classwork
A few featured projects from my design and typography classes during my time at Northeastern.
Book design, typography,
prototyping, UI/UX
WHEN?
Sep. 2021 - May 2023
WHAT?
the denim tour
A prototyping assignment involving creating a landing site in Figma for a made-up event.
aiaia booklet
A book design assignment involving presenting two parallel narratives in one book.
typographic postcards
Some type study assignments involving choosing typefaces and creating informational postcards for them.
the denim tour
“Create a single-page website for an event — real or imagined. This could be a music festival, movie release, stage play, performance art piece, exhibition, or basically anything with a date or dates in the next year. You must create a desktop and mobile version.”
When tasked with this assignment, I decided to create a fake tour landing site for The Blue Jean Committee, a fake Eagles-inspired band created by Bill Hader and Fred Armisen for their show Documentary Now!.
desktop
mobile
The audience I had in mind for this page was old fans of the band - I wanted to rely a little on nostalgia, but give everything a cleaner look to appeal to younger fans. I aimed for a fairly warm, colloquial tone, but a little grandiose as well - again using nostalgic and vivid language and imagery to make viewers feel connected to the band and brought back to a different time. Because of that, I wanted to start the page off with a full-screen video of clips of the band together and in concert, transitioning from a live recording of their playing to a standard recording of their song. I created and edited the above video and set it to play on loop at the top of the page.
For a home page button, I created a white stroke of the band’s logo, and filled it in in full on its hover state.
In a fully-fledged version of this landing site, users would be able to manually enter their closest city into the text box, and a drop-down menu would appear with eligible cities.
For all the non-denim or navy blue sections of this page, I wanted to create a design inspired by the vinyl cover of The Blue Jean Committee’s hit album, Catalina Breeze. I went for a bit of a cooler tone and decided to forgo the grungy texture for a bit of a sleeker look, while still emulating a 70s design style and evoking that soft rock nostalgia.
check it out for yourself:
desktop ⬈
iphone ⬈
aiaia
“Design a short book with two active narratives that either compliment or contrast one another. The layout you create for the texts should inform the overall meaning of the piece. For example, does the juxtaposition of the two texts reinforce the meaning of one? Does it change the meaning of both?”
At the time I was assigned this project, I had recently finished reading Circe by Madeleine Miller, a modern retelling of the story of the witch Circe from Homer’s Odyssey. It was a beautiful, epic book, and added a depth and richness to Circe’s usually flat and cartoonishly evil perspective. I was intrigued by the idea of taking an older translation of the Odyssey - specifically one translated by a man, as many Classical Greek translations are - and contrasting the text of Odysseus coming across Circe’s island with her point of view from Madeleine Miller’s novel.
When it came to differentiating the material on the page, I really wanted to emulate the nature of each text visually. The Odyssey translation I chose is traditional and literal. Its form is rigid - it is written in verse, and numbered every five lines, as Greek poetry often is. I kept that structure for my interpretation - each line ending in its designated place, everything always left-aligned, always numbered. Circe’s text, alternatively, is expansive and exploratory. After the introductory section, I allowed it to take up space on the pages in a larger variety of ways.
flip through:
typographic postcards
kepler
“Design a 6 x 9-inch double-sided type specimen card to promote your chosen typeface. Use OpenType features to highlight the flexibility of the typeface. Highlight the character and personality of the typeface you’ve chosen. You may use any imagery you like to achieve this, but be sure the typeface is the main focal point of your design.”
For this assignment, I was very drawn to the typeface Kepler because of its beautiful science and nature-inspired glyphs. I wanted to create a postcard design that highlighted those glyphs, and used them to make something symmetrical and intricate to reflect Kepler’s origins.
I was very drawn to ideas of symmetry and inversion when it came to Kepler’s front and back designs. I wanted to make them feel elegant, delicate, meticulous, and diagrammatical.
Using circles as a centralized shape felt useful in emphasizing Kepler’s celestial inspiration. Having the circle outlined on the front and full on the back was emblematic of moon phases to me.
anisette
“Choose a typefaces from the collections. Study the anatomy / characteristics of the typeface chosen. Highlight the unique characteristics of the typeface using letters, number, glyphs. Develop Four designs (double sided) that highligh the typography / designer chosen.”
This was my first type study assignment of this nature a few years ago, and I decided to choose Anisette - I was very inspired by the varied widths of the letters. Even though in reality Anisette has more of an art deco style, I ended up taking things in a different direction.
At the time I created these postcards, something about the playfulness of Anisette really made me think of a retro-futuristic style. I think particularly the two character widths (especially when unconventionally combined) really emanated a funky, space-age feel for me.
Looking back, these postcards are definitely not my cleanest work, and don’t do the most amazing job at showcasing the typeface. I probably would’ve chosen to stick with the design’s art deco inspiration if I had the chance to do this again. But I did have a lot of fun making anachronistic collages, so much so that I ended up making three extra postcards through my experimenting.