Research and Professional Activity
As a full-time design educator and part-time design practitioner, my work often leads back to the classroom. And I work to teach and to conduct a design practice in a way that values curiosity about and commitment to exploring design and to using design in the world.
In my time at Loyola University New Orleans, I’ve pursued that design practice in three broad directions:
1.
Web design and development for campaigns and organizations pursuing forward-thinking, compassionate, and progressive goals
I teach at a Jesuit school where the Jesuit value “Women and Men for and with Others” is often cited. That value is frequently seen as urging one to pursue justice and show concern for the poor and marginalized. Within our Design program the faculty frequently cite “design for good,” the use of our design abilities to help others, as a core value.
Part of my interest in design has always been the ability to use design to realize progressive goals. And I’ve sought to work on projects that advance those objectives and that put into practice my department’s “design for good” principle.
In the past few years, I’ve been commissioned to design and develop websites for campaigns that I helped achieve historic victories. These campaigns were focused on health care, living wages, environmental concern, and funding for social programs.
In each, I contributed by:
In combining these traits, I’ve been able to create design solutions and develop those to bring them to life on the web quickly and earnestly.
SeaTac and the campaign for a $15 per hour minimum wage
In 2013 I was hired to design a site for an initiative in SeaTac, Washington to raise the town’s minimum wage to $15 per hour. I designed and developed the campaign site for the campaign Yes for SeaTac. When the project started, it had a logo and name, but no other design. In my role as visual designer, I created an overall look from the existing logo and designed the site around that. I worked as the sole developer of the site and my work enabled the content team and the campaign to focus on getting out their message.
In November 2013, Proposition 1 passed. SeaTac became the first city in the United States to mandate a $15-per-hour minimum wage.
View my work for Yes for SeaTac.
Washington state and the push for compassionate
and responsible long-term care
In 2015, I was hired to design a site for a group in Washington named Responsible Future. This coalition of organizations has pushed for legislation called the Long-Term Care Trust Act, intended to provide funding for services to benefit aging Americans. These services include wheelchair ramps, home care workers, nursing homes, and more.
Before the bill, Washington state was spending 6% of its budget on long-term care. That amount was -projected to double to 12% by 2030. The Long-Term Care Trust Act set out to create a small tax to create a budget specifically to pay these costs.
Working from an existing logo, I created a look and feel for the site. I designed and built an easily navigable site, enabling the campaign to get information to voters and to get site visitors involved in the campaign. I designed and developed a custom Google Map that allows the campaign to geographically show the stories of people this legislation might help. My work on this site allows visitors to easily contact their representative or share their own stories of struggling to pay for care. It empowered this campaign to talk to the public about the need to fund long-term care.
In early 2019, that bill was signed into law, making Washington the first state in the nation to provide for long-term care for an aging population. The setting up of this funding was called a “monumental achievement” trying to answer an “increasingly urgent” question.
View my work for Responsible Future.
Kyrsten Sinema and the focus on defense of health care, protection of the environment, protection for senior citizens, equal rights for LGBTQ citizens, and more
Since 2014, I’ve designed and developed multiple iterations of Kyrsten Sinema’s campaign website. When I first designed Kyrsten Sinema’s website, Ms. Sinema was a first-term representative from Arizona. In 2017, Representative Sinema announced a Senate bid, and I worked a with Summit Strategy, a campaign strategy firm, to redesign her site for a statewide, and later national, audience.
In 2014, I redesigned an existing site whose design had become dated. The first redesign modernized the site’s look and featured a purple, gold, and warm white color palette, referencing Arizona’s desert setting and Sinema’s campaign logo. In a 2016 redesign I further updated the site’s look and also further integrated the campaign logo’s purple as the primary color of the site. For the 2018 Senate version of the site, my design continued the trend of modernization, featuring large, bright images, bold content blocks, and a color palette prominently featuring the campaign’s signature purple. CNN Politics noted the campaign’s purple as one “bucking the usual color scheme” of political campaigns.
