“Senior Thesis 2020 Art Exhibition”
Every year the art department at Emmanuel College selects a talented junior to take on the yearly Senior Thesis Art Exhibition poster and postcard design for the show. For the graduating class of 2020 I Wilfford Ortiz was selected to tackle this project.
However, as a result of the global pandemic of COVID-19, the project itself took a different direction than previous years, it became a branding project for what would be transformed into an online website exhibition to display the graduating class’ final thesis, as well as, a book to commemorate their achievements.
Enjoy!
The concept for this project was to remain true to the basic elements of design; line and color.
Color
Each color represents a different major, every student will receive a different book and poster combo depending on the student’s area of study.
Line
Like previously mentioned, line was one of the two main design elements for this project. I wanted to incorporate it very seamlessly in a way that it almost became abstract but at the same time created a detail and pattern that became coherent and important to the trademark of the book.
This detail shown above is an abstract illustration of the Emmanuel College campus 3D rendering, which is then foil stamped into the book cover to create an indent pattern.
Exhibition
Poster
Series
A series of posters were also created to advertise the exhibition, this poster kept the same theme while adding the names of the students displaying their work in the exhibition.
These posters were designed to be displayed as a polyptych with two on top and two at the bottom.
Online Exhibition
The final stage of the branding/presentation of this project was the online exhibition, that came as a result of the team adapting to our challenges, which in this case was the lack of a physical space to present the student work.
For this, the administration came up with the idea of the addition of a thesis page to the already build Emmanuel College website that would house the permanent home of the class of 2020’s work to display for anyone interested in viewing like a virtual art exhibit.
As you can see many of the elements of this project (color and type) were used to brand the page and add a level of cohesion that would connect the page to the book as well as the poster series.
Link to webpage below
pictured above is a mock-up of the virtual exhibition