GRAPHIC DESIGN AT LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS
Starting in the summer of 2023, I made a bold decision to depart St. Louis and start anew in New Orleans. The Design Department is both an analog and digital melting pot of talent and camaraderie that picks up where I left off in St. Louis. The program embraces traditional and contemporary design methodologies and pushes the boundaries of human interactions and digital experiences. I’m currently on a tenure-track journey to help make the program bigger and better. I’m constantly influenced by this city and its surroundings and can see its reflections in our program and the work our Loyola community is doing. I think you’ll agree that we’re on the right track.
Projects posted in chronological order starting with the most recent.
DESIGN SHOWCASE 2024
The annual Fall event did not disappoint. I’m proud of our students and faculty for working hard and sharing an incredible amount of work. My courses featured work by Type 2 students (freshmen/sophomore), Data Visualization & Presentation (junior studio) and The Collective Student-Led Design Studio (juniors/seniors).
PROJECTION MAPPING
Our team dug in hard to learn and create content for Loyola’s annual holiday event, Sneaux. It was all hands on deck to pull existing holiday content while creating new animations for the 2-hour experience. While we hired a consultant to help us get over the initial learning curve, I’d like to think we’re a bit more prepared for next year.
Not bad for our first attempt at projection mapping!
Matt Normand spearheaded the animations/content. This wreath drop was the kick off for the night.
FALL 2024 MY PATH PRESENTATION
I presented my design journey to Professor Ben Benus’ Design History class in October. I shared my influeneces, inspirations, challenges, and opportunities to allow students to better understand my background and movtivations for the work I create and the courses I teach. I’m always ready to share how much work I created using a MacintoshSE with two 720K drives/floppy disks that had to be continually inserted and ejected depending on how complicated the project was. Still amazes me. I’d like to thank Ms April Greiman for inspiring us all to embrace the pixel revolution in the 1980s.
The Google Slides presentation consisted of over 60 slides and took 20+ minutes to present with time for questions after.
SUMMER 2024 FACULTY SHOW
I participated in and designed the identity for our faculty show: perípheríe. The show brought in former and current faculty with diverse backgrounds and skillsets. I really wanted to approach the show identity using analog processes. So we created vinyl letters, cut and applied them to the entry wall surface, rubbed colored and white chalk all over the letters and then removed the vinyl to expose the forms. It was an experiment that was somewhat successful.
My installation, 30 FRAGMENTS, was an interactive wall display that focused on my reality of building a life in a city that hasn’t quite caught up with the rest of the world. On one hand I’ve come to recognize that change does not come easy and on the other my thirst for change is the very thing that brought me to Loyola. It’s a fragmented existence that, for this show, is defined by the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I digitized my face to create Picasso-like fragments that were divided into 30 pieces of letter-sized neon yellow paper. Then underneath each of those was a lesson printed on a variety of neon-colored paper and stapled at the top. The viewer lifts up the top sheet of paper to reveal a lesson. I also designed lesson cards as give away items that viewers could take home.
I was happy with how the bright, neon colors stood out in the dramatic lighting.
I explored a variety of visual methods for showcasing old/new, boundaries, and movement. The final mark was translated using chalk and wiped away, exposing only the type.
MEDIA DAY BRAND IDENTITY SYSTEM
As part of my tenure-track requirements under the Service category, I create various brand work for my School and College. This particular project is focused on rebranding a popular event targeted to high school students and teachers across the state. Coordinated and run by our Communication Department, there were various objectives to design for: 1) The UX Senior Professional Practice class would be be designing an official app that will streamline registration and communications and 2) Shortening the name to Media Day and designing for a younger audience would be key. The color palette and type treatments are meant to give a modern vibe yet be readable and adaptable to all media usage.
Several iterations were explored that featured a variety of journalism and communications vernacular. The final mark is a combination of typefaces that show diversity.
SPRING 2024 PEACE CONFERENCE JOURNAL
Every spring, the junior design class creates and produces the journal handed out to the 3-day conference. Given timing issues, I took it upon myself to design and produce the 20-page plus cover publication. My colleague, Daniela Marx, created the patterns based on the conference theme of memory, peace, and conflict.