After the announcement of her Senate run, that campaign gained national attention and I continued to work with Summit Strategy to improve that site. While they refined the site’s content and messaging, I designed and developed new parts of the site creating the necessary pieces to emphasize the candidate’s priorities and qualifications. I retooled sections, created subtle animations to encourage interaction, designed and developed splash pages for election day, created a Spanish-language version, and more.
All of these changes – and my ability to design them within a short timeline and with a cohesive and evolving visual language – helped the campaign expand its audience, first from one congressional district to the state of Arizona, then from reliably Democratic voters to moderate and independent voters, ultimately winning the election.
In November 2018, Kyrsten Sinema won her campaign for U.S. Senate in an historic victory.
In addition to flipping a Senate seat from Republican to Democrat, her win achieved a number of firsts: She is the first Democrat from Arizona elected to Senate since 1995. She is the first out bisexual U.S. Senator in history. And she is the first-ever female Senator from Arizona.
View my work for Kyrsten Sinema’s campaign site.
2.
Work that uses design to explore New Orleans and its surroundings
On visiting New Orleans shortly before moving here, I found an odd and charming city full of distinct customs: the cardinal directions north, south, east, and west are eschewed in favor “lake, river, downtown, and uptown” as the city bends its geography to that of the Mississippi River; roadway medians are called “neutral ground” after once having served as a literal neutral ground between hostile factions of francophone and anglophone residents; nearly any time of year, car traffic might patiently, almost gladly, stop to allow the -passage of a parade of revelers and onlookers. It’s a city that, in a globally connected and increasingly monocultural world, holds tight to distinctly local traditions and celebrations.
I became curious, wanting to know more about this city. So I began seeking out and creating projects that use design to explore or highlight aspects of New Orleans or Louisiana.
Southerly Gold, God’s Country
In 2017, I was commissioned by photography collective Southerly Gold, to design a book bringing to life their photographs documenting the parishes (counties elsewhere) at Louisiana’s six corners. Because of -Louisiana’s boot-like shape, there are corners at the northeast, northwest, southwest (the heel of the boot), southeast, then additionally at the top of the boot’s toe, and at the boot’s ankle. These six parishes represent the very different landscapes of Louisiana, from disappearing wetlands to ancient burial mounds, and from piney woods to coastal oil refineries.
Southerly Gold is a photography collective of Aubrey Edwards, Ariya Martin, and Elena Ricci. Their work as a collective has been shown at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art and The Grand Maltese Gallery, and their individual clients include Spike Lee, HBO, and the United Nations. Their members’ work has been shown at the Louisiana Purchase National Biennial, the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and Louisiana State Museum, among others. In 2016, they received the Platforms Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to publish a collection of their photography.
At the outset of the project, Southerly Gold had collected the photos and knew they wanted them to be separated by parish, but weren’t sure quite how. I worked with them to plan the splitting up of the books, choose a size, design, prototype, and create a template for a handmade slipcase, and more. The project culminated in a six-volume set of books of photography, called God’s Country, with one book dedicated to each parish. The covers, when laid out together, form a map of Louisiana showing the locations of each parish. They were printed in a limited edition and released on February 19, 2019.
View my work for Southerly Gold.
Patchen Paintings
Beginning in 2018, I’ve worked with painter and printer Karoline Schleh to co-design, print, and bind an -edition of artist’s books commissioned and written by Edwin Blair.
Karoline Schleh is a painter, printmaker, and book artist whose work has been shown locally and nationally. She co-designed and printed the 1996 chapbook Mistah Leary He Dead, featuring a Hunter S. Thompson eulogy for the late Timothy Leary. That book is in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Historic New Orleans Collection, Tulane Library, Yale University Library, Harvard University Library, and private collections including that of poet and legendary Beat publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
In the mid-1960s, Edwin Blair was active in the New Orleans poetry and art scene of the time. Among other things, he partially financed the production of Charles Bukowski’s first book, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, by Loujon Press in 1963. He’s since become a source of knowledge, correspondence, and ephemera from that era in New Orleans’ history. His collections of correspondence and publications from that era appear in library and historic collections.
