Side Banner Ads created for the Cortland Standard Website

Page setting for special advertising sections.

Side Banner Ads created for the Cortland Standard Website

Center for the Arts - Homer is one of Central New York’s preeminent presenter of the arts and a proponent of community enrichment through world-class entertainment and arts education. Located in Homer, NY - C4Arts hosts a concert series each Spring. Sponsored by the Cortland Standard Newspaper this season, promotions were made for each artists for the Cortland Standard Website as well as for social media. The goal of this series was to design interesting web banners and social media posts that would visually tie a wide range of artists together while still giving each it’s own personality.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the artists in the spring concert series were rescheduled and the promotion pieces were never released.

Center for the Arts - Homer is one of Central New York’s preeminent presenter of the arts and a proponent of community enrichment through world-class entertainment and arts education. Located in Homer, NY - C4Arts hosts a concert series each fall. Sponsored by the Cortland Standard Newspaper this season, promotions were made for each artists for the Cortland Standard Website as well as for social media. The goal of this series was to design interesting web banners and social media posts that would visually tie a wide range of artists together while still giving each it’s own personality.

In a world that is continually diversifying and becoming more blended, I’ve seen many people who experience difficulty navigating between the language and culture they gain from their heritage with that of their place of upbringing. By combining language with the experiential and the immaterial, ‘Inheritance’ seeks to evoke both the challenges and the rewards of growing up bilingual in a multicultural America — that while understanding is often difficult, with time and effort language can fall into place and communication can become clear. 

‘Inheritance’ requires viewers to interact with mounted ‘shelves’ in order to read poem by aysha syed; through shadows, mirrors, and fill-in-the-blanks ‘Inheritance’ pushes the way the viewer reads and creates challenging roads to understanding.

I’m hopeful this project will be meaningful to those that regularly confront multiple languages and cultures; and that it translates the process necessary to express oneself to others who may not speak the same native language. I also hope that it communicates what understanding feels like — both the challenges and the rewards — to those who don’t often have this struggle.

broken english

when my mother struggles to spell a word in english
i want to break the entire language
into little pieces
so the edges of these letters
stop cutting her

Inheritance (Book) works in conjunction with the project of the same name. Tying together personal anecdotes, interviews, quotes, poems, and images - both personal and works in process - this book seeks to take the reader along a journey of identity through tradition and language. Included are interactive pieces only available through the physical object.

Take an essay film and make it into a publication, include a transcription of the film in its entirety. 

The Gleaners and I by Agnes Varda

Serious but lighthearted, Varda creates a film about the modern take on the old activity of gleaning fields. Woven through her narrative, Varda discusses the act of artistic gleaning - interviewing and picking the pieces of the people she observes and films on her new hand held digital camera. Self referential and observational, Varda films her own aging hands and hair along with the stories of gleaners in cities and farms. 

In reference to Varda's self observations, included on each spread are timestamps marking when the spreads were created and revisited throughout the book making process. An exposed spine supports the evidence of making and the scraps of chipboard used for the cover marks a modern day 'gleaning' of the studio where the book was made.  

Organized Salad is a collaborative publication created by UIC’s School of Design graduate graphic design students. Students designed 4 page ‘booklets’ around a topic of interest with found articles. Each week, designed booklets were given to a different student, who then designed another 4 page booklet addition to the original weaving in their own personal topic of interest while keeping in the design style of the original . After 4 weeks, all the booklets were combined, printed, and bound by the graduate graphic design students at the UIC School of Design graduate studios, combined studio class.

Labyrinth was created in response to poster design workshop at the Visual Communication Institute HGK in Basel, Switzerland led by Leander Eisenmann.

Poster design prompted to take a single word and illustrate it in a poster resulting in Labyrinth, which seeks to discuss the difficulties of language. Language, even in a native one, can become a labyrinth that you get lost in; sometimes it’s hard to express what you want to say just like the difficulty o navigating your way through a maze or a labyrinth might be. Speaking is hard, but when you have an ‘ah ha’ moment, things suddenly fall into place and everything becomes clear.

The Daily Faux was created as part of a collaborative workshop between the UIC school of design and the Visual Communication Institute HGK Basel, Switzerland graphic design graduate students

Workshop brief:

We live in the historical twilight of the printed newspaper, at the cusp of a new era in which both “everyone is an author” and the news we read no longer exhibits the assurance of truth. From the point of this greater accessibility to the tools of publishing, as well as the political uncertainty which seems to follow from it, we will conduct a workshop, looking backwards to the heyday of print and forwards to its obsolescence, in the experimental production of a “fake” newspaper. 

