Riley Hamady

This assignment had us pick a designer or genre of design and research all we needed to make something to educate others about the designer or genre. I decided to pick the Big 5 of the psychedelic poster movement of the \'60s and \'70s in San Francisco, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoco, Rick Griffin, Wes Wilson, and Stanley Mouse. At first, I planned on making a set of posters but after some consideration, I decided a newspaper would best represent my research. Each of the men got their page that tells their stories of how they got into this style of design and what was going on culturally that influenced how people viewed the world and design. This was one of my favorite projects as it pushed my boundaries and I gained so much publication design experience.

In Advanced Screenprinting we were in charge of creating our projects the entire semester and we had a lot of freedom to do whatever we wanted. During this time I was working a lot with historical queer button pins and queer history. I\'d been wanting to create a paper quilt for a while so I decided to combine these ideas in my brain and make it into a big project. I picked out a few pins and images that would translate well in screen print form and using layers of screenprinted colored paper and textures and hand stitched border I made this beautiful piece that makes me proud.

The objective for this was to find a data set online that we found interesting and create an interactive data visualization. After looking for a bit I found a set of data from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice that had a list of over 500 of their death row inmates from 1982-2023 and their last statements. I wanted to take this data and show the dark reality of death row and how the last words serve as the final page of one\'s life story, closing the chapter with permanence.

I wanted to show some of the principles I live by in my personal life and my design life. The world is insane and it\'s easy to be awful to yourself. Take time to appreciate the little things in life, especially the things that bring you joy, the little things will bring out the bigger ideas.