Desiree Niu '14, Graphic Design | Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Desiree Niu '14, Graphic Design

As a graphic designer, it is a fundamental aim to manipulate your visual language in order to communicate with your audience, especially when dealing with abstract topics. By building up both my text and image languages and presenting them through an appropriate aesthetic, I follow a notion from a Taiwanese illustrator, Dustin Yang, who believes that “serious issues should be presented attractively; subtle ideas should be examined”. When we deal with a theme that contains many sensitive issues, we cannot declare a universal solution. We can only understand in this moment, how to show the audience one promising solution.

“Distance” as a concept is a very subtle inspiration guiding my creations on various levels. Sometimes, the subject is too close to see the truth of things. In the process of developing my work I found the concept of distances deeply affecting my work. Because of my background in geography, I am interested in the representations of distances on the map that is the beauty of cartography. My two-dimensional work that represents the information concerning distances, scale, and motivations provides me a unique perspective to make graphic works.

While graphic design is mainly based on two-dimensional perspectives, my work attempts to create a space for the audience to “walk around” the work, in order to experience the a process of ‘relocating.’ Therefore, I use the lenticular, or 3-D printing as the fundamental method to illustrate a dynamic environment. To accompany the story I wrote, I have created 2D motion graphics and projected it on each side of a lenticular template. The lenticular effects will allow people to walk from side to side, when the viewers experience the art from a distance, they will have a different visual experience than when they interact with the art at close range. At a distance, they will be unable to experience the detailed elements, which that are deliberately scaled down and composed into a graphic, but close up they, the viewer, will lose the ability to see the bigger picture.

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