Eye to I: Design, Identity, & The Art of Collaboration

What it is:

This collaborative exhibition was the result of weeks of workshops, conversations, and design play led by the Visual Communication faculty at Loyola University. Alongside our artist-in-residence Jessica Lanay and almost two dozen VisComm students, we explored how constraints, unpredictability, and shared authorship could open up new ways of working.

What started as a series of both loose and rules-driven process experiments turned into a full-scale installation at the Ralph Arnold Gallery in Rogers Park, Chicago. The exhibition featured 21 abstract typographic compositions printed on massive sheets of vellum and suspended throughout the gallery.  In the end, the project served as a celebration of making together and a way to practice enjoying the uncertainty of not knowing exactly where we’d end up.

What’s inside:

Design Approach:

The project started with a series of workshops led by the visual communication faculty and our artist-in-residence, focused on process, idea generation, and constraint-based creativity. From there, we developed a system: each designer wrote a list of rules on layout, content, type choices, or whatever they felt like, and passed them on to someone else.

Designers were grouped and handed a single InDesign file that moved from person to person. Each contributor followed the previous person’s rules without seeing what they had made, hiding their layers before passing the file along. The result was messy (by design) but also kind of beautiful. Amidst the chaos, there were a lot of unexpected harmonies in the type and the way the different approaches overlapped. 

I helped facilitate the workshops, participated in the poster design process, created the promotional materials, and assisted with documentation and installation of the exhibition.

The promo materials:

Exhibition setup documentation: