Graphic Design Commons^™

Hyperlink : Connecting Space, Time, Language, And Technology, Marie Otsuka

Masters Theses

This thesis constitutes a methodology for examining our use of systems and tools. We are constantly generating physical and digital residues, and tracing them can reveal an underlying syntax of structures that produced them. I work with these artifacts to highlight the capacities and constraints of language and technology, and what results is a transparency that draws us closer to the raw material. Once broken down into bare elements, new forms can then be resynthesized. Both critical and celebratory, this inquiry uncovers logical structures to reimagine means of making and to create alternate tools for thought.

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 …

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), …

Cultural Investigation On Typography In Branding In The United States And In Brazil., Carolina C Ganon

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This cultural thesis is set to investigate the use of typography in branding, and how the same is influenced by cultural aspects, specifically in the United States and Brazil. The contrasting experience I have had as a student of graphic design in these two countries led me to discover the influence culture has in dictating the typography design use in branding. Typography, branding and cultural influences have been significantly researched in the past, but historically as three separate subjects, without focusing on the importance of their association and how they influence one another cross-culturally. Since the impact of graphic design …

Boo, Meghan Hennessey

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

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.

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 …

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 …

Interaction As A Lost Art, Megan Steele

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In today’s day and age, people are consumed by technology. We tend to use phone and email rather than meeting up in person to share the experiences in our lives. It’s easier, more convenient, and quicker, but in-person interaction is a critical key in keeping relationships alive. Body language, tone of voice, and emotional cues are absent or easily taken out of context when using technology to communicate. The use of electronics takes away human presence.

This exhibition focused on encouraging the idea of meeting up with people face-to-face whether it’s a long time friend, or a stranger. The mural …

Ineffable: Latency In Symbolic Languages, Sirah Yoo

Theses and Dissertations

The design process demands comprehensive knowledge of visual signs and symbols with a focus on visual literacy; it is related to visual syntax, semantics, and the pragmatics of contexts. My work is an interdisciplinary investigation into how designers integrate polysemantic signs into their design process for particular and highly individualized audiences. By analyzing the role of signs in specific contexts across the spectrum of arts, society, literature, and semiotics, a designer's understanding of the cyclical nature of interpretation and reinterpretation in complex environments creates an avenue for cultivating a new schema that provides further levels of interpretations and different access …

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.

How-To Understand And Create Hip-Hop Art, Joshua Wolcott

Graphic Communication

Typography is an essential component of Graphic Communication. The purpose of this study was to bridge typography with hip-hop art. To bridge the two disciplines, hip-hop art was presented in the context that it is actually practiced by these artists. The use of a questionnaire and a drawing lesson was intended to bring the subject within its true context. Presenting the art form in its true context enabled participants involved in the study to understand the art form with the perspective that the discipline, like typography, involves the use of lettering. Participants that were interested in drawing were able to …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Design Research: Typography Within The Israeli Linguistic Landscape, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

A linguistic landscape signifies language used within a physical or virtual public space, in which communication is presented in typographic form, portraying a message to an audience. Within the state of Israel, the linguistic landscape presents a unique situation in which it is common to view municipal and commercial multilingual signs that are designed using Hebrew, English, and Arabic letterforms. By studying the diverse linguistic landscape within Israeli urban environments, the article offers perspectives on the use of multilingual visual language, based on discussions with five Israeli designers in the summer of 2015.

Packaging Design Elements And Users Perception: A Context In Fashion Branding And Communication, Heer Vyas

Journal of Applied Packaging Research

The product packaging has a crucial role to attract consumer, force them to choose the product and act as a brand communication vehicle. The point of focus is how the elements of the package design affect consumer’s perceptions about products and brand. In this study, we collected data through a questionnaire that covered areas such as design elements of the package (size, shape, material, graphic design of package, typography, images and pictures), user’s perception (attention, purchase and repurchase) and their experience (feelings evoked and functional benefits). There is a difference with the professional status and age involvement with respect to …

Typography "In & Of" Ireland, Mary Ann Bolger

Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Points Of Contention: Oddities, Delicacies, & Monstrosities, Arthur T. Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Points of Contention, an MFA exhibit, features fifteen works of relief-printed images from carved linoleum and layers of type printed with antique letterpress wood type. The work constitutes a visual exploration of dissatisfaction and disenchantment presented through the context of odd stories in the news and major current events, such as election politics and the closing of Hostess bakeries, as well as, NSA data collection and gun violence.

