"Reality is the only word in language that should always be used in quotes." A line of lyrics taken from a song called Nervous Xians by My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, a favorite band of mine. 

Designing Modern Women was a project that introduced me to the systemic language of graphic design through composition making, observation and evaluation.

The goal for this project was to manage a more complex body of information and effectively present the information associated with a series of events. Working from given raw information we were to produce a functional program of concerts and theatre performances at the UIC School of Theatre and Music, in Spring 2015. Beyond satisfying the basic requirement of information clarity, the goal was to gradually work towards more expressive and experimental typographic formulations. 

This project explores designing conceptually. Taking Poe's Raven, a poem about a man losing his mind over a lost love, I found connections between his poetry and a modern day film, Black Swan, that deals with fragmented mental states. 

In this project I explored physical dimensions of typography as a medium and resource for graphic design applications. Three dimensional objects and environments were constructed, then translated into two dimensions.

My senior thesis was an exploration of a somewhat abstract idea: silence and nuance of sound. I chose this path because all my life I have loved music and have been fascinated with the science of sound, and while I've been aware of silence, I never thought about it's relationship with sound until now. As a designer, this subject has pushed me to explore connections between text and image in a way that I hadn't done before, in order to find a visual kinship between these two auditory elements. The design concept, and form, for my book supports and amplifies my subject in the following ways: 1) through exploration of white space, and it's relation to the idea of silence being an inverse to sound 2) through the placement and treatment of typographic elements that speaks to the subtlety and nuance that silence and sound straddle at it's closest proximity and 3) the lack of any color besides white, black or a combination of the two, visually conveys this symbiotic relationship of silence and sound.

In the following projects I explored narrative and storytelling through motion. With the Amélie project I expanded my digital literacy into narrative sequence planning, animation design process, and multi-media technologies. Emphasis was placed on both creativity and planning through the development of storyboards and the integration of type, image, and audio components.

This project consisted of a reconceptualization of an old book into the new ebook format. TIME The Year in Review 1977 focuses on TIME magazine’s chosen highlights of the year 1977. It also happens to be the year I was born, hence my owning of this particular volume.

In its original format it is arranged in a categorical layout, with articles and imagery filling the pages. This was TIME’s initial edit of what their editor’s thought was important enough to include in the book, as it certainly does not contain everything that occurred in 1977.

What I aimed for in this reconceptualization is an even deeper edit and condensing, or distilling of information. However, I only focused on events that TIME furnished with imagery, since not all articles in the book were accompanied by photos or drawings. In doing so I further pared TIME’s “important” data down, but expanded the overall experience of the event through focused imagery and writing. By utilizing text derived from the book and information acquired through online sources such as Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, and various news and media outlets, I supplanted the original textual information with an abbreviated synopsis, sometimes only a sentence long, to convey the meaning and purpose of the image and it’s significance in the 1977 timeline. This in itself is another type of compression of information because it has been filtered and processed many times over the years, leaving what I believe is the essence of the pictured event. In opposition of the original book, I have opted for as clean and minimalist layout as possible while still endeavoring to convey the story. I have also gone a step further and have dissected the images and their pertinent stories out from their original categories and arranged them in chronological order. A date is given in the upper left, and I have added two larger text elements highlighting TIME’s chosen category for the story the image refers to, and a second textual element that describes my own chosen category based on personally selected associated criteria. This not only gives an interesting contextual contrast, but also imparts my own personal sense of the event.

Over the course of an entire year, seniors in UIC's School of Design top professional-practice class, “Design Thinking and Leadership,” explored the possibilities and potential for the Art Institute of Chicago's digital publishing program, prototyping a digital version of the exhibition catalogue Van Gogh’s Bedrooms.

In this project I explored typographic form and expression. I engaged in textural investigations of typographic form and expression with an emphasis on composition (contrast, rhythm, tension), non-linearity, visual argumentation, dimensions, and the interplay between digital and analog operations. 

These are some design prototypes that I created for Randa Apparel & Accessories.

As designer/creative director for Better magazine (formerly Make It Better magazine), I was the Swiss-army knife of their Chicago advertising design team. I supported the sales and marketing team by analyzing, approving and directing digital and print advertorial designs, as well as creation of print and digital advertorials for many high-tier clients. I was also in charge of creating and maintaining sales and marketing collateral such as media kits, sales sheets, presentation decks, in-house ads, and a multitude of other design needs that were often on extremely tight deadlines. On top of that, I was the designer for all print and digital assets for the magazine’s prestigious annual Signature Events, which included the Philanthropy Awards Celebration, the Family Foundations Seminar, the Money, Values & Impact event, and the Best of Better Celebration Cruise.

Logo designs that I created for slotcar racing group.

Logo designs that I created for a slotcar racing product created by Ray Lego.