Identity, Type, Poster

Identity system for Scrum (agile) marketing team

Naming logic: etymology of scrum= rugby. Rugby term 'blackdot'= the mark in the middle of the crossbar connecting the goal posts used as an aid to kickers with their aiming. Blackdot= goal

Blackdot's brand tone and aesthetic logic utilize another connotation of the term, dissonance and protest. Sprint names: critics of capitalism & culture. Blackdot typefaces: named after cardinal critiques of capitalism

Identity

Identity designed for Atlanta-based firm Titus Law, a self-started office specializing in areas of personal-injury and business law

Installation, Type. 130 x 30" 

Photo Credit: Kristen Shaw

Process: letterforms made by layering the vectors of discarded diagrams, and then laser-cutting those shapes into cardboard

Intended use: office installation for NYC start-up that develops products on-site from crowd-sourced ideas; intended to display company's tagline 'We Make Invention Accessible' in brushed aluminum 

Actual application: cardboard mockup and subsequent typeface intended for signage, fabrication, and other 3-D or large-scale use

Icons, Signage

Photo Credit: Louis Seigal

Icons and signage designed for MakerBot Factory, Brooklyn-based manufacturing site for MakerBot's desktop 3-D printers, and MakerBot HQ, for a press event announcing their merger with Stratasys 

Catalogue, Identity, Type

Designed w/ Haynes Riley, ft. photog by Erin Sweeney + Brittany Nelson

Photo Credit: Kristen Shaw

2011 graduate book for Cranbrook Academy of Art, featuring the 81 artists, designers, and architects in Cranbrook’s 2011 class

HereHere title: celebrates Cranbrook grad book tradition, noting a marked history of using here in title (e.g. 2005: Made Here, 2006: From Here On Out, 2008: The Here and Now). HereHere focuses on PLACE and its definitive, formative, and educational role at Cranbrook; each artist portrait is a full-bleed spread of that artist in her studio. 

HereHere tone: celebration, reference, reverence, whim; set by juxtapositions color, form, and texture

Work-In-Progress

Hybridized zodiac, combining eastern and western pictorial signs; ongoing project

Web, Marketing

Responsive microsite and assets designed to promote Financially Fearless book and events

Identity, Web

Logo, exploration, and site design for NYC-based psychiatrist, Dr. Namgyal Bhutia

Brand assets— art-directed photo shoots, illustrations, patterns, packaging, info-graphics, etc— created for Quirky, a startup that crowd-sources product ideas and then puts that idea on shelf

Identity, Mastheads, Covers, Illustrations

Womanzine is a topical, digitally-based zine that started amongst woman-friends at a local woman-dinner. Since inception, Womanzine has expanded its scope to include submissions from women nation-wide.

Identity, Signage

LearnVest Live 2014 event signage, decals, workbook, and overall identity re-design/ client's re-design objectives: more gender-neutral, easily updated, modern and flexible

Type, Signage

Hand-drawn type and signage for LearnVest Live 2013

Drawings 01–03 are the process of searching for an intuitive logic within the analytical, syntactic logic of navigational structures. Using a collection of mapped and diagrammed imagery as my source material, I traced and connected various lines of information until I resolved a composition that contained a sense of the Known and the Unknown. This process yielded three different large-scale drawings, each using logical way-finding lines to become lost in the process of making while flattening hierarchies of information. The drawings stem from my interest in the territorial boundaries of language and identity construction.

Web, Marketing

LV+Putnam SEM introduced potential Putnam clients to LearnVest's program for personal finances, showcasing the online tools, apps, and access to Certified Financial Planners that uniquely tailors each program to the user. The SEM content needed to convey the 6-step structure that defines the program while highlighting the resources that make it unique. The end result: responsive, card-based layout enumerating the branded steps, punctuated by lifestyle images & profile pics that describe the unique resources.

Packaging

In-room fragrance packaging designed for the W Hotel

The series is a set of blind portraits, playing with the old idea that the generic portrait one draws is some form of self portrait as well as the premise that drawing is a mechanism that relies on and reveals self-knowledge. At some point, my work shifted from the abstraction of placeless place to the figuration of characterless character— the construction of Other through subconscious repressions of Self, collectively and individually. 

