transitioned into a graphic designer's voice. The projects presented explore how to weave the textural and subjective qualities of photography into a design context. My practice explores how the frames of graphic design – the page of a book, the browser window, or the wall of an exhibition – can be expanded or reimagined. As a designer, I became the translator of content into form, seeking to author the design while collaborating with other voices. The Frame You're Holding is a snapshot of my practice as a graphic designer, encapsulating my …

Part-Time Faculty In Art And Design Higher Education: Support & Challenges, Katherine Ye Jin Lee

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the challenge part-time faculty in art and design higher education face and the institutional support they receive through a case study conducted at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Through an extensive, anonymous and voluntary part-time faculty survey across different departments at RISD, it examines: 1) current perceptions of available institutional & departmental teaching support, 2) teaching approach & practice, and 3) student-faculty engagement. The research aimed to gather data on challenges that are unique to part-time faculty in art and design fields, especially in relation to faculty-student engagement to understand areas where they can be better …

Draw To Breathe, Ranran Ma

Masters Theses

This thesis explores visual expression in drawing as an intuitive mode of thinking suited to everyday life—a form of expression that runs parallel to language and surpasses it.

The project begins with a daily Post-it note drawing practice. These drawings often emerge before conscious understanding, subsequently accompanied by brief text, allowing image and word to resonate through emotion and intuition. Through the use of small-scale, portable, low-pressure materials, and with immediacy and intuitive freedom as the foundation of making, a visual language system grounded in the self develops. Through this sustained practice, I developed an instruction-based card system titled Draw …

Countersense, Avrie Allen

Masters Theses

countersense is an engagement with embodied experience, the conditions that shape it, and the sense we make of it. countersense is a counterhegemonic practice of sense-making in graphic design, performed between perception and meaning-making, self and material conditions, and always foregrounding what politics are chosen as a result of the personal.

Situational 情境中, Jo Zixuan

Masters Theses

The Chinese title of this book 情境中 (qíng jìng zhōng) translates directly to within the situation. Yet separately as three individual characters, qíng jìng zhōng means emotion, scene, within. A situation in my language is inherently an emotional scene, which requires us to account for more than the objective conditions, such as the geographical, economic, and social circumstances, as well as the subjective and affective experiences of individuals.

How can design analyze the context of given situations and construct new situations? The key terms organizing this book describe a movement. Site establishes the levels of context in which any …

Sites Of Departure, Kevin Tomas

Masters Theses

At all scales of human history, there exists a record: The story of how things came to be. An infinity of interconnected traces that thread the intimate and the immense into a single fabric.

Beginning from distinct points of entry, Sites of Departure explores the axes of resolution and scale in documentation, asking what becomes visible when the instruments of the dominant record are set aside. Moving between recovery and confrontation, the work questions the structures that produce our understanding, while creating new documents for future interpretation—all against the reality that to make a claim, is to claim some truth. …

Frameworks, Hailey Lee

Masters Theses

Put on a pair of glasses. What do you see? People? Trees? Cars? Buildings? Now focus on the glasses themselves. Can you see the frame? Why is it that you donʼt notice it until now?

Glasses make the world feel clearer, sharper, more accurate. But what youʼre seeing is always a view inside a frame. The glasses give you a frame, and show you the world through it. Once you get used to that frame, you forget that everything you see is already inside one. Most of us forget that the frame of our glasses is always there—at the edge …

Seeking Ground, Shrishti Chatterjee

Masters Theses

Design increasingly sits within modern systems that reduce the world to narrow, instrumental categories. A tree is paper, the sky is a clock, an ant is a pest. And a graphic designer is a visual marketer optimising for reach and engagement. This leaves the designer without a sense of their place in the world.

Seeking Ground asks how we might return to a more rooted practice. Physically, the ground is the solid surface on which all other things rest. Conceptually, it is the foundational premise from which knowledge is derived. To be grounded is to be connected to real-world implications …

Optimalism, Clara F. Cayosa

Masters Theses

Optima. Optimal. Optimism. Optimalism.

Optima is a humanist typeface created by designer Hermann Zapf (German, male)

Optimal is what design—and life—in 2026 wants to be: maximum productivity, maximum output. But optimal for whom, and by whose measure?