We completed a set of books, titled Patchen Paintings, in Spring 2019. The books convey Edwin Blair’s experience setting up a show of paintings by proto-Beat poet Kenneth Patchen. It documents a piece of New Orleans’ own association with Beat and small-press publishing culture in the 1960s. The show recounted in the book resulted from lots of back and forth written communication between Edwin Blair and Kenneth Patchen.
We designed the book around a short narrative and 50-year-old photos. We researched Patchen and Blair’s correspondence to one another. And we designed the book to visually reference that correspondence. Text from their letters appears on the book’s endpapers. And the cover features reproductions of parts of the richly illustrated envelopes in which Patchen mailed his letters. Inside the book, we feature Edwin Blair’s text, a reproduction of the show’s poster, and a fold-out photo section with photos from show’s opening. The book is risograph- and screen-printed and hand-bound.
View my work on Patchen Paintings.
Tile Prints
New Orleans streets are marked with tiles embedded in the sidewalk spelling out the names of the streets. This wayfinding system dates back to the turn of the 20th century and has become well known.
In 2014 I initiated a project digitizing the type on these tiles. In researching and examining these tiles, two nearly identical but distinct sets of letters emerged. One of these sets has a loose, somewhat organic quality. The other is more geometric or mechanical.
As a way of looking closer and understanding those -differences, I created a set of 19×25 inch screen prints – exhibited at Loyola’s Diboll Gallery – of details of the different letterforms. Each pair of prints shows two distinct forms of one letter.
The story of these tiles, including their minor differences, is related to the story of the city’s own modernization. And this research contributes to the body of knowledge around New Orleans’ visual history.
View my New Orleans Tile Prints.
3.
Graphic design and other formal explorations, primarily in Risograph printing
Risograph printing is a process originally intended for schools and churches to be able to quickly and cheaply produce single-color documents. The machines (made by a company named Riso) look and can be used like a copy machine, but they print in bright, solid colors. Colors are printed one after another, making the machines closer to a printmaking technique such as screen printing than to a modern office printer.
Risograph printers have fallen out of use with schools and churches as full-color printing has become cheaper. But Riso printing has found new use among designers and artists. In the same way other tangible forms of design have seen a reappraisal and renewal recently – letterpress, hand lettering, calligraphy – the Risograph has experienced a surge in interest. There are national and international conferences and workshops. Small publishers print editions of Riso books. Artists use Risograph machines for printmaking.
These machines were originally designed to print single colors quickly and cheaply, not produce high quality art or design. So within the community of people pursuing art or design practice with Riso machines, most find and develop their own methodologies for using these machines by trial and error. Since 2015 I’ve been working in this medium, producing prints, posters, and books, exploring the medium. In doing so, I’m able to contribute to the growing discourse around this printing process. I’m also able to bring this knowledge directly back into teaching, enabling me to teach students and other faculty how to use the equipment and best practices for reproducing work.
Risograph Gradients
In 2014, I produced a series of prints titled, simply, Risograph Gradients. They were a set of studies examining some of the process’ formal and technical limits. The set of prints consists of pairs of screen-printed and Risograph-printed gradients (smooth transitions from one color to another). Each image was first screen printed, using a printing technique called a split fountain, where two ink colors are partially blended together while screen printing. When done well, it can create a very smooth blend between the original colors. I then digitized and printed Risograph versions of these images.
Whereas screen printing can produce a very smooth transition between colors, Risograph printing uses a series of halftone or other dots. It often fails to reproduce very faint colors. And the registration – the position of one color relative to the page or to other colors – may change slightly from one copy to the next. Taken together, these create an imperfect reproduction of the original image.
I exhibited these gradient prints at a two-person show at Loyola’s Diboll gallery. I showed screen-printed originals and the Riso copies side by side as a way to look at the formal and aesthetic boundaries between the two, and in Risograph printing itself.
This process that produces imperfect prints provides a quick and economical method of creating large editions of art or design work. The qualities that initially seem like flaws become parameters for designing within and around. They form part of the character of the finished work, and change how practitioners approach the medium.
