For the first ten years of my career I practiced my craft — advertising art direction — exclusively by hand. To help me in the design process itself, I hired specialists. For typography, for instance, I chose a firm I admired in Minneapolis where the typographers would hand cut the film negatives letter by letter. In those days — the 1980s — each area of design had master craftsmen. I can remember one day walking into a warehouse with thirty-foot ceilings. On the back wall I saw a large horizontal canvas. The artist was suspended from scaffolding and covered in speckled paint dots. I wasn’t in an artist’s studio looking at a masterpiece half-finished. I was admiring a billboard — a hand painted one-of-a-kind billboard. This is not to say that the old methods of working by hand were entirely idyllic. They had countless drawbacks. IT took several days to put together a layout with Pantone paper and transfer type, only to realize the color combination was wrong and the time wasted. Because processes were slow and labor-intensive, choices were limited. In the mid 1980s, design studios and creative departments started using computers. For the first time I was able to select a color scheme, click a button, and see seemingly endless options instantaneously. It wasn’t long before the skilled craftsmen of type were replaced with digitized fonts loaded directly onto hard drives. Suddenly, the idea of working type by hand became economically unfeasible. The typographers closed up shop, threw out their old tools, and went out to look for new jobs. Several years later billboards were being painted on vinyl sheets right from our electronic files. Perfect replications of the original reproduced with speed and precision saved time and manpower. The new process had replaced the billboard artists almost overnight. I saw a generation of artisans exchanged for a generation of desktop publishers. Just like the craftsmen of the past, older methods of graphic design have been cast aside finding their way uneasily into the category of fine art. And now fine art, too, may cast them aside. Recently the Dean of the Fine Arts Program at Virginia Commonwealth University has held several meetings where he discussed the elimination of older printmaking methods in order to expand digital printmaking. Computers, it seems, will not be simply content with displacing the old hand processes; they want to eliminate them. For most young designers the computer has completely replaced the hand in every stage of the design process. I’ve noticed in many cases designers aren’t problem solving outside of the computer. It isn’t even considered. Certainly, the goal and outcome of my creative project were not intended to revive antiquated hand methods, at least as they historically existed. But hopefully, I’ve created something original by combining both hand methods and modern technology. If nothing else, I want younger designers to think beyond the 20GB hard drive as the only tool in their process.

A double standard has permeated all of Indian society throughout its history. Persecution is part of everyday life though routinely ignored. This abuse of power has led to identity-based politics, which harms members of non-dominant groups. My work is an expression of my personal experiences within the social and cultural landscape of India. I externalize this embodied experience through text, video, and ambient sound creating an environment of the pressures of the expectations of others. The videos follow the cycles of my thought and open up an examination of culture and society. To enter the space is to enter a mindscape and see Indian society through the eyes of its own alienated citizenry.

This conclusive study is based upon a project of a social awareness campaign designed to reduce screen time in older children and Millennials. This is achieved through the uses of all modern aspects of a campaign: posters, advertisements (social and print), as well as a trio of posters that explain the concept of the campaign. Lastly, this all pulls together with the intended use of both a microsite and mobile app.

These typographic and image based designs explore multiple components of design including: legibility, manipulation, communication, and conventionalism with an emphasis on information graphics. Drawing from influences of the Futurist designers and Dadaist typography, I take the mundane details of an object such as a baseball or car to create excessive amounts of visually stimulating graphics. Through this process of gathering detailed information, I take photographs, draw by hand and scan images to fully understand and portray an objects identity until I feel satisfied that the objects visual potential has been exhausted. These personal expressions are combined to form printed material and book designs. These works explore the experimental use of type and image montage to break the rules of graphic design while keeping some of the traditional aesthetics associated with this discipline. My love for detailed subject matter may be seen in my books, The Baseball and 1 (One) which include subject matter from my childhood interests such as rare 1/1 baseball cards.

Sleep paralysis is a condition in which the REM sleep in an individual fails to disengage after they awaken. This leads to full body paralysis, during which vivid and often terrifying hallucinations occur. I myself suffer from sleep paralysis. That being said, I have always been intrigued by the concept of exploring serious topics through the use of comedy. In essence, that is what my project is about. I wanted to make light of sleep paralysis. By doing so, I hoped to deescalate the terror in the mind of the sufferer. Comedy is possibly the most effective method I have in my arsenal, as I have found that it has helped me to overcome my own issues with the condition. I have attempted to create a source of information for my fellow sufferers that is both informative and non-threateningly simple in its delivery of the information. To summarize, this project was to give people like me something that I never had access to when I first developed the condition and was severely unprepared for dealing with it. I aim to be an artist that is both humorous and helpful in everything that I do, and it is my hope that I was able to succeed in this task.