The Risograph was used to print the pink cover.
2024 SENIOR CAPSTONE
The theme for this year was ITERATE. Twenty-three students participated in creating immersive projects from everything to an interactive letterpress history experience to an app that helps residents be rescued or residents help rescue those affected by hurricanes to a ceramic tile numbering system that glow in dark for better night vision. More to come here.
Each senior had to display their work in the Diboll Design Center (formerly Diboll Art Gallery) for both academic and public viewing. A hardbound book was also created to document the entire year of each senior’s accomplishments at Loyola. Congratulations!
Social media post sent to alumni, design community, students, and staff promoting the event.
EARLY SPRING 2024
A busy start to the year included branding work, color and image experiments, and my first Mardi Gras!
I’m continually influenced by color and the process of iterating. DoubleSpace Gallery is an identity I created for the Design Department. Im choosing colors I see all around me.
There’s only so many filters a design guy can make. But I’ll keep making more.
If it’s one thing this town is known for, it’s how to throw one hellavu parade. Mardi Gras 2024 was no exception. Six weeks long and over 70 to choose from, it’s a spectacle like no other. And that’s not necessarily a compliment! (I purposely didn’t post the trash photos—the ones where city crews scour the streets every night with water and haul off literally thousands of pounds of crap to some mysterious landfill. If only birds and fish could embrace the beads in a more sustainable way).
FALL 2023
What a start to my first year Loyola Design! If this is any indication of how things will go, I’m all in.
The end of the fall semester means Design Showcase is happening, a show-and-tell open house of every design course and student pin-ups for all to see. My Typography 2 and Collage Design classes did not disappoint. Super proud of what they’ve accomplished and look forward to the next Showcase.
The School of Communications & Design hosts these incredibly immersive workshops for high school students throughout the region. It’s branded as FRIYAY (they’re only held on Fridays) and is becoming more popular every semester. This particular workshop is lead by the one and only Karoline Schleh who teaches our drawing, printmaking, and book arts courses. I asked to her to print on some old advertising pages from Life magazine—one particular page was so old, it disintegrated on the press. Cool!
Makers Day #2 / Silkscreen. It was meant to be a t-shirt making session… I went rogue and started printing on whatever else I could find. Thanks, Matt Normand.
For some reason, I have this fascination with digitizing my face and experimenting with color, pattern, and texture. Hidden meaning? Blame it on Covid / online learning.
To get to know our colleagues better, we created MAKERS DAY events where we learn and play with different mediums. This particular event focused on Risography. Each of us made a funny face, digitized it, and then added our own personal design. We kept overprinting different colors and patterns. (Erin Kim got to have some fun, too!)
Daniela Marx is chair of our Design Department and one amazing designer. She spent over two years designing and producing her one-woman show, Wonderful is Now. It’s quite possibly one of the most visually rich experiences I’ve witnessed and a great amalgamation of Loyola Design. What an incredible way to kick off the Fall 2023 semester.
Exquisite Corpse became popular during the Surrealist movement in the 1920s. Artists were looking for collaborative ways to generate unique compositions by taking turns drawing sections of a body on a sheet of paper, folding in thirds to hide each individual contribution. The first player drew the head—then, without seeing that head, the next artist added the torso, and the final artist added the legs/feet. From this, a strange, comical, often grotesque creature would emerge.
Fast forward to 2023 and our interpretation realizes how collage design, coupled with a unique book binding process, offers a myriad of creatures that only exist in this setting.
In the Fall of 2023, I taught a collage design course for the very first time! I had part of the summer to delve into research, buy and read books, collect examples, and experiment on my own. This particular exercise will go down as one of my all-time favorites—weave and replace collage. I make stuff up as I go along.
Every Wednesday evening the Design Department hosts Forum, an opportunity for faculty and students to engage with guest speakers, participate in workshops, learn from and be inspired by each other, and connect outside of the traditional classroom. This particular workshop focused on creating modular letterforms using traditional methods.