View my Risograph Gradient Studies.
Risograph Posters and Prints
Since 2015, I’ve also designed and produced a number of Risograph posters and prints. These are frequently in service to my department, publicizing department events or creating learning materials for students. They’re often opportunities to involve students in department life and education outside of class. I use these opportunities to learn and play a part in the growing body of knowledge around this process.
View my Risograph Posters.
Loyola University New Orleans’ Identity Statement says that “faculty activities are a studied balance among teaching, research, and service both to the university and to the larger community,” and while teaching and pursuing outside research, I also conduct service for my department, the university, and a wider design community.
Within my department, I researched, acquired, and set up our Risograph printing lab. I work as part of a small team to periodically maintain our computer labs. I’ve also revised curriculum for Design courses and written curriculum and proposals for new courses. In 2015–2016, I co-created, revised, and helped pass a new Interactive Design degree. Additionally, I represent our department on our college curriculum committee as well as often serving as our department’s representative in Loyola’s faculty senate.
From 2017 to present, I’ve served as president of AIGA New Orleans. AIGA is the professional association for design. Before our current board started, the chapter had gone largely dormant. There wasn’t a board, there weren’t events, and the chapter wasn’t engaging with the local design community at all. During my time as president, the board and I have: created a new event series for professional development, called Social Study; connected with other local design-related organizations to co-host events; and created a series/group focused on women’s experiences in design, called Flourish, which is based on AIGA National’s Women Lead initiative.
Loyola’s Identity Statement says that faculty professional interests “will contribute to the vitality of their work in the classroom.” Accordingly, my professional and research interests contribute back to my teaching, enabling me to bring new understanding, a variety of ways of using design to approach the world, an insight into the benefits of service within a design association, as well as relevant production, technical, and other design knowledge to my students.
In my time at Loyola University New Orleans, I’ve pursued that design practice in three broad directions:
1. Web design and development for campaigns and organizations pursuing forward-thinking, compassionate, and progressive goals.
2. Work that uses design to explore New Orleans and its surroundings.
3. Graphic design and other formal explorations, primarily in Risograph printing.
1.
Web design and development for campaigns and organizations pursuing forward-thinking, compassionate, and progressive goals
I teach at a Jesuit school where the Jesuit value “Women and Men for and with Others” is often cited. That value is frequently seen as urging one to pursue justice and show concern for the poor and marginalized. Within our Design program the faculty frequently cite “design for good,” the use of our design abilities to help others, as a core value.
Part of my interest in design has always been the ability to use design to realize progressive goals. And I’ve sought to work on projects that advance those objectives and that put into practice my department’s “design for good” principle.
In the past few years, I’ve been commissioned to design and develop websites for campaigns that I helped achieve historic victories. These campaigns were focused on health care, living wages, environmental concern, and funding for social programs.
In each, I contributed by:
Translating the campaign’s needs and values into a design system that worked effectively on a desktop site, on a mobile site, across different amounts of content, sometimes in multiple languages, and always within tight deadlines.
Developing – writing or integrating the code necessary for the site to work – websites efficiently, so that these campaigns could get their messages, platforms, news, and updates out quickly and reliably.
Bringing a level of investment and genuine care to these projects aligned with my values.
In combining these traits, I’ve been able to create design solutions and develop those to bring them to life on the web quickly and earnestly.
SeaTac and the campaign for a $15 per hour minimum wage
In 2013 I was hired to design a site for an initiative in SeaTac, Washington to raise the town’s minimum wage to $15 per hour. I designed and developed the campaign site for the campaign Yes for SeaTac. When the project started, it had a logo and name, but no other design. In my role as visual designer, I created an overall look from the existing logo and designed the site around that. I worked as the sole developer of the site and my work enabled the content team and the campaign to focus on getting out their message.
In November 2013, Proposition 1 passed. SeaTac became the first city in the United States to mandate a $15-per-hour minimum wage.
View my work for Yes for SeaTac.