This supporting thesis explores the conceptual and physical processes of creating the pieces, including researching other artists who have wrestled with similar topics and produced their own unique reaction and resolution …

Worlds Of Gods And Goddesses - Mercury, Paige Coyle

College of Arts and Sciences Presentations

Each team member created a planet poster based on the concept that humans use both science and religion to explain the unexplainable. Each of the planets has a mythological background, usually Greek, which is related to the planets and the name of its moons. These posters had both physical and digital aspects to them. The typography used for each poster is related to statistics and facts about that planet. Video and audio related to the still images are visible using an augmented reality application. By downloading the Android or iOS Layar app from www.layar.com you can view media related to …

The Secret Life Of Things, Maja Savic

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses the work presented in The Secret Life of Things, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, from March 18th through 22nd, 2013. The exhibition consists of sixteen illustrations (four of these are digitally enhanced photographs) and one animation that show the artist’s interest in bringing household objects to life. Pieces in the exhibition can be characterized as humorous with a strong narrative and attention to details. Savić’s ideas are based on traditional education with contemporary influences. All printed work is twenty inches wide, sixteen inches tall, framed, and hung in …

Arabic Typography Play, Sarah Alfalah

Theses and Dissertations

I believe that spoken and written languages are verbal and visual expressions of cultures. Language is used to convey and sustain values and the belief system of people. Arabic is a language of complexity and formal beauty that is being disregarded and pushed away by its own native speakers. It is losing its value in the Arab world. In other words it is dying. Both the written and spoken language is being affected. As the world is interchanging, integrating, and becoming closer, there has been a strong impact on many societies, threatening their original culture. Arab cultures are abandoning the …

Transforming Narratives, Lucia Weilein

Theses and Dissertations

Narrative, often considered synonymous with “story,” can be viewed from a structuralist perspective and analyzed independent of any particular content. Breaking narrative into categories of story and discourse, this autonomous structure makes possible a translation of content from one form to another. The various media and form types common in graphic design can serve as both recipient and translator of narratives, converting content into a framework that includes the concept of craftsmanship, aesthetic components and specifications, legibility and composition, and the physical form of the designed object. To examine how this framework functions in practice, I have developed a series …

Material Meaning, Anne Jordan

Theses and Dissertations

The synthesis of old and new, analog and digital, and hand- and computer-based methods provides designers with an opportunity to work beyond the constraints of the computer and take advantage of the aesthetic effects that actual materials bring to visual communication. Designers who choose to actively participate in their process – bringing the aesthetic effects of working materially into the realm of the digital – will likely learn to reject an approach that relies too heavily on passive digital tools. Active participation in the design process can extend our creative vocabulary and humanize visual communication.

Space: A Discovery Of Visual Language, Kelley White

Theses and Dissertations

Space is a visual communicator. The act of perceiving space is a neurological soiree that projects and negotiates meaning in our constructed world. The poetry that we observe within space is tied directly to our emotions and to previous experience. Within ourselves, we each have particular feelings, unconscious or not, relating to height, length, and depth, as well as light and shadow. For example, a long, narrow hallway may elicit anxiety, while an open, sunlit nave in a cathedral may bring about feelings of serenity and joy. Our observations and interactions within the perceptual confines of space reveal clues to …

Geologic Typography, Eric Karnes

Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I explore how the processes and structures of non-design disciplines can influence typographic form. Using the field of geology as a test case, I apply geologic processes to typographic form in order to create dimensional structures that speak to a wide audience.

Typography: From Internal Conflict To External Content, Ernest F. Bernhardi Iii

Theses and Dissertations

This body of work represents a celebration and pursuit of realizing an alternative language, one capable of expressing internal conflict through process and response to external typographic form and content.

A Sense Of Place: A Personal Exploration, Analysis And Re-Interpretation Of Diverse Places, Hyejin Park

Theses and Dissertations

Every city/place has unique, distinctive qualities. Individuals acquire a sense of place in accordance with their own experiences and perspectives, which may not be the same as the experiences and viewpoints of another person. In this project, I explore, analyze, and re-interpret three places that have creatively and emotionally influenced me and remained in my memory: Times Square, New York City; Insadong, Seoul, South Korea; and Broad Street, Richmond, Virginia. To comprehend and draw a sense of place, I observe, feel, and document the characteristics of each place through different methods and processes, based on my own experiences. In addition, …