Alyssa Sullivan

This assignment is geared towards the misinformation that has been spread and the harm that has been inflicted upon society by not confronting the 2020 COVID pandemic with care. 

Spring 2020

For this assignment, we were tasked to create a helpful voting guide for peers/students in our age range. I focused on mental health and voting. My research began in studying disabilities and voting, trying to understand the common difficulties a person might face in going to vote as well as the process of voting, such as searching for a candidate that will represent you. As my research progressed, I found a much larger theme: mental health associated with voting. Voting can be such a tedious process that is often overwhelming, especially according to the peers I interviewed with prior to beginning my design. I focused on the three phases of voting: before (Prepare), during (Vote), and after (Heal), because each phase is worth considering your personal mental health during already tense times. Each hand out I crafted also includes a coloring page I designed for encouragement and relaxing.

A Shuffle Through Time, Fall 2019

Mobile thumbnails for Metacool

Legacy Roots Final Packaging Design, Spring 2019

User Testing:  Once I originally finished, I sent the interactive infographic to a group of my friends to see if they were able to navigate the page. One person claimed that they were unable to navigate at first due to the hierarchy of images and it was ultimately just confusing. So, rather than overall changing the layout to make one smaller than the other, I allowed both large images to be clickable and be less confusing for the audience. 

Typography I Cookbook Project 

In the book Civilwarland in Bad Decline, George Saunders paints a picture of a theme park based on the civil war and how it is doing poorly. I imagined something along the lines of gravel walkways, wood cabins, and trash astray. I wanted to focus on a scene that I felt was the climax: when a hand gets cut off and buried in the dirt on the grounds. I emphasized the pile of dirt and pushed it to be in the foreground with brighter and more saturated colors. I made the display text integrate with the imagery by partially burying it behind the pile yet in front of the shovel. I wanted there to be a lot of texture and darkness to give off the understanding that it is a dark and gritty book itself. The colors in this are also complimentary (blue and orange), making it aesthetically pleasing to look at.

I interviewed with Carol Baudin, a field nurse/RN. Carol believes that to truly heal you have to find the root of the problem, not just medicate your side effects, or in other words holistic healing. Something she emphasizes on is making sure the patient is at a point of homeostasis/a balance between their mental, spiritual, and physical health and by taking the steps to get there. Carol says the best thing you can do for yourself is to begin today taking care of your body and mind now so tomorrow you will be better than today. With that in mind, she told me some ways to take care of yourself is to eat right, take vitamins/medicine when you need it, go outside and be active, and being kind mentally and spiritually to yourself. I wanted to reflect her ideas by creating a cover that looked a bit natural and rustic by dying it with tea, using twine to bind, and using brown fonts. I wanted the images to reflect the textures, colors, shapes and sizes of healing methods both natural and modern medicine and how the two can be similar and different and enhance them in their own ways.

In a consumerist society, we often value what we are able to purchase more than the people around us. In the article "Money Talks," it sheds light on how we allow the people who have the most monetary value guide and dictate our society. This reason is almost entirely for the potential of their money, not the potential of the person. The image I have created is focused on the idea that in as consumerists, we believe that the true value of our own selves is the money we have and lack value in the relationships and the true power of the people. I have made use of visual weight and a sense of imbalance created by making the left side (which resembles money) larger and closer to the viewer and on the opposite end (the people) as smaller by reducing the space occupied. The overall work is not proportionate with itself to emphasize the idea of the unproportional amount of importance placed on people who have money and those who do not.

In this project, I have made a system of animals (sheep, frog, giraffe, and zebra) with the style of having a circle face and separating the surrounding features. I wanted the figure/ground relationship to balance as a whole by breaking up the pieces so it is not as overall heavy, while also maintaining an unbalance to the lower half of the face to bring variety. The stroke on each face is unified by implementing the same size through each one but it is differently used in each one, also providing variation. The symmetry in the work is important as a whole because it allows the icons to read as icons/logos.

The two letter I had in this project was A and S, and I turned them into an alligator and a serpent. I found a level of balance between the actual letterform and the animals I integrated by making the letterform to create the overall shape of the animal and allowing the letter to breathe. By keeping the overall design simple, it allows readability and a logo like look. I also wanted the color palette simple so it does not overpower the design whilst still complimenting it by including colors that have contrasting values. I used the font Garamond in regular because I felt that it had the right amount of weight and feet that complimented my design. I feel this piece is successful because it allows the letterform to breathe while still reading it as an image and making the two integrate smoothly.