Washington state and the push for compassionate
and responsible long-term care
In 2015, I was hired to design a site for a group in Washington named Responsible Future. This coalition of organizations has pushed for legislation called the Long-Term Care Trust Act, intended to provide funding for services to benefit aging Americans. These services include wheelchair ramps, home care workers, nursing homes, and more.
Before the bill, Washington state was spending 6% of its budget on long-term care. That amount was -projected to double to 12% by 2030. The Long-Term Care Trust Act set out to create a small tax to create a budget specifically to pay these costs.
Working from an existing logo, I created a look and feel for the site. I designed and built an easily navigable site, enabling the campaign to get information to voters and to get site visitors involved in the campaign. I designed and developed a custom Google Map that allows the campaign to geographically show the stories of people this legislation might help. My work on this site allows visitors to easily contact their representative or share their own stories of struggling to pay for care. It empowered this campaign to talk to the public about the need to fund long-term care.
In early 2019, that bill was signed into law, making Washington the first state in the nation to provide for long-term care for an aging population. The setting up of this funding was called a “monumental achievement” trying to answer an “increasingly urgent” question.
View my work for Responsible Future.
Kyrsten Sinema and the focus on defense of health care, protection of the environment, protection for senior citizens, equal rights for LGBTQ citizens, and more
Since 2014, I’ve designed and developed multiple iterations of Kyrsten Sinema’s campaign website. When I first designed Kyrsten Sinema’s website, Ms. Sinema was a first-term representative from Arizona. In 2017, Representative Sinema announced a Senate bid, and I worked a with Summit Strategy, a campaign strategy firm, to redesign her site for a statewide, and later national, audience.
In 2014, I redesigned an existing site whose design had become dated. The first redesign modernized the site’s look and featured a purple, gold, and warm white color palette, referencing Arizona’s desert setting and Sinema’s campaign logo. In a 2016 redesign I further updated the site’s look and also further integrated the campaign logo’s purple as the primary color of the site. For the 2018 Senate version of the site, my design continued the trend of modernization, featuring large, bright images, bold content blocks, and a color palette prominently featuring the campaign’s signature purple. CNN Politics noted the campaign’s purple as one “bucking the usual color scheme” of political campaigns.
After the announcement of her Senate run, that campaign gained national attention and I continued to work with Summit Strategy to improve that site. While they refined the site’s content and messaging, I designed and developed new parts of the site creating the necessary pieces to emphasize the candidate’s priorities and qualifications. I retooled sections, created subtle animations to encourage interaction, designed and developed splash pages for election day, created a Spanish-language version, and more.
All of these changes – and my ability to design them within a short timeline and with a cohesive and evolving visual language – helped the campaign expand its audience, first from one congressional district to the state of Arizona, then from reliably Democratic voters to moderate and independent voters, ultimately winning the election.
In November 2018, Kyrsten Sinema won her campaign for U.S. Senate in an historic victory.
In addition to flipping a Senate seat from Republican to Democrat, her win achieved a number of firsts: She is the first Democrat from Arizona elected to Senate since 1995. She is the first out bisexual U.S. Senator in history. And she is the first-ever female Senator from Arizona.
View my work for Kyrsten Sinema’s campaign site.
2.
Work that uses design to explore New Orleans and its surroundings
On visiting New Orleans shortly before moving here, I found an odd and charming city full of distinct customs: the cardinal directions north, south, east, and west are eschewed in favor “lake, river, downtown, and uptown” as the city bends its geography to that of the Mississippi River; roadway medians are called “neutral ground” after once having served as a literal neutral ground between hostile factions of francophone and anglophone residents; nearly any time of year, car traffic might patiently, almost gladly, stop to allow the -passage of a parade of revelers and onlookers. It’s a city that, in a globally connected and increasingly monocultural world, holds tight to distinctly local traditions and celebrations.
I became curious, wanting to know more about this city. So I began seeking out and creating projects that use design to explore or highlight aspects of New Orleans or Louisiana.