Students will form two teams, each of which will organize a news office for the editing, design and printing of two news editions, an evening and a morning one. Time is scarce in our production scenario: offices must work quickly and figure out shortcuts in their production process in order to make their deadlines. A crucial emphasis of the workshop is on the self-organization of production. How the office works together and co-ordinates its multiple activities is perhaps the major challenge. You must discover production shortcuts and work fast and imperfectly “in circumstances where urgency demands destroying the stages of progression.” Are divisions of labor necessary or do they slow things down? How might editing, typography, and printing be merged as activities in order to make production faster and the news product more interesting?

A note about down time—If you’re waiting for some material to arrive to begin your work, think about how you can accelerate some other part of the total procedure while you wait. And/or reflect on the process in writing.

This is an exercise in experimental editorial form. The newspaper is our conceptual template, but the document you put together need not imitate the look of a newspaper. It should rather experimentally iterate its structure of juxta-posing unrelated elements into an imaginary coherence. Benedict Anderson writes, in 1983:

What is the essential literary convention of the newspaper? If we were to look at a sample front page of, say, The New York Times, we might find there stories about Soviet dissidents, famine in Mali, a gruesome murder, a coup in Iraq, the discovery of a rare fossil in Zimbabwe, and a speech by Mitterrand. Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each other? Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each other or of what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition shows that the linkage between them is imagined.

This work is meant equally as an experiment in typographic form — in the degree of complexity and order you can develop within this highly compressed process. The design should seek to to visually distinguish and relate all the heterogeneous content, as well as formulate a system which allows for maximum decision making among different designers.

Words by: Henry Jack Fisher

ONE: presents a cross-section of work created by graduate students from the UIC school of design during the 2016 - 2017 academic year on a one-to-one scale. ONE: attempts to give an honest and authentic portrait of the program, the students, and their working processes. A mix of works-in-progress and finished works are reproduced at one-to-one scale to give a sense of actual dimensions, original contexts, and physical properties. ONE: can be read in multiple directions and folds out to a single, large-scale poster that emphasizes the cross-disciplinary and collaborative nature of the program.

Photos by Alexandros Skouras

This series of photographs was taken over the course of one semester. Each graduate student received the same three compartment desk drawer at the start of the semester. Each page of this publication explores how an individual occupied this identical space over time, unknowingly being observed and photographed.

Partner off and create a new piece based off of a combination of both of your design styles. Take their work and make it your own while still maintaining their voice. 

Poster series juxtaposing topics of interest with opposing ideas - analog vs. digital, handmade vs. computer generated 

"Arranging One's Books" - Include the whole text and apply it to organizing your own library. 

The first place to start in organizing a library are the books, next are the book shelves. In creating this pieces, organizing books becomes interactive again: should they be by color, alphabetically, by publication date? Perec takes the reader through this thought process and that journey can be taken through the interaction with the miniature bookshelf. In order to read the text the books must come out but by the end, with some help with Perec, some advice can be taken about how to put them all back.  

"We are a nation of immigrants. We are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the ones who wanted a better life, the driven ones, the ones who woke up at night hearing that voice telling them that life in that place called America could be better." - Mitt Romney
 

America is based on this idea that all are welcome; the statue of liberty stands to say Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But in this age we are becoming more and more closed off, opposing the very ideas we claim to stand for. The irony holds true that our claims are not how we appear and instead we have created a box for ourselves instead of being as open as many dream. 

A set of three 24x36 posters designed around TV food personality Alton Brown. The posters contain a set of catch phrases and the name of the variety show tour 'Alton Brown Live'. Constructed out of post-it notes in reference to the way Brown communicates with fans via Twitter, a map of the United states points to the stops on two legs of the tour. Each destination is made out of popcorn kernels, an ingredient highlighted in the show. 

Intentionally left empty to be sold at stores in children's candy aisles. Shoppers would come across this empty box and be faced with the facts regarding rates of hungry, malnourished, and starving children globally while attempting to partake in feeding their own children excess sugary snacks. Each box purchased would have proceeds going to feed hungry children around the world instead.