Creative Encounters ::: Exploring the Art of “Thinking Through Making”

Print/Moving poster
Creative scholarship
Collage collaboration

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2025— GOLD Winner in the Graphis 2025 poster awards competition︎︎︎ International.

In Fall 2023, I teamed up with Associate Professor Courtney Windham to create a series of promotional materials for a conference panel session, ‘Creative Encounters: Exploring the Art of “Thinking Through Making”,’ for the MACAA Satellite Virtual Conference hosted by Auburn University on March 21-23, 2024.

Motion design

A version of the poster series was animated and posted to multiple platforms. The promotional campaign was highly successful, garnering submissions from diverse regions of the U.S.. The campaign culminated in selecting 8 outstanding proposals from a pool of 12 proposals. The panel will feature two engaging sessions dedicated to exploring the unique creative encounters experienced by fellow designers, educators, and students.

We define the panel’s theme—'creative encounters'—as a pivotal moment in design where unexpected connections are made, often in overlooked situations. This process liberates designers from conventional thinking, fostering the pursuit of new insights and knowledge. These encounters can challenge existing perceptions with surprising connections, yet they also spark intuitive leaps, serendipitous discoveries, and reflective moments, paving the way for transforming abstract ideas into tangible creations. To illustrate this concept, we joined our image-making processes in two experimental sessions. In the first session, I presented photographic remnants from past explorations︎︎︎—while Courtney contributed various typographic sources and custom AI-generated images.

In the following session, I created and printed several 11x17in layouts in order to explore different arrangements of the poster information. These layouts helped us to come up with creative ideas for placing our cutouts, while also responding to the typographic landscape. Subsequently, we digitally enhanced four collaged posters.

Tools ::: Circle and square punch set, xacto knife, glue sticks.

Font in use ::: News Gothic MT Std.