The International Criminal Court
I designed a book about the International Criminal Court (ICC), an intergovernmental organization in the Netherlands that prosecutes individuals charged with crimes against humanity. My book gave an introduction to the court and provided in-depth examples of the contexts and proceedings of three important court cases that were held in international tribunals like the ICC. For this project, I collected and organized texts, such as legal documents and historical essays, into a legible and compelling narrative. I utilized grids, paragraph and character styles, and more tools in InDesign and Illustrator to create a cohesive typographical system that I utilized throughout my 44-page book. Through the iterative, 3-month long process of designing the book, I learned how to conceptually express content and ideas through design, and how specific typographic and design choices can affect how that content is interpreted.
Bauhaus Invitations
For this project, we were tasked with designing a printed invitation for an event in history. I chose the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923 in Germany and developed an interesting visual and typographic composition to showcase relevant information about the event. I incorporated this composition in both a printed and digital/animated format. For the printed invitation, I experimented with different colors, weights, and textures of the paper eventually choosing a thick cardstock. For my animated invitation, I translated my design to a non-physical form, adjusting the proportions and hierarchy to fit a digital format such as a social media post.
Printed Invitation
Animated Invitation
The process for creating the invitation involved several weeks of ideation and design iteration.
Week 1-2 (initial approaches):
Weeks 3-5 (refining chosen approach):
Week 2: Experimenting with one of my initial designs
Week 3: Changing the orientation and playing with color and grid layouts
Week 4: Revising my grid and type treatment to create 2 drafts
Week 5 (Final): Balancing the composition by ensuring type alignment and proper hierarchy
The Influence of Black Artists on American Music
Music has been an integral part of my life, and I am always curious about exploring the histories and contexts of the songs that I listen to. I recognized a common theme in Western, specifically American, music, which was the massive influence of African American artists in the development and characterization of popular genres in music. After learning more about these artists and their impact, I wanted to commemorate them in a series of posters focused on different popular genres of music, which highlighted the African American artists responsible for spearheading the genre, as well as both popular Black and non-Black artists in the genre that they influenced with their music.
Typography Broadsides
Broadsides have been a significant part of the history of typography as they allowed type designers to display the qualities of their typefaces on a single, large sheet of paper. For this project, I designed broadside posters for a serif (Bodoni) and a sans serif (Futura) typeface. I included the names of the original designers of the typeface, the year they made it, paragraphs about its histories and features, large characters displaying important visual elements of the typeface, and a listing of the main letters, numbers, and symbols. I also designed a broadside using my own typeface called "Los Alamos," which I created by using tracing paper to replicate widths, angles, and serifs for different characters, and then making vectors of each character in Illustrator.
Original designs for Futura and Bodoni broadsides:
Creating a custom typeface (Los Alamos):
Final broadsides:
