Luke Fabricatore

One of the most influential designers of the digital age is Susan Kare. For a design research project, I chose to study her decades of work and document them in a new format. The outcome is a website that works like a timeline. It starts with her 1983 assignment with Macintosh 1 and concludes with a 2015 Pinterest rebrand. The timeline displays an abundant collection of assets, icons, typefaces, and more on a pixel grid, all unearthed from books and internet archives. The biggest struggle for the project was figuring out a good system to navigate the jungle of pixels onscreen. After many iterations and testing, I settled on creating a digital helper that moves around the timeline and provides some much-needed context. In figuring out how to explore the space myself, this project gave me a new understanding of the pixel. Having to recreate many of the assets for better clarity, I learned how tedious and impressive the craft is to design for systems with visual limitations. Kare navigated this space with precision and detail; the goal of my website was to demonstrate that.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is one of the most prestigious events for experimental film in the world. It comprises a fast collection of filmmaking styles and perspectives from a diverse list of submissions. To represent how incredible this event truly is, I designed a digital poster that distorts and adapts based on the submissions of those who view the poster. Upon scanning the QR code located on it, users are prompted to design their own letter that will become part of the cycle as this poster changes over time. The letter design tool utilizes several vector parameters that enable both freedom and rigidity in design simultaneously. The user can also select a ghost color, which continues to be on screen even after their letter has been replaced by someone else\'s. The poster spins similarly to a film roll, celebrating its past in pioneering 16mm experimental film. The poster is meant to be cyclical by design. It\'s always changing and adapting and will likely never look the same again, thanks to the built-in randomizer for new submissions. The films themselves explore concepts that are often very nonlinear, so this felt like the perfect way to represent that in its marketing. The poster was made primarily with JavaScript while utilizing PHP and SQL for storing user submissions and advanced CSS features to make it 3-dimensional.

Fuse Labs is a playful storefront concept for downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. It honors the city\'s rich furniture history and explores the future of furniture alongside Grand Rapids\'s sustainability goals. The store is designed to coincide with the 826 Literacy Program. 826 provides after-school assistance for students K-12 and is funded primarily by interesting boutique concepts at the front of every location. For this project, I built out a wide variety of applications to see that the brand would be fully utilized in every aspect of the store. The brand\'s concept entails buying old furniture from locals and repurposing the materials to create a modular series of products that all fit together. I invented and modeled a new interlocking mechanism called a \"connector\" that pairs with \"legs\" and \"tops\" to form many different items. The logo mark was designed to interchange like the products themselves, allowing for 16 possible configurations of the word \"Fuse.\" The colors intersperse vibrant playful tones with more cozy, neutral colors one would expect to find in their home. I designed inside and outside storefronts and advertising, mobile and desktop interactive websites, an instruction \"recipe\" book, and stationery to complete the project.

This project is focused around abstracting and defining a character. For me, that character was Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Seeing as Zuckerberg’s decisions at Meta have led to widespread mental health issues, a decline in user privacy, and a system of human data exploitation, I felt it only fitting to study him as a villain. The outcome is a series of cards that derive from playing the surrealist game. The rules are simple: think of people, places, and things that describe his character in a connotative way. For instance, I chose his animal to be Jackson’s Chameleon; it can mask itself in its environment while also being known for decimating entire ecosystems. The cards take heavy inspiration from the Corporate Memphis art style; it is most known as being the friendly, soulless medium through which many Silicon Valley giants communicate with their audience. I chose to subvert this art style and give meaning back to it. The images look nice at first glance but are very overt about their awful depictions. The cards work as a system to paint the character of Zuckerberg.