THE THINGS WE TAKE WITH US
MAY 2024-APRIL 2025
CINCINNATI, OH
STORYTELLING & PRINT DESIGN
SENIOR CAPSTONE PROJECT
The University of Cincinnati has a robust co-op program where every other semester, students leave campus to work a full-time internship for four months. Having experienced this program first hand, the cities I’ve lived in during my internships and the experiences I’ve had throughout the program have fundamentally changed who I am and how I experience the world. With my capstone, I aim to share the stories of upperclassmen who have been through the co-op program and the experiences they’ve had.
WHAT IS IT?
An anthology of essays from communication design upperclassmen reflecting on their experiences of personal growth throughout their co-op journey. WHAT’S THE DELIVERABLE?
A publication that acts as it’s own artifact, encapsulating these stories and experiences in time. WHO IS IT FOR?
Targeted towards underclassmen who are in their first year of the program and about to search for their first co-op. WHY?
To provide a candid and honest resource about co-op and the personal growth that accompanies it.
COLLECTING THE CONTENT THROUGH MAPPING
Since my project centers specifically around communication design’s co-op program, I had to collect all the written content that would make up my project. I used different sorting and mapping activities during 1:1 interviews to talk to upperclassmen about their co-op experiences.
JOURNEY MAPPINGTo get an overall sense of each interviewees’ experience of the program as a whole, I had them map out their journey on a scale of best of times to worst of times. This would allow me to get a sense of how each semester impacted the next and set the tone for the interview of things they mentioned I wanted to dig deeper into later.
EXPERIENCE MAPPINGI brought printed out maps to all my interviews of all the places each interviewee had been on co-op as well as mapped a couple places they submitted prior to the interview to spark conversation about each place and how it was meaningful and why.
WHAT IS THE NARRATIVE?
After collecting all my content through interviews, I was swimming in experiences to include in my project. I had to sort through all my transcripts and decide how I wanted to frame my project in order to define my content.
SYNTHESIZING THE CONTENT COLLECTED
I organized all the stories that stuck out to me into different themes and then chose four that I wanted to focus on. The stories I decided to tell fall into four categories: (1) figuring our who you are and who you want to be, (2) wanting to make the most of your experience, (3) learning how to be an adult, and (4) the transition between semesters. After that, I began to group the stories into loose chapters, beginning to think through the ordering of experiences and the cadence of the overall project. I started to pick out overarching conceptual themes that represent students’ experiences as well as different visuals and pull quotes I could pair with each story.
GETTING A SENSE OF PACE AND LAYOUTOnce I had my content synthesized and defined, I laid out all the copy and began placing in where imagery spreads would go, thinking through the structure of each chapter and the overall project.
CONTENT INFORMING DESIGN
To properly tell these stories within my project, I dug into my content. Once content was edited and finalized, I printed it all out, read through it, and marked it up. I challenged myself to really consider the body copy. How can the emotion within the stories come through in the typesetting? In order to properly do that, I first had to fully understand and digest the content.
How can the emotion within the stories come through in the typesetting?
EXPRESSIVE BODY COPYBased off of my annotations, I began typesetting. What does uncertain body copy look like? What does distracted body copy look like? How can line breaks emphasize different phrases? How can I leverage alignment to convey meaning? These were the questions I asked myself all while keeping the content readable.
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MESSY, ARCHIVAL, & SINCERE
ARCHIVAL & DOCUMENTARIANThe typography is inspired by typewriters and analog filing systems. The type catalogs students’ experiences throughout their co-op rotations. The typography is meant to feel like it is archiving these stories and experiences.
MESSY & PERSONALThe imagery leveraged artifacts collected through students’ co-op rotations, the physical things we have taken with us, to support the written content. Pairing these artifacts with photos and hand written elements conveys how personal and meaningful people’s experiences are as well as communicating the messy nature of figuring out who your are and who your want to be is.
‘THE THINGS WE TAKE WITH US’ CONCEPT TEST PRINT
For class critique, I printed out the explorations and spreads I had to get a sense of how the project is coming together. Seeing the publication physically in front of me allowed me to assess the cadence of the project overall and what spreads achieve the tone and feel I want.
WHAT COMES NEXT
Next, I’m defining my design system with global and local rules, allowing room for the messy moments of figuring it out and the quiet moments of reflection within the project. I currently working on flushing out all the imagery and spreads to be test printed and reviewed before final production for the senior showcase at the end of April.