Identity and Other Untruths:

Harmonizing Authorship with the Artifice of Design

​​

 
119-page MFA thesis comprising essays, poetry, and visual art exploring the paradigm of authorship typically absent from graphic design, while intrinsic to the creative fields that inform it. In my major essay titled "The Division Bell," I employ the ideas of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Michael Rock, and Meredith Davis, among others, and encourage harmonization of more creatively "truthful" practices of authorship with the more artificial language of design as a means of transforming the designer's output and in turn their identity.

 

I use myself as a rhetorical lens in the creative written and visual work, which is both inspired by and an application of my research process. This includes a short film, linked below; as well as the poetry; photo-collage compositions blending self-portraiture with found imagery; and the type and layout design of the thesis 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.​​​ 

​​