Lauren Mehl

For this quad group project, we were each assigned a Detroit sports team, and created an identity for an idea inspired by the team's history, ideology, and impact on the city. If you've ever been to a Detroit FC game, you'll know their fans, called the Northern Guard. Their strong, vocal, in-your-face LGBTQ activism combined with community-first, grass-roots club culture allows Detroit’s fans to be expressive, unrestricted, and supportive of a common goal: Detroit soccer played in Hamtramck. However, the city has been passing anti-LGBTQ legislation lately that puts its community members at risk for discrimination, and not having access to the same civil rights as other citizens. Our audience is LGBTQ teens who already have an interest in sports but feel as though the culture is inaccessible. What they don’t know, is that our football club is anything but the status quo. We want our audience to know that the community they’re looking for is right here in Hamtramck, waiting for them to join and become even stronger. Lauren Mehl, Brandi Witek, Lizzy Stapleton, Jeanne Lepley-Savoye

In this 3-week design sprint duo project, we were tasked with creating a branding system or campaign for the #WHYVOTE USA contest by Creative Conscience and VoiceBox. Given both of our ties to working class backgrounds, we decided to focus on people in our generation who work in the trades and are not in school. We want first-time voters currently in the workforce to understand how their votes are important, specifically as it relates to their career. By using their right to vote, trades workers are protecting the policies that will protect their business and livelihood for years to come. ** SECOND PLACE WINNERS IN NATIONWIDE CONTEST ** Lauren Mehl, Kate Dembowski

Reframing the mindset of an American idea, this duo campaign is coming to the defense of all transgender Americans throughout history. We found that older generations, particularly Gen X and Boomers, though they were around for much of this history, still lack education on what being transgender is and how it works. This is largely due to things like the AIDS epidemic and other systemic discrimination tactics in the late 1900s that kept the broader public unaware of trans issues, struggles, and ways of life, directly leading to more hate and violence-based discrimination, especially lately with new restrictive transition laws. Trans Truth aims to highlight the rich history and existence of the trans and broader LGBTQ community through political rally style merch, social media posts, and public signage. It’s about getting the audience of Conservative Americans to support trans rights in a way they might not even expect, giving them the power of understanding encouraging them to listen and learn for themselves just as conservative media outlets do. Lauren Mehl, Sierra Chisenhall

As a personal project between semesters, I took on "EVIL," the final track on Melanie Martinez's PORTALS album. The visual inspiration pulls from the artist's strong visual aesthetic and music style, influenced by her own live performances along with music videos for the album and broader story it tells. "EVIL" dives into revenge, karma, and the desire for payback from a situation where the author felt wronged. Combining the lush, vibrant magenta and blooming plant life with decayed, rotten greens and browns, showing both the beauty of her authentic emotions and how her "evil" thoughts corrupt the world she has created within the song.

As an exploration of visual and musical narrative, for this video I focused on "Full Circle" by Movements. As this was the first of many motion pieces I would make, for this song I focused on using kinetic typography movement to capture the energy and rhythm of the music, presented with imagery of constantly moving water, drowning in emotions, circles and logic loops of intrusive thoughts, tossing and turning in concrete beds, and the sun rising to try again in the morning. These visual textures and concepts bring focus to the lyrics, illustrating themes of depression, uncertainty, and the never-ending cycle of mental health struggles present in the song's first verse and chorus.