Optimism is what you find in jeepney decalomania, or sari-sari store signage in the Philippines. It is the joy of everyday making, an assemblage of color and humble material. In Clara Balaguer’s words: of turning shit into gold.

Optimalism is my (Filipino, female) thesis; an accumulation of what I've learned trying to persist in graphic design. This is …

\N: Playground Of Digital Interventions, Thea Kim

Masters Theses

How do we live within the digital world? Is the space a tool, a refuge, a playground, or something so deeply embedded that we no longer notice it at all? The digital strives to disappear. In becoming invisible, it becomes harder to question, quietly reorganizing how we perceive, act, and relate.

Yet, the digital was not always encountered this way. There were moments when we explored the web, hacked it, and played within it — out of our own curiosity, mischief, or simple pleasure. These practices, often informal and unintentional, expanded the medium from within, stretching what it could hold …

Fictional Truths, Saachi Mehta

Masters Theses

Fictional Truths starts with a question: What if storytelling wasn’t just content, or a way to pitch to a client, but instead became a way of approaching design? What if we could borrow from how narratives are built to reimagine how we design?

This thesis investigates how analyzing narrative structures opens up possibilities that traditional linear design frameworks simply can’t reach. Context shifts meaning. Through feminist revision and plural truth- making, I propose that fiction is a legitimate way of knowing, not separate from truth, but a way of producing knowledge that resists a singular perspective. Instead, Fictional Truths embraces …

Re-Assembly, Tonia Zhang

Masters Theses

Graphic design is bound by invisible defaults — software suites, standardized formats, and interfaces optimized for speed, profit, and frictionless output. Re-Assembly treats these standardized technologies not as neutral scaffolding, but as the primary material for critical inquiry. By dissecting this “default” infrastructure, the work exposes the logic of extraction and control baked into our templates and grids. Through a practice of subverting and rebuilding these everyday systems, design is pushed to operate under decentralized and open terms. This repositioning rejects the role of the designer as a surface technician, instead defining them as an active agent and an architect …

Mediated Landscapes, Image Road Trip, Faith Kim

Masters Theses

I do whatever I can to not work on my laptop. But when I do, I'm greeted with the pristine landscape of Mac OS Tahoe — it was Mac OS Sequoia for a long time until recently. These default wallpapers are engineered layers composing an image: mediated, highly designed, presented as though they were simply found. Where an image lives determines what it means.

From the digital camera to the phone camera, effortless distribution, infinite storage: photography has reshaped not just how we make images but what we think they're for. I'm as interested in moving existing images around as …

Human After All, Ritu Mantri

Masters Theses

human

0. a being, relating to, or belonging to a person or to people.

1. an organism whose behaviour is structured by survival, instinct, and the immediate conditions of its environment.

2. a primate capable of thinking in abstractions. It makes marks, builds tools, and uses language to reflect on itself and the world around it.

3. a maker that increasingly constructs systems as a mirror of itself to store memory, meaning, and perception beyond the limits of its body.

4. an entity whose intelligence is increasingly indistinguishable from the tools and technological infrastructures it has built.

5. a superhuman …

Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

Material Costs, Karima Weinman

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how migration fatality and disappearance data can be reinterpreted through material craft to create a more reflective encounter with information. Working with the Missing Migrants Project's dataset, this project asks how design can communicate dimensions of human loss that conventional data visualization cannot reach.

The work situates contemporary border violence within a longer colonial history, arguing that the logics of surveillance and quantification that structured European imperial expansion persist in the databases that govern mobility in the Mediterranean today.

Terrazzo is a 15th-century Venetian flooring technique built from discarded fragments bound together into a unified surface. This …

Open Forms, Barbara Cutlak

Masters Theses

Open Forms

Architecture always exists in relation to the context in which it stands. There is no way, however, to anticipate how the constructed space will be inhabited, or transformed by the surroundings — and so, it remains open to discovery and change. Graphic design form can operate in a similar way: opening itself to a context by offering multiple ways of seeing, interacting and being performed.

Drawing from the contexts that have informed my practice — my training in architecture and the artistic movements of Brazil, my home country — Open Forms experiments with how to translate these spatial …