An Absurd Memory

New assignment! This is one of the first projects we as students have done for an outside client. The goal was to capture the essence of seven short plays by renowned playwright Samuel Beckett for an upcoming performance at Johnson County Community College. The plays include:

Act Without Words II: In which two people of disparate personalities are stored in sacks.

Ohio Impromptu: In which an old man reads from a cryptic tome to an old mute man.

What Where: In which there are only five left of a group of four men.

Play: In which three burial urns take turns spinning yarns.

Come and Go: In which three women sit on a bench.

Breath: In which there is breath.

Footfalls: In which a sick child either exists or does not.

Death and confusion play major roles in each performance, which is why my main graphic consists of a sightless skull. The icons overlaid on top represent imagery from the individual acts. They are loosely joined by broken, ashy lines, implying the thematic ties that necessarily join each, but only in a superficial - or broken - nature.

Bring your kids!

The Roaring Five-Years-From-Now

This was past of an art history project, the assignment was to create an educational product that could be sold in a museum gift shop to teach people about a particular movement. Hence this art deco desk calendar. It's chock full of all kinds of lovely prints and fantastic information about the era, the art, and the legacy of art deco.

Poster in this image is © Art.com and Steve Forney. Used non-commercially in an academic setting.

Road Trip!

Here are a few travel magazine covers and titles I designed!

I'll Make You a Pizza You Can't Refuse

There's a pizza place nearby with a mafia theme. Their current menu doesn't really suit their restaurant - it's built around buffet and delivery orders, but finding a way to order the pizza you want is a bit of a mess. It lists all kinds of things you don't need to know while in the store and things that don't do you any good outside the store, like the contents of the salad bar and the drinks available at the drink fountain. Here's the original for comparison.

I redesigned and streamlined their menu, turning it into a tear-away notepad. The focus was on user experience, and I wanted a design that would be easy for the customers and cooks to interact with. This menu explains everything you need to know about building a pizza with little pieces of mafia theming sprinkled throughout. I also redesigned the logo while I was at it.

It's the Bombe

 Cryptography! Or as my great-grandpa used to call it, fubswrjudskb!

This has been an ongoing project for my layout design class, and it's finally getting to a point where I'm ready to call it presentable. The project is to construct a tritone newsletter for a non-profit organization. While my classmates are off raising awareness for worth-while organizations like the WWF or GlobalH2O, I decided that I like word puzzles and made a newsletter for non-profit hobby organization the American Cryptogram Association.

The neat thing about making a newsletter for a group dedicated to hiding messages in things is that you get to hide a bunch of messages in things. Take this logo, for example.

This logo is a rotational cipher for the word BOMBE, which is a reference to the machines used to crack the Nazi ENIGMA codes during World War II. If you take 360 degrees and divide it by 26 (letters of the alphabet), you can assign a different letter to each distinct point on a circle. I indicated this by the point on the circle that doesn't have a triangle on it. The outer ring is B, the next ring is O, and so on. The result is a neat little explosion with a neat little hidden message.

This is the cover! The main focus here is the tritone coloring - only the colors used in the entire document are the red, orange, and blue shades along the left edge. The dark brown is a combination of all of these colors, and the raindrop imagery is just lighter and lighter shades of blue. In theory, this entire newsletter could be printed with just three inks.

And here's the interior spread! It's very busy, very rigid, and very wordy, just like cryptography. Because this composition is for a hobby organization, I wanted to include articles and information that would be interesting to casual cryptographers. This is a bit of a departure from the philosophy of the ACA, but its accessibility is perfect for bringing in new members and keeping current members informed and entertained.

Method to Madness

 Click to enlarge? Yes, you can. Go for it. Follow your dreams. I believe in you.

It's not strictly part of my graphic design classes, but this handout I designed for a schizophrenia presentation in Psychology class is pretty fancy.

Kinda makes me wish I was doing the OCD presentation so I could change the order of the last set of icons. Or change fonts midway through. Or make the whole thing slightly askew. Or stop brainstorming ways to torment those with mental illnesses.

The title font is Quaver Sans by TippleType, and can be found at LostType.com, an awesome site for donationware fonts.