Ethan Cwiek

For this partner project I did with another Natalie Orlando, the goal was to take an existing idea, and reframe it for a different audience. So the topic which we had chosen was immigration, which has quite polarizing opinions here in the USA. Our goal was to create a brand that represented the immigration of people as not something to be looked down upon but something to be celebrated. We chose bold yet contrasting colors as well a different geometric shapes as an abstract to show everyone’s differences and how we may not all look alike or fit well together, but should do what we can to come together to build something bigger and strengthen our communities.

The objective of this project was to create a series of compositions centered around a single object which had a certain level of significance to me, with the one I chose being a Sony Camcorder. This object had been in my family since I was little and was one which much of my early childhood was witness to. The next task was to research every aspect of it and explore its meaning, history, uses & functions, societal implications, personal experience, etc. I then took many photographs of my camcorder, explored all possible angles, lighting scenarios, and focusing. Next, I printed out the best images taken and began to explore the connotative and denotative meaning of the object, specifically by hand drawing different words, phrases, or sayings on the paper which would relate to the composition or meaning in some way. Lastly came refining these images by digitally reproducing our sketches in Illustrator, playing around with only a few typefaces to keep a similar aesthetic running throughout my 20 photos. Ultimately this project taught me to search out the hidden symbolic meanings of objects, and how different photography and lighting methods play a crucial role in the outcome of a composition.

For this group project I helped create alongside Martina Lasku and Emily Zhang, our goal was to choose a city in the US and imagine, based on environmental, political, and technological factors, what communication will look like in the given city 50 years from now, in the year 2074. Although many groups in our class had a dystopian outlook of our future, we chose to make our future society a utopia, focused on new advancements in technology that foster community and inclusion. We decided on Marquette, Michigan due to its beauty, it’s position by the water, as well as it’s abundant natural resources. But in regards to the core of this project with our communication plan, we believed our future society would be a mix of people from many different cultures speaking many different languages. So our final alphabet was devised using primarily latin letterforms, but also intermixing bits of Esperanto and Arabic; Esperanto due to its easy learnability to many languages, and Arabic due to the large Arab population currently residing in Michigan. Overall this project taught my group to think on a larger scale and to understand the different impacts the physical world has on how humans communicate to one another.

This project’s task was to choose an artist and create a piece which shows off their work all while having the design emulate the process and value of their work, without just outright copying their style. The designer I chose for my piece was Ikko Tanaka, a prolific Japanese graphic designer well known from the 1950s until his death in the early 2000s. His work included a vast variety of print media, packaging, as well as advertisements and branding. The piece which I decided to create was a 28 page book chronicling the timeline of Tanaka’s work, exploring his portfolio as a sequence and telling his story at the same time. In Terms of the book’s design, I went with a simplistic theme with a white and dark gold color scheme weaving throughout the book in forms that change shape with every page. Although not drawing directly from Tanaka’s work to form the aesthetic of the piece, I thought more about his broader approach to creating art as inspiration. Tanaka’s art was well known for incorporating traditional Japanese elements with modern design styles, and this is what made his art stand out in the crowd in my opinion. So I decided that my book would combine two unlike ideas into one, which started from my idea to make the title of the book out of two contrasting typefaces. Overall, making this book helped me to understand better how to create a system, and how to integrate it but not duplicate it.

This project is probably the most abstract project I have completed during my education at CCS. Ultimately the only specificity was that this project should somewhat revolve around ourselves and our life experiences. So with keeping this in mind, I decided to focus on a unique characteristic I have. Synesthesia is a mental condition where a person has sensory overlaps in their brain that make specific connections with no reasonable correlation. I have a type of Synesthesia which allows me to see specific colors and scenery depending on the type of music, including tempo, key, etc. So for my end result, I created an interactable installation using figma along with a three button controller I handmade with cardboard and copper wire that allowed users to go through 12 songs which I handpicked that show a wide variety of the many different colorful scenes that play out in my mind while experiencing music. Each of these 12 songs has a corresponding video I created that demonstrates what I see. These videos collages of sorts combine many different overlayed clips, most of which are pulled from the National Archive.