Southerly Gold, God’s Country
In 2017, I was commissioned by photography collective Southerly Gold, to design a book bringing to life their photographs documenting the parishes (counties elsewhere) at Louisiana’s six corners. Because of -Louisiana’s boot-like shape, there are corners at the northeast, northwest, southwest (the heel of the boot), southeast, then additionally at the top of the boot’s toe, and at the boot’s ankle. These six parishes represent the very different landscapes of Louisiana, from disappearing wetlands to ancient burial mounds, and from piney woods to coastal oil refineries.
Southerly Gold is a photography collective of Aubrey Edwards, Ariya Martin, and Elena Ricci. Their work as a collective has been shown at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art and The Grand Maltese Gallery, and their individual clients include Spike Lee, HBO, and the United Nations. Their members’ work has been shown at the Louisiana Purchase National Biennial, the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and Louisiana State Museum, among others. In 2016, they received the Platforms Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to publish a collection of their photography.
At the outset of the project, Southerly Gold had collected the photos and knew they wanted them to be separated by parish, but weren’t sure quite how. I worked with them to plan the splitting up of the books, choose a size, design, prototype, and create a template for a handmade slipcase, and more. The project culminated in a six-volume set of books of photography, called God’s Country, with one book dedicated to each parish. The covers, when laid out together, form a map of Louisiana showing the locations of each parish. They were printed in a limited edition and released on February 19, 2019.
View my work for Southerly Gold.
Patchen Paintings
Beginning in 2018, I’ve worked with painter and printer Karoline Schleh to co-design, print, and bind an -edition of artist’s books commissioned and written by Edwin Blair.
Karoline Schleh is a painter, printmaker, and book artist whose work has been shown locally and nationally. She co-designed and printed the 1996 chapbook Mistah Leary He Dead, featuring a Hunter S. Thompson eulogy for the late Timothy Leary. That book is in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Historic New Orleans Collection, Tulane Library, Yale University Library, Harvard University Library, and private collections including that of poet and legendary Beat publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
In the mid-1960s, Edwin Blair was active in the New Orleans poetry and art scene of the time. Among other things, he partially financed the production of Charles Bukowski’s first book, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, by Loujon Press in 1963. He’s since become a source of knowledge, correspondence, and ephemera from that era in New Orleans’ history. His collections of correspondence and publications from that era appear in library and historic collections.
We completed a set of books, titled Patchen Paintings, in Spring 2019. The books convey Edwin Blair’s experience setting up a show of paintings by proto-Beat poet Kenneth Patchen. It documents a piece of New Orleans’ own association with Beat and small-press publishing culture in the 1960s. The show recounted in the book resulted from lots of back and forth written communication between Edwin Blair and Kenneth Patchen.
We designed the book around a short narrative and 50-year-old photos. We researched Patchen and Blair’s correspondence to one another. And we designed the book to visually reference that correspondence. Text from their letters appears on the book’s endpapers. And the cover features reproductions of parts of the richly illustrated envelopes in which Patchen mailed his letters. Inside the book, we feature Edwin Blair’s text, a reproduction of the show’s poster, and a fold-out photo section with photos from show’s opening. The book is risograph- and screen-printed and hand-bound.
View my work on Patchen Paintings.
Tile Prints
New Orleans streets are marked with tiles embedded in the sidewalk spelling out the names of the streets. This wayfinding system dates back to the turn of the 20th century and has become well known.
In 2014 I initiated a project digitizing the type on these tiles. In researching and examining these tiles, two nearly identical but distinct sets of letters emerged. One of these sets has a loose, somewhat organic quality. The other is more geometric or mechanical.
As a way of looking closer and understanding those -differences, I created a set of 19×25 inch screen prints – exhibited at Loyola’s Diboll Gallery – of details of the different letterforms. Each pair of prints shows two distinct forms of one letter.
The story of these tiles, including their minor differences, is related to the story of the city’s own modernization. And this research contributes to the body of knowledge around New Orleans’ visual history.
View my New Orleans Tile Prints.
3.