This research has two primary aims, both of which relate to a study of graphic design methods within the field of popular culture. The first aim is to identify the visual codes which appear in the sleeve designs of a broad selection of UK punk seven inch singles released between 1976 and 1984, and to analyse these in relation to a number of different punk sub-genres and audience groups. Sleeves are mapped stylistically, geographically and chronologically to show the evolution of a range of distinct design strategies and the diasporic effect on the development of punk in the wider regions of the UK. The documentation of these graphic traits reveals the ways in which distinct patterns within punk’s visual language evolved and eventually became entrenched over time. The second aim is the development of a transferable, theoretical and practical method for characterising the formal properties of a range of graphic material. A number of print-based and interactive visual matrices accompany the written thesis, as a key component of the research methodology. In this way, the relationship between graphic design, time and place, and audience is made clear, while the interactive display allows for a more complex range of textual information to be shown, along with the opportunity to review links between sound and visual form. Visual material extended from this research was exhibited successfully in Southampton, London and Blackpool during the spring and summer of 2007, and a number of public talks were given by the author. The major contribution to new knowledge and understanding is in the development of an analytical methodology that has focused on punk graphics but which could be adapted to the study of other graphic artefacts related to visual manifestations of youth culture in the late 20th century and beyond.

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No description available.

This document is written from the perspective of the Oasis Link community, a group of dissidents who have resettled in the Mojave Desert sometime in the near future. It is a speculative design document. Surface is what is visible. It’s the crust of the earth and the face of a meteorite—the coat of a jackrabbit and the waxy skin of a Mojave Prickly Pear. Surface is superficial, but it also reflects and defines the underlying structure of something—it makes the hidden visible.

Communication design, as a significant tool for sustainable social advocacy, is still under-explored both academically and within creative practices worldwide. In a developing country like Pakistan, the role of social advocacy as an effective tool for social change is ambiguous. This practice-led research aims to redress this imbalance by exploring the development of graphic communication design approaches (GCDs) for social advocacy, in response to a low Pakistani literacy context. The investigation presents a contextually responsive GCD model for design development (Fig3a: 13), as a critical design framework, for synthesising graphic languages in Pakistan. This is presented as an alternative non-traditional communication approach, in response to contextual constraints (socio- cultural, literacy levels and/or available resources) in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The practice asserts contextually driven communication design approaches for sustainability, and it also contests the effectiveness of universal design approaches in culturally diverse contexts. Using a case study approach, a semiotic analysis of three forms of Pakistani graphic media, namely Lollywood billboards, Pakistani truck art and political campaign posters, is undertaken. As a mapping stage, this explores the development of vernacular communication systems and visual codes to advance effective graphic languages in Pakistan, while a simultaneous review of the literature and practice supports the case studies. However, the analysis relies primarily on a pilot study, contextual interviews and collaborative design projects, with Pakistani truck and billboard artists, to identify critical graphic frameworks operative in the Pakistani visual context. This leads ultimately to the final participatory design-led synthesis stage, which co-designs social advocacy interventions in the low- income community of Dhok Chaudrian, Rawalpindi. The interventions address the major issue of open garbage dumps, and the co-design approach highlights the significance of communication design practice evolving as a sustainable social engagement tool in response to a specific issue in a specific context. This thesis is organised in four major sections. Chapter One introduces the research aims, structure and organisation of the thesis. Chapter Two reviews the context and identifies gaps in graphic communication design theory and practice in a social context, before it grounds the research in the Pakistani context. Chapter Three maps the Pakistani visual vernacular through a case study analysis, a pilot study and three collaborative design projects in the cities of Lahore and Rawalpindi. This establishes critical communication design frameworks as a rhetorical design framework (pg. 88) and contextual GCD principles (pg.77) in Pakistan, which are then tested in the proceeding final synthesis stage. Chapter Four entails the design synthesis, which involves testing and evaluating previously developed critical frameworks through co-design sessions in the Dhok Chaudrian community, Rawalpindi. This chapter focuses specifically on community participation as a tool to inform the development of effective graphic languages for design sustainability. Co-design sessions, as an interaction prototype, are evaluated for short-term impacts in terms of engagement, with custom- designed communication tools for a low-literacy target audience. As for resources, this research draws on contextual interviews, collaborative design projects, contextual observations and design evaluations, all of which are supported by published material. The research-led design process is systematically documented as design taxonomy, to be valued as a transferable model of communication design practice. Organisations, artists and designers, with similar research or practical ambitions, can take away the underpinning principles from this research practice and locate them within their own respective practices.