Process

For this project, I was the sole designer, but I have my classmates and professors to thank for providing feedback and guidance.

Archaic's identity seeks to align with 80s and 90s instrument creators and advertisers, but fit for a modern era.

While I could have gone towards physical representations, cassettes, synthesizers, etc. I found something more abstract would be cleaner and more versatile.

I thought a humanist sans serif would be most appropriate, recognizing the wide range of typeface featured in vintage magazine adverts, and seeking something friendly and human. Freight Sans is the final choice, being warm and readable.

The Village of Carthage, New York is where I grew up. It's small and mostly uninteresting, but needs a great website for its community to stay informed with a wide variety of users, from those just trying to stay up to date, the community event gurus, and the local politics followers.

The current website is lacking in clear navigation and consistency, understandably so for a small village. Accessibility issues like text in images and articles as PDFs are also concerns.

I visited the websites of other towns and villages in New York for reference on structure and layout. Two in particular were Canton and Liverpool, which had more intuitive navigation and layouts.

The website needs to serve a wide range of users and have a clear navigation in order for users to quickly find what they need without frustration.

The end result was a simple and clean website. The left side navigation makes it easy for users to find what they're looking for while giving a lot of space for content in the center. The layout is consistent between pages but also flexible if a new type of content needs to be added.

"Most artworks were created by people who are dead." is a comedic zine exploring funny statistics about the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, New York City.

The project brief required the creation of a "visually captivating information design piece" with a dataset provided by the Museum. It was important to capture the viewer's attention, be memorable and present information in an engaging manner.

Moodboard

I knew I could create something memorable and unique with straight-faced humor by presenting statistics with misguided conclusions. I looked towards other zines and similar bits of humor for inspiration.

North Country Arts is a nonprofit organization supporting and promoting local artists in northern New York state. With the increasing accuracy of AI-generated artworks, human artists must seek the most human-like elements of their work, imperfection. This identity seeks to reflect on human creativity and individuality; as one seeks to differentiate themselves, maintain humanity and refuse to sand off the edges.

“The Peasant and The Devil” is the tale of a crafty peasant and a devil, from the Brothers Grimm collection of fairy tales. My project combines collage and motion graphics to tell this story.

Axolotls Are Cute is an educational explainer video about the difficulties of taking care of an axolotl (an aquatic salamander often kept as pets). Many people are not aware of the numerous conditions which axolotls require to remain healthy. This video serves to educate and raise awareness about this, in order to avoid accidental harm of axolotls.

Hi, I'm Liam Donnell, a graphic designer studying at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.