The impulse to resolve and interpret messages drives creativity and understanding. As graphic designers, we may try to communicate familiar ideas in an unfamiliar way - unfamiliar, but unique, memorable, and engaging. By utilizing the theory and practice of psychology and the cognitive processes involved in assigning influence, importance, recognition and associations with signifiers in the mind, we can strengthen visual communication. Theoretical and applied psychological techniques and models will provide the basis for an exploration and development of new methodologies and tools that will enhance the creative process for graphic designers.

Memory is like afternoon light penetrating the windows of a fast moving car. The light coming through the trees creates images, reveals objects and faces, and introduces fluctuating sensations of warmth and coolness. Sometimes these images appear in logical sequences and at other times they are fleeting, surreal, and ambiguous. While memories are often presented linearly as fact, in actuality our stories only grasp at the truth. They are fragmented, imagined, and rearranged. By examining the intersection of reality and imagination in memories we see retelling as an act of creativity.

Somewhere along the way, I found that graphic design in professional practice was becoming synonymous with form and style, and losing its connection with concept and audience. I’m trying to find a way back.

In this thesis project, my intention was to integrate diverse high school courses with poignant subject matter to increase the amount of learning students can achieve. This unit plan explored a Prince George High School (Virginia) multi-class cooperative effort involving biodiesel production. The project involved creating a biodiesel refinery built by Production Systems classes according to plans purchased from the Internet. The research for converting used kitchen oil into biodiesel and the titration of the fuel was conducted by Chemistry classes. Graphics Imaging Technology students created a logo, a poster, and designed brochures that described the processes and benefits of this product. Marketing classes conducted consumer surveys and devised a product distribution plan.Graphic Imaging Technology, a Career and Technical Education course, has long been linked to art education. For example, graphic design students incorporate art in many phases of their design projects. Specifically, during their preliminary creative thinking, students sketch thumbnails of possible design solutions and regularly use their drawn or painted illustrations in their printed pieces. Additionally, film photography, which is commonly viewed as a fine art, has been used by graphic design students for several years. This art form has been replaced by digital photography in many design studios and school classrooms, but the principles of balance and composition remain the same.Other teaching strategies such as interdisciplinary study have also been introduced into graphic design and art class curricula. The rise in cross-curricular studies is indicative of the importance of varying the classroom instruction to offer the most diverse learning environment to students. Math and English are most often combined with unrelated classes in multi-discipline education, but regrettably, science classes typically are not. Since few fields of endeavor do not incorporate other disciplines, a multi-discipline class collaboration and unit plan which included high school Production Systems, Chemistry, Graphic Imaging Technology, and Marketing classes was developed.This project sought to establish a working relationship among various high school classes while providing a mutual learning environment. Additionally, disciplines that do not ordinarily interact with each other had the chance to take part in an renewable energy project that inspired new ideas and developed an increased consciousness of the environment.Finally, as students were involved in all facets of this biodiesel project, they experienced a working environment similar to the "real world". Establishing school-to-work programs that facilitate a smooth transition from high school to the work force is one of the main goals of the Prince George High School Career and Technical Education department. Students communicated their thoughts, worked together, and helped one another the same way as if they were employed at a business.

In our journeys on the open road, we travel through a landscape of visual imagery composed of patterns, rhythms and a spectrum of changing colors. Our previous experiences, mental and physical attitudes and expectations, shape our perceptions. By visually interpreting and presenting my experiences of the journey on the open road I hoped to tell a story of how the open road energizes the creative spirit. My goal was to explore how the landscape is altered by motion and speed as we pass through it, and how the journey can be experienced in various ways. I wanted to investigate and interpret how we shift the boundaries of our perceptions.

Employing the designer William Morris as a source of inspiration, this project seeks to explore the call for nature and beauty as a part of our lives. Moreover, it interweaves the necessity for experience of the sensual world (the five senses) with the cerebral world (a requisite to igniting the internal imagination)—a concept embodied in the form of the book. It advocates a redefining of the book as an imagination sculpture (the external and the internal) reflecting this new definition.

This document explores the use of motion within design to defamiliarize a message. The objective is to expand a viewer’s level of understanding through prolonged perception. I experiment with this idea using present-day tools which afford my own movement during the capturing process to create various visual interpretations of motion. I look to László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Eadweard Muybridge who explored the use of the camera, the new technology of their day, to understand its potential to create a new visual language. They believed the lens of the camera was the eye of the future—and the public’s exposure to the camera’s possibilities an enlightening transcendence. I also believe in exploring newly developed tools; in visually researching their intended and unintended use to discover new perspectives in not only the way we see and represent the world, but the way we understand and represent ourselves in relation to the study of our field.

I take a poetic approach to graphic design practice. It is a subjectivist approach, which recognizes our human right to willful interpretation. Designers navigate form, culture, and history like poets through language. We are subjective, exploratory engines drawing formal inspiration from figural and analogical associations. Subjectivity in graphic design practice is complex, however. Subjectivity privileges the interaction between object and individual. When we designers interpret the literal world with the poet’s omni-directional sensitivity, we intentionally and intuitively create objects that accrete inexhaustible, extra-literal value for their audience.

[pt] Na presente pesquisa investiga-se a prática da ilustração e as possibilidades para a construção de uma reflexão de âmbito teórico sobre o assunto. Identifica-se um descompasso existente, na atualidade, entre a prática, de qualidade, da produção de ilustração e a produção de textos críticos sobre a atividade. Entende-se a ilustração, a partir de suas especificidades, como uma arte visual parceira do design gráfico. Apresenta-se uma visão da ilustração contextualizada na história das artes visuais e correlacionada às reflexões próprias da questão da imagem e do campo do design. / [en] The study investigates the practice of illustration and the possibilities for the elaboration of a reflection of theoretical scope. There is a discompass concerning the current quality practice of illustration production and the production of critical texts on the activity is identified. Illustration is understood from its particularities as visual arts associated to graphic design. An approach of illustration in the context of the history of the visual arts is presented and related to reflections proper from image issues design field.

Dwelling on Thresholds reflects upon different modes of living/being, how we feel in different rooms and whom we decide to share space with. It asks how the spaces we dwell in affect our ability to access common and private spheres when needed or wanted. Along the way, tactility has come to play a big part in the work which has visually crystallized into a 30 m2 threshold curtain made up of floor plans of all apartments I have lived in over the past 10 years. An abstract information graphics with textures and colour nuances reflecting levels of well-being, alienation and moods in-between. The accompanying publication investigates our constructed environment as well as modes of thinking and dwelling in ‘the common’.