Graphic Design Commons^™

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 …

Girls, Girls, Girls, Mackenzie Sikora

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

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 …

Go-Getters, Mackenzie Sikora

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

For Rent, Mackenzie Sikora

A Midwestern Review: A Magazine of the Arts and Issues at DePauw University

No abstract provided.

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 …

Game On, Nicholas Lommen

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for BSU Honors program.

Kevin J. Miyazaki Interview, Anthony Santoro

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Kevin J. Miyazaki is an artist and photographer born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Japanese American parents originally from Hawai‘i and Washington state. His artwork often focuses on issues of ethnicity, family history and memory. The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is of particular interest to Miyazaki, whose father spent time at both Tule Lake and Heart Mountain camps. His work has been exhibited in a variety of locations, including The Center for Photography at Woodstock (New York), The Haggerty Museum of Art (Milwaukee) The Rayko Photo Center (San Francisco) and Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle). …

Katie Vogel Senior Art Portfolio, Katie Vogel

Senior Art Portfolios

No abstract provided.

Haley Kropp Senior Art Portfolio, Haley Kropp

Senior Art Portfolios

No abstract provided.

Good As We Know It: Goodness In Design Discourse Since 1870, Garreth C. Blackwell

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the ways in which design and design practitioners have defined value in the design discourse through the vocabulary and concept of goodness since 1870. These definitions of value have been central to design discourse both past and present and deal with the impact and purpose of design work as well as its role in the creation of the approaching future. Since before the coalescence of graphic design as a separate field of design, these questions have been tied to the form, function or social impact of the objects created by designers. Despite the prevalence of this line …

Through The Eyes Of The Animator

SIGNED: The Magazine of The Hong Kong Design Institute

Few non-native animators have found international success in America quite like Raman Hui. We speak with the Hong Kong creative about his work in Hollywood and his new-found fame in China.

Infographics On The Brain, Rachel S. Evans

Presentations

Higher Education is often known for a certain type of learning experience in the classroom. Students expect thick books and in many areas of study, the Socratic method, but generally little in the way of visual aids. Students in other areas of study, including K-12, are increasingly benefiting from their educators using infographics in the classroom. The potential uses in higher education range from giving your course syllabus a facelift, to illustrating facts visually, and even to teaching students to create their own infographics as a practice-ready skill. This session will quickly explore why today’s students are drawn to visuals …

Message Journal, Issue 3: What Is The Topography Of The Contemporary Graphic Design / Communication Landscape In Relation To Art Practice? What Occupies The Space Between Disciplines?, Spencer Roberts, Richard Miles, Andrew Spackman, Craig Barber, Cathy Gale, Zachary Kaiser, Daniel Jasper

Message Graphic Communication Design Research

No abstract provided.

Infographics On The Brain: Lightning Talk, Rachel S. Evans

Presentations

A 5 minute lightning talk discusses the benefits and potential uses for infographics in libraries.

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 …

Sustainable Design: Can Eco-Friendly Be Beautiful?, Melanie T. Santiago

Honors Theses

Graphic design students and professionals experience an enormous amount of pressure in regards to their final printed pieces. In the effort to produce flawless work, they print several versions of a piece—often comparing dozens of copies for slight differences in ink variation, color saturation and paper quality. While this trial-and-error process undoubtedly accomplishes its intended effects, it also produces outrageous amounts of wasted paper, ink and cardboard among other products.

Graphic design has implemented computers to increase efficiency in the design process while ignoring the impact of obsolete hardware on the environment. In its perfectionism, it has sent countless pounds …

Graphic Design And The Cinema: An Application Of Graphic Design To The Art Of Filmmaking, Kacey B. Holifield

Honors Theses

When the public considers different art forms such as painting, drawing and sculpture, it is easy to understand the common elements that unite them. Each is a non-moving art form that begins at the drawing board. Using line, color and shape to evoke a particular response from audiences is what ties these fine arts together. Graphic design, however, tends to separate itself from the fine arts. Because of its later development in the art world, as well as, its operation within modern technological developments, graphic design is driven by the idea of communicating to large audiences. In this way, although …

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety, Rebecca Schroeder

Honors Projects

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety is a triptych video and artifact piece inspired by the abstract analysis of my dreams. It recognizes worries held within my subconscious and brings them to life through graphic design, photography, and video. The process of creating provides a new perspective of looking at both art and occupational therapy as methods of solving emotional distress.

I have recorded over 80 of my dreams in the past year. In these dreams, regret, grief, and anxiety are common themes. These themes are represented in three triptychs that cycle through past, present, and future problems. The cycling of …

Hand Lettered, Jennifer L. Shaw

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Around this time last year, I discovered hand lettering on chalkboards around Folk for the NASAD accreditation show. I found these pieces to be particularly inspiring and wanted to learn how to create something similar. Having absolutely no experience with hand lettering I knew that this was going to be a long process. I tasked myself with creating 100 small pieces in varying styles to teach myself hand lettering. I was inspired to end the project with a large chalkboard mural about the school of art to then be donated to the school when the project is complete. The reason …

Graphic Design For The Shark Reef Aquarium [Course Project], Alexxis Rodriguez

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

This essay examines the thought processes of how a short, informative booklet was constructed for the Shark Reef Aquarium. Methods of research includes searching for valuable, credible articles, viewing competitor’s designs, visiting the company’s official information and media, and gathering design books for inspiration. Other ways of research include the designer’s ability to think critically in order to create intentional design that effectively communicates the information to the reader. Ultimately, looking at Lied Library’s resources has played a role in the booklet design and how to think about the supporting design elements.

It's Slapstick Design, Thanks! Wait! No "Thanks"- Just Slapstick Design ..., Curtis A. Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

I'm arguing for an approach to generating graphic form based on slapstick. Slapstick is a genre of physical comedy involving humorous portrayals of clumsiness, mistakes, and nonsense. I investigate it as an approach to form, content, process, and communication. These methods were used to construct an immersive installation loosely based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Graphic design is expected to function. It does this by conditioning users to its particular patterns or by skillfully implementing familiar patterns. A slapstick approach to graphic design is valuable as a critical tool for disrupting conditioned experiences for promoting empathy by relating …

Infographics: A Librarian's Best Friend, Rachel S. Evans

Presentations

Infographics are on the rise as a communication medium in libraries. We live in a visual world; we are visual creatures, naturally drawn to graphical representations. Using free web applications, librarians and their support staff can now easily create beautiful and compelling infographics which can serve multiple purposes in the library environment. From community outreach and marketing of programs and collections to internal use as a presentation aid and everything in between, infographics can help us relay important information in an attractive way for little to no cost. This presentation will discuss the advantages of using infographics in the library …

Simplification: An Effective Visual Solution For Graphic Design, Yihan Wang

Theses and Dissertations

Simplification, as an effective visual solution, is frequently applied in modern graphic design. During my graduate studies, this method was integrated with each project including identity design, package design and print design. As a result, it not only helped clarify thoughts in the creative process, but it also helped form a relatively consistent style. However, since graphic design refers to communication via visual elements, this presents the problem of whether simplification affects the transfer of information. In other words, the degree to which the visual language should be literal needs discussion and exploration. Contrary to the simplified expression of graphic …