Biography: A village childhood spent in South China had a great impact on Man Hui’s later adoration of nature, simplicity and authenticity. She is currently a graduate student at the California College of the Arts, pursuing her MFA in design. Lately she has passionately fallen in love with “white space” — the empty space where she sees the greatest potential for creative possibility. Her interest is in print design. With the love of simple beauty, she wants to create design in its most minimal and direct form by enhancing the efficiency and articulation of communication.
After earning her BA in Fine Art and Anthropology from Middlebury College in Vermont, Elizabeth headed west to San Francisco. Last fall she began her first year of California College of the Arts’ MFA in Design program where she found herself investigating the physical qualities of Elmer’s glue and observing human behavior in San Francisco’s Chinatown. This summer she is working at Elixir Design and will devote the upcoming year to her thesis, investigating the idea of strategy as design.
The ability of design to improve human interactions and exchanges is Adriana's focus of interest. As a member of the U.S. Latino community, she is interested in why and how this ethnic group is gradually redefining itself. Specifically, she is curious about the influence of design and how design can be leveraged in the redefinition of a U.S. Latino identity. This is the focus of her MFA in design thesis at the California College of the Arts. Adriana is a partner of Cultura Design, a design firm located in Winters, California.
Objective: PROBLEM: To collaborate in a team of three to design a catalog for the MFA Writing Department. The design of the catalog needed to represent the program in relation to the students in a multidimensional way: connection, identity, and aspiration. SOLUTION: We used images from nature as a metaphor to capture connection, identity and aspiration, and treated them abstractly. The fusion of organic and geometric shapes expresses the idea of life (students) vs. system (school) and how they are integrated as one, achieving a unity of opposites. The spreading dots represent the idea of dispersal as students graduate and begin new lives.
RESULT: Each student was given a different geometric/organic figure to highlight their individuality and yet connect them through one system. In regard to the nature of abstraction and beauty of poetry, white space is used throughout the design to imply the infinity of creativity and artistic conception. The overall impact effectively achieves communication between our individuality and unity! The playfulness of typography reflects the vitality of the writing and enhances our reading experience, which transcends convention.
Tools used: The photos of the sycamore trees were brought into Adobe® Photoshop®, and the levels were adjusted to achieve a graphic, paired-down look. The geometric shapes were created in Adobe Illustrator®. The spreads of the book were laid out in Adobe InDesign®.
