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This project was my Lindenwood Senior Capstone project including branding and a line of packaging for a made-up company called Two-Stroke, which sells stationery. Every element was designed manufactured by myself, from the hand folded notebooks to the laser-cut boxes.

This zine was a final for my Print Design and Production class. I decided to make my second zine about things that I had figured out over the last semester, and would like to share with others. I tried to adhere to the grid I had set up, and decided to go with stickers to display my information on the page alongside handwritten blurbs to add extra information. I think it turned out really well, but I wish I had more time to add some more information in the section about Obsidian. It’s a really good tool!

For Typography II, we had to come up with hand-lettered phrases to put on T-shirts. I instantly gravitated towards making up some bad band names and throwing them on shirts. I immediately got to work and started sketching some ideas:

I picked the best sketches of the three and cleaned them up, and threw them onto T-shirt mockups.

I even ended up screenprinting the “CRISP RATT” design onto an actual T-shirt, and a ton of people wanted them! I ended up printing around 20 of them, so that design was a hit. I also thought the “Gallium” design ended up looking like the Gorrilaz logo as well, and I printed a few of those as well!

I got a ton of practice on working with hand lettering and making some cool band logos and I think I did really, really well with this one!

This is a tri-fold brochure made about one of my favorite designers, Aaron Draplin, for my Typography 1 class. I decided to pull from the design of Field Notes, one of Aaron’s creations. I also thought about how often, a trifold brochure is often something that is thrown away. You read it, and discard it, and the format allows for that. But, what if the trifold had something for you to keep? I added the triple fold pocket ruler to the bottom so you have something that’s actually useful in a pinch, and you’ll always have something to remember the brochure by. It also brings in a bit of Aaron’s aesthetic too! I thought it turned out great.

This was a book cover made for my Print Design and Production class of one of my favorite books – A Japanese novel titled Kafka on the Shore, written by Haruki Murakami. I chose the image of a crow because the main character identifies himself as Crow, and that theme stretches throughout the book. The use of blue was also chosen as it evoked the ocean, another important symbol.

Many other book covers for Kafka on the Shore have really unusual or odd imagery – Probably because Kafka is a weird book – and I think that a more simplified version would bring in more people to it’s story. Other versions of the cover took the same approach as me, but they all looked a little plain. I think that I made it seem a little more interesting than the other ones.

Something I would love to add to it would be an obi, or belt, which is often included on Japanese book releases to add things like marketing claims. On one of my books, Designing Design by Kenya Hara, it has it’s own obi with the title and some accolades for the book, and it adds a really interesting tactile feel and makes it seem a little more premium.

I haven’t had the chance to design very many book covers, so this gave me a lot of insight as to what goes into it, and I think that it turned out really well for one of my first attempts at something like this.

For an assignment in my Motion Graphics class, we were told to make a short intro to a movie we enjoyed. I had recently watched the Grand Budapest Hotel and decided to do something based on that. I think this one turned out really well, and helped me get an even greater grasp on working in After Effects.

Double Take

Double Take was a zine made for my Typography I final, and the first zine I have ever made. It is a collection of things you overhear that make you stop what you’re doing and do a double take, as I had been hearing a lot of those sorts of things over the last week, and continued to hear them as I wrote the zine.

Some of the imagery was taken from found items, such as the bottom of an Apple Magic Mouse on page 6, and the small notebook on pages 9 and 10. Many of the others were manipulated somehow, and I fell in love with Lindenwood University’s high-quality scanners, so I used those as much as I could. I learned a lot about page layout, what works, and what doesn’t. The copy on pages 7 and 8 are not my best work, but I’m pretty proud of the introduction pages.

The cover was adorned with handwritten variations of “WITH SPECIAL ISSUE”, and the last page before the rear cover contained handwritten citations for my images, as well as a small illustration and serial number to make each copy unique.

SPECIAL ISSUE

As I was looking for a quote to use for my final spread on or around December 6, 2023, Lindenwood University decided to cut many of its NCAA Division I sports teams, affecting 284 student athletes. This announcement caused a wave of anger throughout the student body, and came at a total surprise to everyone. The announcement itself made everyone do a double take, as the announcement given in the Lindenwood Theater lasted no longer than three minutes. The president wasn’t even present during the announcement, which made the entire situation seem callous.

“SPECIAL ISSUE” was a letter size sheet of paper folded in half and included in every physical copy of Double Take, finished just hours after the announcement. It reflected my frustration on that day, with the sports cuts and rising tuition making me feel like the student body was being exploited. It focused on showing the dissonance between the luxury contained in the president’s mansion (which had been the target of vandalism that night) and the University’s apparent need for money in an absurd way. I thought it fit well within the context of my zine, and within the broader history of zines as a medium for protest.

This typeface was made for Typography II, where we were told to make an inspired typeface. One of my favorite fonts ever is Grilli Type’s GT Sectra. Sectra was made by taking a simple path for the letterform and processing it through the use of various tools, like drawing over that path with a broad-nibbed pen and then cutting it using an X-Acto knife.

Process

So, for Sclera (which is named after the white part of an eye), I decided to take a similar approach as Sectra and make something in a sort of blackletter style. I jumped into Krita and began to draw using a chisel-tip brush.

Then, I began to take that same brush and trace those letters using only straight lines:

With these, I was able to make very simple vector paths that could be brought into Illustrator to be stroked with a similar brush. A lot of the angles had to be changed to accommodate the angle of the brush, or else many of the lines would disappear. This also gave the typeface a good visual rhythm, where many diagonal lines were made at the same angle. However, since they’re just simple strokes, it would allow me to make the font bolder, lighter, or change the style quite easily.

I think this one turned out well for an inspired typeface, and I really enjoyed the process that GT Sectra used. I definitely would like to extend this to the lowercase characters as well, and add more symbols. My other typeface Hello World looked so much better after I added the lowercase set. I love how moody it is, and I could see it on the cover of a horror book or something like that!

This candy box was for my Print Design and Production class. It was an exercise in packaging design and setting up a file to be ready to print, cut, fold, and glue together.

The dimensions and design of the box itself was taken directly from a box of Nerds candy, but I found that making the unfolded box in Illustrator is quite difficult and tedious when trying to get every dimension correct. So, I opened up my copy of FreeCAD and made a sketch with all the correct dimensions, which was easy to import into Illustrator.

Another advantage of this is that I am able to easily adjust the dimensions. If I ever need another box, I can simply enter the dimensions of the box into the design spreadsheet and export a new dieline.

Inspiration

The box of Nerds brought me into an interesting rabbit hole when looking at the style of candy packaging that I wanted to do. Nerds is in a class of candy that is somewhat adjacent to the cheaper classes of candy. Some examples of this kind of candy would be Fun Dip, Pop Rocks, and Milk Duds, where their packaging has a really neat charm but is printed as cheap as humanly possible. I then decided to give an identity to a cheap candy that seemed to never have one – chocolate rocks.

Making Chocolate Rocks Look Good

I had the idea to have a nature theme for my box, and as it turned out we also had a pretty big supply of craft paper in the print lab, which gave the impression that the box was made of recycled paper. I decided to use the natural brown color of the paper to represent soil, and made a design around that look. I was able to use a variable typeface to give each letter a different width, and duplicated the ‘O’ to represent the rocks in the ground and clouds in the sky. I was also able to repeat the “weirdly good chocolate rocks” tagline to represent the grass.

I thought this box turned out really well, considering it was one of my only times doing packaging design. It has a super unique feel when held in the hand!