Graphic design and other formal explorations, primarily in Risograph printing
Risograph printing is a process originally intended for schools and churches to be able to quickly and cheaply produce single-color documents. The machines (made by a company named Riso) look and can be used like a copy machine, but they print in bright, solid colors. Colors are printed one after another, making the machines closer to a printmaking technique such as screen printing than to a modern office printer.
Risograph printers have fallen out of use with schools and churches as full-color printing has become cheaper. But Riso printing has found new use among designers and artists. In the same way other tangible forms of design have seen a reappraisal and renewal recently – letterpress, hand lettering, calligraphy – the Risograph has experienced a surge in interest. There are national and international conferences and workshops. Small publishers print editions of Riso books. Artists use Risograph machines for printmaking.
These machines were originally designed to print single colors quickly and cheaply, not produce high quality art or design. So within the community of people pursuing art or design practice with Riso machines, most find and develop their own methodologies for using these machines by trial and error. Since 2015 I’ve been working in this medium, producing prints, posters, and books, exploring the medium. In doing so, I’m able to contribute to the growing discourse around this printing process. I’m also able to bring this knowledge directly back into teaching, enabling me to teach students and other faculty how to use the equipment and best practices for reproducing work.
Risograph Gradients
In 2014, I produced a series of prints titled, simply, Risograph Gradients. They were a set of studies examining some of the process’ formal and technical limits. The set of prints consists of pairs of screen-printed and Risograph-printed gradients (smooth transitions from one color to another). Each image was first screen printed, using a printing technique called a split fountain, where two ink colors are partially blended together while screen printing. When done well, it can create a very smooth blend between the original colors. I then digitized and printed Risograph versions of these images.
Whereas screen printing can produce a very smooth transition between colors, Risograph printing uses a series of halftone or other dots. It often fails to reproduce very faint colors. And the registration – the position of one color relative to the page or to other colors – may change slightly from one copy to the next. Taken together, these create an imperfect reproduction of the original image.
I exhibited these gradient prints at a two-person show at Loyola’s Diboll gallery. I showed screen-printed originals and the Riso copies side by side as a way to look at the formal and aesthetic boundaries between the two, and in Risograph printing itself.
This process that produces imperfect prints provides a quick and economical method of creating large editions of art or design work. The qualities that initially seem like flaws become parameters for designing within and around. They form part of the character of the finished work, and change how practitioners approach the medium.
View my Risograph Gradient Studies.
Risograph Posters and Prints
Since 2015, I’ve also designed and produced a number of Risograph posters and prints. These are frequently in service to my department, publicizing department events or creating learning materials for students. They’re often opportunities to involve students in department life and education outside of class. I use these opportunities to learn and play a part in the growing body of knowledge around this process.
View my Risograph Posters.
Loyola University New Orleans’ Identity Statement says that “faculty activities are a studied balance among teaching, research, and service both to the university and to the larger community,” and while teaching and pursuing outside research, I also conduct service for my department, the university, and a wider design community.
Within my department, I researched, acquired, and set up our Risograph printing lab. I work as part of a small team to periodically maintain our computer labs. I’ve also revised curriculum for Design courses and written curriculum and proposals for new courses. In 2015–2016, I co-created, revised, and helped pass a new Interactive Design degree. Additionally, I represent our department on our college curriculum committee as well as often serving as our department’s representative in Loyola’s faculty senate.
From 2017 to present, I’ve served as president of AIGA New Orleans. AIGA is the professional association for design. Before our current board started, the chapter had gone largely dormant. There wasn’t a board, there weren’t events, and the chapter wasn’t engaging with the local design community at all. During my time as president, the board and I have: created a new event series for professional development, called Social Study; connected with other local design-related organizations to co-host events; and created a series/group focused on women’s experiences in design, called Flourish, which is based on AIGA National’s Women Lead initiative.
Loyola’s Identity Statement says that faculty professional interests “will contribute to the vitality of their work in the classroom.” Accordingly, my professional and research interests contribute back to my teaching, enabling me to bring new understanding, a variety of ways of using design to approach the world, an insight into the benefits of service within a design association, as well as relevant production, technical, and other design knowledge to my students.
© 2019 Daniel Lievens