I worked on a large number of films, email designs, and graphic identity explorations for Vassar College during my time as a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at the Vassar College Office of Communications.
Congrats Admitted Students
I produced and edited over 14 student interviews for the Vassar College admitted students experience.
The 3d pieces were developed as limited-edition T-shirt graphics for Vassar Communications. The concept for these designs is “defamiliarizing the familiar.” I chose the Vassar ID card as well as the phrase “VASSAR COLLEGE” to amplify and multiply to the point of unfamiliarity. As this was originally created for a Vassar Admission project, I attempted to riff off of the Chermayeff+Geismar+Haviv type treatment of “Vassar.”
The series titled “movable type,” was inspired by my mentor and co-worker George Laws, Publications Director and Graphic Designer at Vassar. He taught me about the philosophies of Albers and others at the Bauhaus, and insisted that I study the historical origins of writing and printing in order to understand present typographic form. While the serifs of Roman script were created from the materiality of brush strokes, I sought to emphasize the quality of endless, materially unlimited repetition as the medium’s unique signature for my digital art works— an idea I came across while studying the work of John Maeda in the MIT Media Lab in the 1990’s.
This work, while contemporary in its use of 3D rendering, attempts to hearken to the Chinese tradition of wood block printing in form and composition. Most typographic works are read left-to-right, top-to-bottom. I used the architectural tradition of isometric rendering to base this composition on regular angles, defamiliarizing the way that students read “VASSAR COLLEGE—” a phrase permanently burned into our minds as Vassar students and often rendered dull.
Modeled and rendered in Blender 3D with Cycles and Freestyle renderer and processed in Illustrator.
