The University of North Texas Communication Design program needed a call-for-entries poster to promote an alumni exhibition. As both a UNT professor and a UNT alumni, I was happy to have the opportunity to work on the project. The intent of the exhibition was to ‘reveal the best kept secret in design education,’ a theme that sparked both the title of the show and the poster imagery.
In February of 2011, I gave a poster presentation at the College Art Association annual conference in New York City entitled How the Sausage is Made: A Model of Communication Design Practice and Education. The result was 32 square feet of convoluted information graphics that included, among other things, a beef steer, butchering diagram, and sausage grinder—all integral components of the design process.
The Denton Domino Hall is a music venue located in—you guessed it—Denton, TX. Each month a pair of musicians, one local and one national, perform on the Domino Hall’s porch. It’s an intimate outdoor setting and always a good time. To help promote the concerts I created a new identity mark for and a series of four silk-screened posters.
Designed to promote my MFA graduation exhibition, this poster is a composite of details culled from my thesis document.
It all started in Hanover, PA, later known as the Snack Capitol of the World. An enterprising young couple named Bill and Sallie Utz began producing Utz Hanover Home Brand potato chips in their summer kitchen. Batch after batch, at 50 pounds of potatoes an hour, they laid the groundwork for what became the United States’ largest privately owned snack brand. What makes Utz potato chips so special, so unique? Nothing. They’re just potatoes, grease and salt—like every other potato chip out there. It’s not the chips that are special, it’s her: The Little Utz Girl. Those rosy cheeks could sell anything. This is a self-authored project about her life.
My thesis project, The Dismissive Actually, contains a series of self-initiated design projects exploring themes of visual wit, personal narrative and processes of idea generation. The projects describe my creative methodology through typography, hand lettering, photography, illustration, information graphics and creative writing.
4tomorrow, an independent, non-profit organization based in Paris, is the annual host of an international project to promote active citizenship through the medium of design. I designed and illustrated a poster to raise awareness of breaches to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
There’s nothing more challenging than designing your own identity system. Except maybe particle physics. Or world peace. Or rolling your Rs like native Spanish speakers do. But still, you get the idea.
As an Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas,
I have the opportunity to work with certain student organizations as an academic adviser. One such organization, the UNT In-Line Hockey Club, was planning to sell t-shirts to their fan base, the Hockey Bunnies, to raise money for paying tournament fees. I volunteered to do the shirt designs and developed this bunny icon as the mascot.
As a MFA student in the Design: Visual Communication program at Virginia Commonwealth University, I developed a body of work centered around the notion of design authorship. The underlying idea being that, by serving as the author of the content I design, there is a more perfect union between form and message. And, from a pedagogical standpoint, authoring your own message exercises a broader design skill set than simply providing visual interpretation for pre-existing content. The Escapist Fantasy Tourism Board is one such example of the self-authored projects I created while at VCU.
