Plus a look back on the semester as a whole.
For my Thoughts on Thesis book, I wanted to create a personal curation space that explored ideas I was interested in pursuing for my thesis. The lexicon features a mix of artist features, narrative concepts, past projects, and future musings. As everything has already been drawn before, I wanted to have tangible examples of ways different illustrators have approached similar subject matter. That way, when I do my own personal explorations into the same subject matter, I have a deeper understanding on how it has already been done so that I can try to build off from it in a way more unique to myself.
I chose a shiny metallic paper for the pages, hoping that the shine would come through in all of the artwork and give a little touch of magic to each page. This worked in conjunction with my developing thesis statement, as I currently am looking towards finding magic in the mundane and expressing it in illustrative form. Another prevalent feature of the book’s design was the use of a rainbow of colors and gradients. I chose a different color for each spread of the book, reflecting off of the artwork being featured on the page. These colors would then be applied on either one page, the entire spread, or just in a gradient that radiated from the spine. I thought the subtle touch of the gradient paired well with the artwork, as it created another layer of interest to the page without distracting from the art.
The cover and back cover of the book feature personal illustrations that were risograph printed onto textured paper. A fun note was that I drew the back cover before I did the front, so I was able to fulfill my wish! I had initially wanted to include a page about risographs in the book, but decided to feature it front and center in the cover instead. It is a medium I love dearly, and plan to pursue in the upcoming semester.
Reflections
While we only did three major projects this semester, I found each project I worked on very fulfilling. I had a bit of experience working collaboratively before in Junior Graphic Design Studio, but in that semester, Spring 2020, the COVID pandemic hit and sent everyone back home, effectively ending the collaboration projects of the semester. Since then, I had taken a gap year in an attempt to wait out COVID/pursue my other artistic interests. However, in doing so, my original class of 2021 already graduated and I was left in a new environment full of people I had never met before. I came back nervous to not know anyone, but I actually found the class very welcoming to my alien presence. These collaborative projects helped me greatly to bond with my new classmates and feel like a part of the class.
Impact and Empathy
This was the first collaborative project we worked on, where my partner Jayna Mikolaitis and I translated a project from the design agency Hyperakt into a new form. We choose a project focused on girl’s education, and developed that further into a publication that educated about women’s health; and in particular, periods.
We had so many ideas about things we wanted to include in the publication that we couldn’t narrow down, and in the end, it became an explosive combination of scanned imagery, photography, noise effects, gradients, and more that somehow still worked together. Everything was printed on newsprint and then bound together by a red thread. Structurally, we were initially inspired by illuminated manuscripts and women’s craft. This then translated into deciding to design our booklet to match the visual language of a calendar, where the pages are flipped vertically and the folios run through each page like days of the month. Just as a period is a monthly occurrence that lasts for around a week, 7 consecutive folios are smeared red to show the time of month.
Our content was a massive research collection of articles, history, research papers, and personal interviews. We wanted the publication to both be informative about the cultural and historical context in which periods have existed, and explore why periods have long since had a negative connotation related to it. In addition to that, we made sure to include first hand stories that friends have had with periods, keeping the topic grounded and personal.
As Jayna was one of the few people I knew prior to returning, I found it very natural to work with her. I think because we had previously worked on a large-scale project together before (granted, it was a completely different medium), we were able to bring our own individual voices together in an exciting way.
Design in Question
In our next collaborative project, the group size grew by three, bringing in Chloe Carson, Antonella Jones, and Ken Rudolph to me and Jayna’s partnership. We were tasked with three readings: “What Does it Mean to Decolonize Design” by Anoushka Khandwala, “Designing Designing” by Edwin Schlossberg, and “Practice from Everyday Life: Defining Graphic Design’s Expansive Scope by its Quotidian Activities” by James Goggin, where we had to generate several questions in response individually that would serve as the foundation of the project. When we came together as a group, we discovered that a lot of our questions revolved around the same sphere.
“What is the difference between craft and design? Is there a difference?”
“How can the process be the product if it is not the output the audience is seeing?”
“How does one work within rigidity to make something new?”
We were all asking about things that related to all of the classifications and invisible boundaries that exist in graphic design, and how we found all of it so constraining. For once, we all felt like we wanted to break free from all of the restrictions and do something loose and fun. The idea of doing something 3-D was on everyone’s minds, as it went against the typical 2-D form making we had been doing for years, and paper mache was the natural solution to our budding ideas. We immediately conceptualized having hanging 3-D spheres, with a large central sphere acting as the center piece of the project. From there, we decided to make our risograph designs in the forms of strips so that it would facilitate the paper mache making process, allowing all of our designs to overlap and come together in unexpected ways.
I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but paper mache is an incredibly time consuming and arduous process. Each balloon needed multiple layers of newspaper on it before our risograph prints could be pasted. Even with our team of five, we only had enough time to make around 16 paper mache balloons, the majority of the time going into the two gargantuan structures that were 3 feet in diameter.
In the studio space, our sculptural forms felt large and significant, yet when we actually went into the installation location and hung the forms up, everything was dwarfed by the height of the ceilings and size of our space. After the first check in, we decided that we needed to engage the walls of our corner. We added the leftover strips to the walls in 8-bit cloud-like shapes, bouncing off the balloon imagery that was already there in the paper mache. On the hidden wall, I printed large vinyl text that announced the newfound title of our project, Out of Bounds. The bubbly typographic forms engaged well with the geometric shapes of the clouds and hanging orbs. These additions were what we needed to finalize the installation, taking it from a hanging experience to one that was all-encompassing.
Conclusions
Overall, I had a good time this semester bonding with my new classmates and spending more time on fewer projects. Everything we were able to make felt substantial, and I got to see the benefits of design collaboration in a way I didn’t have an opportunity to before. I want to thank James Grady for being a wonderful professor, as he was always supportive in our crazy endeavors and provided insightful guidance throughout the year. Thank you to the TA Jordan for the same reasons, and I want to say one last hurrah to everyone in our class for finally finishing the semester!
Blooper images:
