ABSTRACTED, 2018


​Abstracted is a workshop that was facilitated at Pratt Institute in their senior design class. 
Students were tasked with finding an open source type face and creating writing based on its qualities.
This writing was then translated into visual narratives and uploaded on a shared blog. For more examples click here.

Font: Beauty School Dropout

Outline the beautiful curvy fish with chopsticks dancing from fingers.
Bubbles dance around in the wind like an elegant Gatsby.
My fingers bounce off the screen in a patient longing
​for those three round dots. 

​ Tia Chinai / Pratt Institute

Font: Bubble3D by Vladimir Nikcolic

Ideally we would bounce around in a castle, while eating Skittles together.
They ask me if I can blow my gum into a bubble; they must think
I’m an amateur. When I see balloons, all I can think about is how
​much pressure can be put on them before they pop.
​ANALOG IMAGE MAKING, 2018


Using principles of design and composition, students worked with one chosen material to create fifty analog images.
Before starting the project, students worked through writing prompts to establish deeper relational
understanding of their chosen material and their interest in image making.​

Hannah Concepcion, Sophomore, Virginia Commonwealth University: Design Tech, 2018

Dynique Moore, Sophomore, Virginia Commonwealth University: Design Tech, 2018

DIGITAL TEXTURE


​Using the fifty the images created in the Analog Image project, students were asked to refine twenty-six of their strongest
​composition's and edit them in photoshop. This challenge students to consider foreground, background, and color. 

Ricardo Ortix, Sophomore, Virginia Commonwealth University: Design Tech, 2018

Alicia Kim, Sophomore, Virginia Commonwealth University: Design Tech, 2018

Type Integration


Focusing on negative space and visual balance, students were tasked with taking the twenty-six letters of the alphabet
and integrating each letter into an individual composition. The goal was to integrate these letters
in as an tool of emphasizing the strength of the established composition.

Emma Umberger, Sophomore, Virginia Commonwealth University: Design Tech, 2018

Joy Westkaemper, Sophomore, Virginia Commonwealth University: Design Tech, 2018

Fold Down Zine


This project served as a culmination of projects through out the class. Students were challenged with creating a
visual system that considered hierarchy and format. Working with a fold down zine, they considered the duality of their
piece as a zine and poster. The zine showcased a refined piece of writing about their personal visual
aesthetic, in context with the progression they made throughout the semester. 

Hye Kang, Sophomore, Virginia Commonwealth University: Design Tech, 2018

Samm Truitt, Sophomore, Virginia Commonwealth University: Design Tech, 2018

Jessie Mackenzie, Sophomore, Virginia Commonwealth University: Design Tech, 2018

 Material Compositions & Curation


​Students split up into groups and collect 200 photographic compositions: fifty monochromatic images, fifty cool tone images,
and fifty warm tone images and fifty images that include typography. Each group was then tasked to curate  three five by ten gridded compositions, using their collected photos. They were challenged to create connections using sequencing. motion, rhythm
and leading lines.  The last phase of this project was to wheat paste their strongest composition as a team. 

Virginia Commonwealth University: Summer Intensive, 2018

Motion Graphics


​Students choose three existing material compositions, that they refined in photoshop. The prompt given during the phase was to explore how they could use highlights, shadows, depth and a lack of depth to strengthen the pre-existing sight lines and compositions.
​Students then crafted a single sentence narrative to create gifs that had a minimum of twenty layers. 

Vectored Visual Narratives


Students were broken up into groups and tasked to create visual narratives. Each student worked
on an individual 18 x24 vectorized poster. They then incorporated text into each poster. 

Celina Bolanos, Betsy Kinstle, Lucas Lee, Josh Guinn,  Virginia Commonwealth University: Summer Intensive, 2018

Ben Wood, Georgia Svoboda, Elizabeth Wyrick, Eric Couture,  Virginia Commonwealth University: Summer Intensive, 2018

Manifesto Project


Students were assigned to write a 1000 word manifesto and create a visual system that supported their beliefs.
The learning outcomes of this project were to gain comfort and experience in concept-driven processes, advance problem-solving
skills in publication/book design, develop abilities with deep hierarchies and complex grid structures,
and use InDesign to control type in quantity, and to work with Illustrator & InDesign.

Jessica Hill,  Bowling Green State University: Typographic Systems, 2019

Emma Powers,  Bowling Green State University: Typographic Systems, 2019

Bradford Simpson,  Bowling Green State University: Typographic Systems, 2019

Workshop Run
​Principles Gestalt
Symbol Making