Between Dreams and Reality (2022)

Why did I lose years of my life to this?

This project was centered around learning art direction and interaction design and creating a graphic visual identity to iterate into a microsite prototype for a cultural arts client. Our microsite accompanies an art exhibition of tapestries telling the story of dreamlike hallucinations experienced by the artist. The site walks users through the narrative, materials, and processes used to create the tapestries, enhancing understanding and appreciation while conveying their eerie and surreal themes. The full tapestries are never shown, opting instead for close-ups of tapestry details, encouraging viewers to visit the exhibition to see the works in full.

Research first to expand our minds

The project began by studying the work of precedent designers to extract guiding design qualities. These were applied in three weeks of graphic exploration, where concepts were explored extensively, before being refined into three distinct art direction strategies expressed as posters and graphic assets. The work of precedents influenced our semantic and practical approach and encouraged us to expand our exploration beyond design software, for example using photography and a scanner to abstract type and imagery.

Diverge diverge DIVERGE

Creating the visual identities involved pushing boundaries of legibility and structure, which initially came at the cost of cohesion. A challenge was maintaining an exploratory approach while retaining underlying design principles. To ensure the work had intention, the tapestry imagery and narrative became the driving force of the project, with all visuals aiming to abstract and enhance their meanings. This facilitated meaningful exploration in a narrowed design domain and led refinement of graphic explorations into distinct art direction strategies with specific identity goals.

Converge???????

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Diverge again ???! (shocking and unexpected)

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What do you mean we have to actually finish the project?

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Takeaways

This project taught me that good design is digestible expression of deep domain understanding.

The details are the design, and the design is the presentation. Weekly presentations sharing project progress for critique taught me that ideas are only as valuable as your ability to sell them. As the main content strategist, I created the narrative and slides each week to present our process as a compelling story.

You should be able to justify every design decision. In weekly critique, it became clear that nothing could be done "just because." This led to considering design decisions more holistically, drawing on domain and client knowledge, to ensure all decisions were grounded.

Don't design in your head. Each project is an opportunity to learn as much as possible about a domain, through secondary research on history and context, and about visual design, by referencing existing patterns, and studying work of designers across industries.

Presented final design direction process and identity at SFU Undergraduate Conference 2023.