"Self-discovery through a complex and sometimes arduous search for an Absolute Other is a basic theme of civilization, a theme supporting an enormous literature: Odysseus, Aeneas, The Diaspora, Chaucer, Christopher Columbus, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver, Jules Verne, Western ethnography, Mao’s Long March. It grows and develops, arriving at a kind of final flowering in modernity. What begins as the proper activity of a hero (Alexander the Great) develops into the goal of a socially organized group (the Crusaders), into the mark of status of an entire social class (the Grand Tour of the British “gentleman”), eventually becoming a universal experience (the tourist)." —MacCannell

"Those who study or write about the primitive usually by defining it as different from (usually opposite to) the present. After that, reactions to the present take over. Is the present too materialistic: Primitive life is not— it is a precapitalist utopia in which only use value, never exchange value, prevails. Is the present sexually repressed? Not primitive life—primitives live life whole, without fear of the body." —Torgovnick 

“In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.” —Debord 

(left to right) 01 The Conductor; 02 The Composer; 03 The Impostor; 04 The Other;  05 The Drifter; 06 The Doubter; 07 The Buyer; 08 The Thinker

Work-In-Progress

Pattern studies and explorations, currently in production

Photo Credit: Kristen Shaw

Portraits of eleven famous cult leaders: Marshall Applewhite (Heaven's Gate), Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, David Berg (Children of God), Claude Vorilhon (Raëlism), Jim Jones (People's Temple), David Koresh (Branch Davidians), Shoko Asahara (Aum Shinrikyo), L Ron Hubbard (Scientology), Jim 'Father Yod' Baker (the Source Family), Marina Tsvigun (The Great White Brotherhood), Charles Manson (The Family)

Print, Digital, Marketing

Printed and pdf versions of LearnVest's welcome kit designed for new premium members

253 x 54 in

Masonite & plywood structure: Built with Charlie O'Geen

The cultural portrait of primitive life shifts with time, revealing the unconscious desires and fears of present society. Compelled and frightened by the unknown, we approach the primitive as a collective manifestation of the Other: out of fear, we dismiss and dehumanize; out of intrigue, we romanticize and eroticize. We attempt the mysterious outside from the bounds of an understood inside, engaging in trained pursuits of self-knowledge. In the circles that we travel, our fragile boundaries maintain us while our perseverance makes us human. 

Infographics created for LearnVest articles on subjects of The American Dream, retirement, and work-life balance

The project of Drawing 04: Animal Other bridges the abstraction of my earlier work (e.g. Drawings 01–03) with the figuration of later work (e.g. Character Study 01), shifting in focus from the navigation of non-place to the portrayal of non-character, i.e. The Other.

Web, Marketing

LearnVest's home page re-design 

Lettering, Construction

Photo Credit: Kristen Shaw

Kenneth Burke,
Introduction to What

Wandering by a canal
Through meadows in a dream
Then later
Uninvited to a party,
Asking
“Where is the secret passage?” 
(which, when found,
proved to be dirty and unusable—
my coat dragging through the damnedest plaecs)
I must read more Schopenhauer
(him saying in sum:
“Will must blindly seek completion,
“Life is sex, and Death excretion”)
Remember how once snow-flakes
Stood still in mid-air,
The earth coming up to meet them?
Yet I’ve been different 
Ever since I found
That snow is crazy

Some people read maps and see the grids of place fairly easily. For me, something gets lost in translation. I generally miss the geographic connection; I move straight through lines that cross over color and shape—that simple geometry that connects and divides place, identifying passages of transportation as boundaries of territory. Those mapped lines punctuate composition with an authority that claims geographic fact and objectivity, as though the land itself authored the representation. And at the same time, the visual language of maps seems to hold the internal logic of a script that writes about the geometry of existence... something words can access on a strictly utilitarian and analytical level. The mystery of that indecipherable yet understood  language quietly offers potential that exists in-between tensions of constructed limitation. I want to go to there.

Web

Site proposal for Metcenter

Posters created for the group show Google [(your name) + Naked], in which each member performed a google search of her name + 'naked' and then created poster/s from the material

Screenshots from my brief but intense obsession with Draw Something; all drawings were done on an iPhone with my index finger

Site designed for the band volcano! using straightforward HTML framework and visual styling that allows effective and easy customization

Thread and nails on wall

Guide to Residential and Commercial real estate in Austin

Gif-ts for the third birthdays of my niece, Chora, and nephew, Asher

Posters designed for Detroit's 2011 Jazz festival