Firestarter & Other Classwork for Tell the Story of What You Make
Fall 2021
In the fall of 2021, I took the Olin College class “Tell the Story of What You Make,” which teaches different aspects of graphic design through project-based curriculum. We learn design principles as well as how to use Illustrator and Photoshop. Several of my projects for the course are displayed below, as well as my final project, a magazine featuring the art of Olin students that I titled Firestarter (inspired by Olin’s phoenix mascot). The printed magazine has a gradient stripe running from red to yellow on both the cover of the magazine and as a solid color header on each page, so that when viewed in print flipping the pages of the magazine has a gradient effect.
One of our first assignments in the class was to create a self-portrait using only characters from a font. I used the font “Over the Rainbow.”
Another project involved creating a visual “recipe” with an ingredients image and a final product image, inspired by the Ikea Fika cookbook. For mine, I chose to approach the prompt more abstractly, with the “ingredients” and “final” output for writing a short story.
Another class assignment involved creating an anti-binge drinking poster. We were required to use a video game theme, include the instructional text, and to have a catchy, video game-inspired phrase. I created this image by combining an image I took myself, the table with the cups, with images of the Gameboy and the Gameboy’s screen that I found online.
For this project, each student had to create a logo for an imaginary business called Country Joe’s Pets.
For this project (above and left), we each picked a past project we’d worked on, found a magazine page from a real magazine, and copied the formatting using our own project’s images and language.
I really enjoyed working with magazine layouts, so I chose to take the assignment a step further and create my own magazine pages (above and below). All three of these pages are heavily inspired by examples of magazines published in the early 00s that I found online. I also chose to return to magazine layouts (with a more modern aesthetic) for my final project, Firestarter.