TH+INK

Students develop exhibition graphics that explain why designers and manufacturers choose glass as their input over other materials to create various types of artifacts. They also make the ‘reverse’ argument for cases where glass is abandoned as raw material.

This ongoing collaboration with curator Marv Bolt, Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG) produced the following student projects that received the Institute for Information Design (IIID) award in 2020.

Students animate infographics by the Isotype Institute, pioneers of information design. They first identify the visual codes that encode the entities and and action of the original infographic. Then, they explore ways in which to sequentialize the narrative by storyboarding. Students finalize their animation by animating vector graphics using timeline based software.

Students express a sleep phenomenon by hybridizing analytical and poetic expression. Through posters they envision quality of sleep and show how the sleeper’s experience relates to sleep study data.

Students explore visual encodings to give concrete visual expression to numerical data. They design posters showing what it takes for fuels and natural flows to produce power in certain creative scenarios.

Students explore an intellectual topic of their interest through page or screen based design work.

Britany Machado’s series of “augmented reality posters” are centered around the principles of Descartes’ Six Meditations. The series begin with Descartes’ “first meditation,” on doubt.

Gameboard designed by Jacob Gyory as a special studio project. Captain Cosmos is a character-based game featuring a modular board, carefully constructed card designs and tokens.

Students explore an intellectual topic of their interest through page or screen based design work.

Students explore an intellectual topic of their interest through page or screen based design work.

Halle McMahon’s artist’s book “Faceless Pranksters,” is envisioning a Pablo Picasso poem by fusing typography with optical illusion art.

Artist’s book by Cindy Knickerbocker makes poetic impressions of architectural elements by blending drawings with concrete typography,

Students explore an intellectual topic of their interest through page or screen based design work.

Paige Monel’s information guidebook maps out the common flora of the northern zones of US. The book has a three stage iconography to orient and engage the the reader with the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the subject matter.

Artists’ book designed by Maya Kallman uses visual storytelling to communicate how psychedelics change the brain’s pathways and allow it to make new connections and abandon harmful thoughts.

Students explore an intellectual topic of their interest through page or screen based design work.

Artists book designed by Mengling Zhou explores how dream imagery can be expressed on page spreads. The book features compositional strategies such as layering and masking to enunciate various dreamscapes.

Students design books based on a typeface of their choice. Their challenge is to synthesize historic, narrative, and aesthetic components of the typeface in a seamless continuity.

Students compose short stories and essays as paragraph text, creating patterns that express their meaning. They explore spatial as well as sequential expression of textual content.

Students create iconography interpreting literary and scholarly content. They storyboard narratives based on this iconography, and consequently introduce words to storyboard entries, forming book pages.

Students designed infographics illustrating visual solutions of mathematical theorems.

click here to enlarge

Visual explanation of the Mercury space mission. The narrative is constructed by incorporating archival data of the mission timeline, radio transmission, and the orbital pattern of the spacecraft.

Yoonshin Kim (2012). Interactive guide evaluates performance of hybrid, electrical, and conventional passenger autos, drawing data from industry resources.

click here for the interactive version

click here for the interactive version

Students answered the question of what it takes to power a 100 Watt lightbulb for a year. Researcher Vaclav Smil assisted the course by providing energy data. Students came up with narrative schemes to compare the impact of fuels vs natural energy sources in producing energy.

interactive guide for the life cycle analysis (lca) of a typical cheeseburger.

click here for the interactive version

Students devise infographics showing the correlation between quality of sleep and patterns recorded by scientific devices during a sleep study.

I supervised a wayfiding project in collaboration with the City of Chicago Innovation and Technology department. Student projects were presented to members of several city departments, and they informed subsequent wayfinding efforts.

This wayfinding project for the University of Chicago’s Regenstein library was developed in collaboration with library personnel and my information design students. Designs were implemented in 2006.

Students construct multi-layered narratives from sources of fiction and non-fiction. They devise page architectures that reflect the imaginative space of their content. Adapted texts include Scene seven of Socrates' Trial, Future shock (Alvin Toffler), The Grand inquisitor (Dostoevsky), Jamming the Culture Code (Kalle Lash), The Pit and the Pendulum (Edgar Alan Poe); Memento Mori (Jonathan Nolan).

Books from the course were exhibited at SAIC's Flaxman Library, and acquired by SAIC's Joan Flasch artists' book collection and the Newberry Library.

students create seamless page sequences using a limited style palette of image, icon, and type; adapting fiction and non-fiction writing. a collection of these books were exhibited at the Sakip Sabanci museum, Istanbul in a show titled flow/debi.

graphic book that interprets the Miles Davis song "so what."

this page features books from the beginning typography course (2007). students design specimen books that probe aesthetic and historical dimensions of celebrated typefaces. 

exploring form and meaning; visual representation from realism to abstraction in a sequential book format. drawing from a mosaic of cultural / historical information, students compose a seamless image sequence portraying the essence of a city.

students devise side-by-side and front-to-back relationships between various textures. then, they frame these textures by a geometric or organic design patterns that progress in a linear or alternating sequence.

In this package design course subtitled "containment and desire," students explored pattern making for dimensional structures; creation of dimensional modules; expressive potential of space packing and unpacking ; and relationships between typography and surfaces.

They applied these conceptual variables in a final project, designing a packaging system for a product line of their choice.