TH+INK

Design Issues Journal cover art, Design Issues 34, no. 1 (Winter 2018).

I took a poetic infographic approach for this cover image. Intelligence emerges and gains ability to transform earth (back cover), then extracts, processes, and reacts upon the debris produced by this creative process (front). The background pattern reflects elements fundamental for existence, life and intelligence.

To design the iconography that I produced for this cover, I drew on a library of nearly 400 images that I compiled by visual research, sketching, and drawing. References include scientific representations, paintings, drawings, and photography.

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This infographic, designed from geologist Dick Naslund and archaeologist Hilary Becker’s data, was featured in ‘The Binghamton Nuvolone: Restoring an Object in Six Parts’ exhibition at the Binghamton University Art Museum. The motion-graphic that is attached to this image, demonstrates the approach of the Materials Matter App, an NEH-funded educational tool that I am developing with colleagues at SUNY Binghamton—from materials science, art history, anthropology, classical archaeology, and geology. The app uses motion-graphics to unify our knowledge of the material world from the human systems, down to materials, and elements on the periodic table. In this scenario, the app takes viewers from a visible painting down to how its surface atoms interact with x-rays.

The sample is switched from “lead white,” that was available to Baroque painters to “titanium white,” that has been available since the early twentieth century— in order to demonstrate this mechanism in a feasible manner. This sequence illustrates one way of identifying a painting’s elemental composition, that is, the use of X-ray fluorescence (XRF).

Had the XRF detected “titanium” on the Nuvolone, that wasn’t available to painters until the 1920s, it could have suggested forgery !

I co-curated this exhibition at the Binghamton University Art Museum (Binghamton, NY) with the investigators of an interdisciplinary seed grant and produced key infographics. My collaborators were Marv Bolt, first curator of science at the Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG) and Jane Cook, chief glass scientist; as well as Binghamton University colleagues Mark Poliks (materials science and engineering); Amy Robbins (anthropology); and design assistant Bethany Gordon. The exhibition featured posters generated in my Graphic Design III class that explored glass as an amorphous phenomenon—focusing on 10 objects from the Binghamton University Art Museum collection.

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click here to see the motion-graphic.

Infographic representing the creation of solar fuel by the “water-splitting” process. I was credited as co-author for this science outreach article for my graphical contribution to the experimental design process. (“Nanoengineered lone-pair active photocatalysts for more efficient water splitting,” with Louis Piper, Sarbajit Banerjee and David Watson, SPIE Newsroom, 4 April 2017.)

A motion-graphic and exhibition piece followed, demonstrating the collaborative design process that produced the infographic. The panels demonstrate the influence of design process (visual encoding, staging, and conveying action) in researchers’ thinking and their conception of the final product. The motion-graphic demonstrates the way in which researchers envisioned the process of “water-splitting.” (Thinking About Drawing, Tower Fine Arts Gallery: The College at Brockport, Brockport, NY.)

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“Speak to the eyes: Visualizing Information from the Ottoman era to the Republic,” traveling exhibition

Studio-X, Istanbul, May 18 – July 7, 2017.

Printtek 2017, October 4-8, 2017 at Tüyap Fair, Convention and Congress Center, İstanbul.

I served as academic advisor and designer for this design history and research exhibition which focused on how infographics were utilized to publicize reforms by the early twentieth century Turkish governments. At the core of this exhibition is a gallery of 10 data visualizations from the covers of government journals that are animated by 10 designers. Designers reconstructed the graphics through motion graphics, exploring their multiple intellectual layers. They, then, comment on how these graphics balanced aesthetic value and visual impact with data clarity.

I designed infographics illustrating the function of a neuron on this sculptural interpretation by Blazo Kovacevic, in collaboration with the Binghamton University (SUNY) Psychology Department.

Poster exploring a concise and clear graphical expression of “synthesis,” an experimental procedure devised to improve the nano scale usage of polymeric film. The design was realized during the grant-funded Image of Science workshop that brought researchers and designers together to explore jargon-free expressions of research projects.

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This graphic was designed during the grant-funded Image of Science workshop. It displays the correlation between voters' adherence to group norms and their potency to influence politics in five demographic categories, and according to party affiliation. The correlations are explored in four quadrants. Mini graphics derived from the main graphic highlight and explain the significant results of this survey.

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Advantage is an artist’s book hybridizing the language of infographics and comics. In the run of 84 pages, I have devised a fable of technology and the inclined plane, envisioning how techniques shaped human geography.  The book was produced in a board book edition of 6 copies (2016), as well as a short-run signature bound edition of 100 copies (2017). It is featured in the special collections of the Getty Institute, TheMet, MoMA, Ryerson Library, Newberry Library, and more.

The story is a culmination of my studies on design and technology history, as well as many years of teaching a graphic design course rethinking comic book storytelling. There are forty spreads, each serving as a historical stage, whose elements are largely modeled after visual representations of technology and warfare found in ancient and medieval artwork, and drawn from archaeological studies. Advantage envisions geographical advantage; the emergence of mechanical advantage; and inquires on how cultures tend to channel their knowledge in a purely visual narrative in the tradition of Gerd Arntz, Lynd Ward, and Frans Masereel.

The book's print edition was exhibited at the Thought Bubble festival in Leeds (2017), UK's largest comic art event; as well as the 2018 Fumetto Comic Festival Luzern, Switzerland.

Diagram outlining my 2019 project proposal, titled “Looking closer at “emerald green : our experience and knowledge of color.”