/ / R3 _ Sult$

1. Fixed Projects

Album cover featuring layered pink cherry blossom shapes over a photographic garden scene with the title “Flow of Nature” arranged among the flowers.

Album Cover Design

Research a soundscape of your choosing. Create a design system of typography, color, image treatment, and graphic elements based on the essence of the soundscape. Write unique text for the artist name, album title, and song titles. Update all the extra important text credits and verbiage. Design the outer jacket with a die-cut, inner sleeve, record label, hype sticker, and a unique disc shape to be cut on the laser cutter. Put it all together in a grab-your-attention head-banging dance-the-night-away hands-on tactile vinyl record packaging.

Photograph of Uluru at sunset with large olive-green letters spelling “OUTBACK” placed among the grasses in the foreground.

MegaTyposaurus Rex

Research cityscapes, landscapes, and waterscapes of the assigned continent. Apply extrusion, focus, overlap, perspective, scale, shadow, and transparency to the word that describes the environment to enhance the three-dimensional space in the photograph. Make the type an object.

Black-and-white magazine cover and spread featuring tattooed figures, with detailed geometric and floral tattoo designs highlighted against dark backgrounds.

Subculture Zine

There are so many fascinating people in the world. Research a sub-culture that you want to know more about, make a presentation, and…

Poster depicting several gold swords emerging from a dark landscape beneath the quotation “The weapons of darkness tell us truths.”

Macbeth Poster

Learn the rhetorical figures as possibilities for communicating messages. Read Macbeth and watch three different movie productions of the story. Work in teams to understand the meanings of the rhetorical figures and develop ideas about possible images to use for the design. Design a poster that communicates some major aspect of the story.

Circular composition in black and white text on a red background. The words of the Typographic Oath spiral inward toward a central title while curved rules guide the reader through the text.

Typographic Oath Poster

Place your left hand on The Elements of Typographic Style, raise your right hand and swear to the Typographic Oath. Then explore the rules and break the rules of typography. Let’s play with type.

Architectural study that reduces a contemporary building to a system of lines, planes, and simplified structural elements. Railings, stairs, and façade components become repeating graphic patterns that establish depth and perspective. The restrained use of black and white emphasizes spatial relationships and structural organization.

Graphic Translations

Select from a given a list of topics. Create tracings and sketches before making a final selection. Use simple geometric shapes of lines, circles, and rectangles. Combine simple shapes to create more complex forms. Repeating lines are used to create planar surfaces and dashed and dotted lines are used to create surface texture and light and shadow features.

This composition combines the K with a descending swash that functions simultaneously as a decorative flourish and a secondary letterform. The extended terminal introduces movement and contrast against the rigid vertical stem of the capital. The balance between classical serif construction and expressive gesture gives the symbol both elegance and personality.

Typographic Symbols

Learn the anatomy of typography by exploring various combinations of two letterforms. Make successful combinations through understanding typography is a system. Create a symbol that retains some of the key structural elements of the individual letterforms while designing something unexpected.

The currency employs symbolic imagery associated with secret societies and religious iconography to establish a conceptual theme. Limited color palettes, large typographic elements, and geometric overlays create a clean and restrained aesthetic. The consistent placement of imagery and denomination information helps maintain cohesion across the entire series.

Bogus Banknotes

Admit it. You want to be Eric Masters, Willem Dafoe’s character from the movie To Live and Die in L.A., who’s an artist by day and a counterfeiter by night. Design a cohesive series of banknotes, both front and back, for a fictional entity. Research a topic, develop a visual language, and design. Let’s print.

The project satirizes processed food culture through elegant typography and premium food packaging conventions. The restrained palette, symmetrical compositions, and refined labeling system create a luxury aesthetic that directly conflicts with the subject matter. This contrast strengthens the conceptual premise while demonstrating careful attention to hierarchy, proportion, and visual consistency.

Culture Jammed Packaging

Select a product that you love to hate and culture jam it. Design a label system that creates engagement with an audience about a social concern relative to consumerism. Apply the labels to an appropriate three-dimensional form to enhance the message. Let’s jam.

This symbol system explores biological variation through the recombination of insect anatomy. Wings, legs, antennae, and body components produce numerous believable creatures while maintaining visual consistency. The project demonstrates a strong understanding of modular design and uses repetition and variation to create a compelling collection of forms.

Customizable Symbols

Develop your skills as a shape builder and symbols library user. Research, design and produce a set of customizable pictographic symbols. Design a base object and a set of add-on objects. Think parametrically.