Project 1 / Book Map

The concept for this project is to connect a book and author with a place on the world map. Hover over the cover image to see an author image. Click on the cover or author image to see a red dot on the map that corresponds to the nationality of the author or setting of the book. I used the javascript animate function to create the appearance of the red dots, and a hover CSS id for the covers and author images. I'd like to use this basic idea for a promotion for crime novels at work.

Project 2 / Mad Girl's Love Song

Drawing from the typographic movement of the “words in freedom” of the Italian Futurists and the spacing and arrangement of Mallarmé’s composition on the page, this project expresses Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Mad Woman’s Love Song” as a parallax website.

Through movement, the visual compositions incorporating each stanza of the poem reveal and hide various elements of the design, changing the experience for the reader as the poem progresses. This effect is achieved through a website built and coded with a parallax jquery plug in and javascript library. Parallax is a special scrolling technique in computer graphics where background images move more slowly than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth and adding to the sense of immersion for the viewer.

I also used Google fonts to render the repeating elements of the poem in the same typeface. The more hopeful lines of the poem are rendered in flowery script, while the depressive nature of the refrain appears in very small sans serif type at the bottom. I tried to balance expressive typography with the colorful illustrations to create a readable viewer experience.

In such an intensely personal poem, the reader becomes an active participant who can reveal the words and illustrations by controlling the speed down the page. This project combines handmade art with technology, considers the kinetics of type and words, and attempts to create a simulataneous and unified expression of a dreamy and personal poem.

Project 3 / Occupying Isms

This project is inspired by Russian designer El Lissitzky's book The Isms of Art, his 1925 manifesto documenting the prevailing movements in Western art from 1914 through 1924, with text in English, German, and French. I reimagined the book for the Occupy movement which tends to avoid isms—capitalism, socialism, anarchism, and communism—because occupiers view labels and formal ideologies as profoundly misleading. Instead, I used definitions for rupture, autonomy, people power, horizontalism, and assembly from Marina Sitrin's book Occupying Language. These terms apply to movements in Greece, Spain, and the United States, and the definitions are translated into those languages. The The Isms of Art was an approach to a complex communication problem of designing a book in three languages. My digital version is a website with a javascript plugin that allows images and sections of text on the page to be sorted by keyword. It is possible to view combinations of the keywords as well, depending on which words are selected. Google translate solves the translation issue, so the text can be translated into Greek, Spanish or English. Anyone can upload photos to the page, which are tagged with the word that applies, and incorporated into the project.

Final Project / Roaring Parnassus

My thesis project, Roaring Parnassus: The Futurebook and the Historical Avant-Garde, celebrates the innovation and creativity of book designers in the early 20th century. Their ideas inspired and guided my design thinking about the future of books—both print and digital—framing how these formats relate to each other.

This page displays some some experimental concepts for the “futurebook”—the rendering of literature and non-fiction texts into multiple formats for the modern reader. I have attempted to utilize current technology to take the content, genre, and structure of the narrative text to create multimedia digital book design that considers opportunities for typography, image, and motion. Like physical books on a bookshelf, the squares on this website represent the book projects that have been collected into one digital space. Rolling over each image reveals the title of the book. Clicking on the image displays the project in an iframe, allowing for full navigation of the project without leaving the page.