Harvard Film Archive June 2011 brochure, 2011. 10.5” x 5.5”. 

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The aim of this project was to publicize the Harvard Film Archive’s June offerings in the form of a 10-panel, folding brochure, an exercise that posed a number of artistic and strategic challenges. I arrived at my final design by asking myself a number of questions, chief of which was:

How do we attract a wider audience without estranging existing patrons? 

While some members of this “wider audience” might be familiar with the films and directors featured at the HFA, I felt it would be safe to assume that most would not be acquainted with Jerzy Skolimowski or Luis Bunuel yet would nonetheless appreciate the opportunity to discover their body of work. I did not intend to advertise to the public at large—rather, my target audience was the corps of well-educated professionals who had an appreciation for the arts yet were either ignorant of the HFA or did not feel that they had time to devote to it. 

In order to attract this “discretionary” viewer, I wanted to incorporate as much imagery into the brochure as the content would allow, using enigmatic, full-bodied film stills to breathe life into descriptions of movies that often defy description. I wanted to emphasize the ability of the HFA to accomodate the schedules of even the busiest viewers and to effectively communicate the richness of its programming. At the same time, I felt it was necessary to stay true to the avant-garde spirit of the HFA’s repertoire, and so strove to create a sophisticated, unconventional layout.

I thus arrived at a compromise: a central, calendar-mosaic device, which is the first panel of the interior spread that readers see when they open up the double-gate folds containing of all the “background” information. Its aim is to act as a “supergraphic” — a graphic device stuffed to its gills with information, with something for everyone. A reader with no prior knowledge of Skolimowski may not react to the title (or even description of) “Hands Up! (Rece do Gory)”, but she may find her interest piqued by an image of Stalin with four eyes.

Foreign Policy Magazine special issue, July 2011.

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In my proposed re-design of this magazine, I attempted to develop a bold, simple typographic grid system that married the conservatism of academia with the sleekness of modernism. Analysis of Foreign Policy Magazine’s feature stories, reader Letters and current visual identity led me to conclude that the magazine’s current readership primarily consisted of academics and students, but that the magazine was (like many others) trying to entice a younger, more discretionary audience while building out the original base. My design is an attempt to reconcile these two goals, to integrate rather than alienate. 

Proposed suite of TV on the Radio re-issue materials, June 2011.

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The objective of this project was to translate an artist’s musical style into a visual identity and to create a brand around that identity. My proposal for TV on the Radio consists of a suite of re-issue materials in the form of three CD covers, an iTunes card and a poster. 

I wanted to create a visual language for TV on the Radio that is multi-layered, at once natural and synthetic, and rich in metaphor and emotional timbre. To me, they are masters of the art of uncovering—and reveling in—the strangeness of the familiar. 

I went through several rounds of iterations before I settled on an “identity” that I felt adequately conveyed what I saw when I listened to TV on the Radio. Ultimately, I chose to create mixed-format collages in order to show both the surreal poetry and the richness of the band’s electro-symphonic arrangements. I deliberately composed each palimpsest with images not only created using different mediums (i.e. painting with photography) but also wholly unrelated to each other, with only an allusion to connect them.

Thus, NASA satellite photography serves as a backdrop to a Rousseau painting, a cave from the school of Romantic painting floats above a Rodin nude, and a man pulls himself up a rock face in a photograph, unaware of the 19^th-century extra- (or sub-) terrestrial world he is about to face.

Sources: Henri Rousseau, Ernst Haeckel, Auguste Rodin, Ivan Aivazovsky, Joseph Wright, NASA, Google Images. If I have used any photographs belonging to you, please let me know and I will gladly credit you.