AIGA Design CensuS
Adobe Design Achievement Awards Semifinalist 2017
Spring 2017 - Collaboration with Sara Remi Fields, Treat Swarstad, Lily Fulop, and Bettina Chou. Photo editing credits to Sara Remi.
ABOut the Census
The 2016 AIGA Design Census was made to gauge designers in the industry and to take a census of these professionals around the world. After receiving over 9,000 responses, AIGA released the data to the public, which enabled designers to have the opportunity to explore the census. In the spring of 2017, the junior Communications Design students at Carnegie Mellon University teamed up to visually represent the data gathered from the AIGA Design Census and to create a CMU Design Census to survey their alumni. The CMU Design Census aims to connect current students and alumni through shared experiences.
After receiving responses from CMU alumni, we created a collection of zines that represent the alumni who responded to our questionnaire; each zine describes their design style and a bit about their lives. Using these qualifiers, we imagined personas of the alumni - highlighting their design philosophies, aesthetics and insights. We encourage you to meet the designers from across the world through this website.
The website and introduction video have been created by Sara Remi and Treat with assistance from Emily. The visual system and print pieces were a collaboration of the entire team. Specifically, my role for the project was copy editing, analyzing data, ideating for the site graphics, creating 3 of the 15 zines, and collaborating on the design of poster.
Website
The website that we coded uses mixed media to allow the visitor to interact with and play with the AIGA census data. When a visitor first loads the website, a motion graphic walks them through what the AIGA census is and how we’ve represented different portions of it through our design. It encourages the visitor to click through our links and use their keyboard to play with the information.
Our site is hosted here.
Zines
A second portion of this project was to create a census of our own to send out to CMU Design School alumni and then to create a second visualization off of the collected data. Since we believed that CMU alumni are a part of the design community, we wanted to tie this portion of the project into that of the AIGA census.
Since there were 5 members of our team, each member created 3 of the 15 zines. To give an overall theme to each zine, we asked in our survey how the designer would categorize their signature style. The three zines I designed had the style names of Design for Humanity, Modern, and Successful.
The 15 zines packaged together can be sent to any firm or company that has CMU design alumni. When the package arrives, it can promote conversation, reminiscence, and story sharing.
Poster made of zines
When the 15 zines are opened fully and taped together, they create a large poster. The poster has many elements that represent Carnegie Mellon University’s Design program, such as a quote from a beloved professor, Dan Boyarski. The poster also includes, in small green type, all 15 of the signature style terms written in repetition. Similarly to the zine packaging, the poster also leads viewers back to the site by providing the URL for them to visit.
