Identity and Other Untruths:

Harmonizing Authorship with the Artifice of Design

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 MFA thesis comprising written and visual components. This includes an 119-page book of research, poetry, and visual art, along with an accompanying short film, collectively exploring the paradigm of Authorship that is typically absent from graphic design while intrinsic to the creative fields that inform it. Through my writing, I encourage harmonization of more creatively "truthful" practices of authorship with the more artificial language of design to transform a designer's output and in turn their identity. I present my theoretical writing in an essay titled "The Division Bell" in which I employ the ideas of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Michael Rock, and Meredith Davis, among others.

 

I use myself as a rhetorical lens of sorts in the creative written and visual work, which is both inspired by and an application of my research process. This includes the film, found below; as well as the poetry; photo-collage compositions blending self-portraiture with found imagery; and the type and layout design of the book itself. While the book is glossy and perfect-bound, bathed in CMYK pigments and the Swiss rationalism of Neue Haas Grotesk, it is also replete with scribbles, jagged white space, and the humanist color of Robert Slimbach's old-style Arno Pro. These choices speak to the contrasts that drive my work: the human and industrial, the organic and rational, the expressive and controlled; and the intersections of theory and praxis, process and product — all tensions that can be harnessed to reveal new truths about the role of the designer and the scope of their craft.

 

View complete thesis book​.

Read selected poetry.​​​ 

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