Auburn Students Honored in 2023 Graphis New Talent Awards

Several students in the School of Industrial and Graphic Design (SIGD) were recently recognized in the 2023 Graphis New Talent Awards. Graphis, an international publisher of books and awards for the visual communications industry, hosts this annual competition to recognize student designers who produce polished, professional work under the guidance of their professors.

Several students from Assistant Professor Devon Ward’s Introduction to Graphic Design class received Honorable Mentions. Students Deborah Yeseul Choi and Hannah Duff were recognized in the Vinyl category of the competition for their vinyl record packaging projects. Duff created an album cover for folk songs about cowboys using hand-drawn typography and photo collage to represent the highs and lows of life in the American West. Choi designed an album for the music of classical and electronic composer J.D. Robb, whose songs are composed of natural sounds that highlight electronic instruments. She pulled inspiration from the intensity of black-and-white punk zines and the wires of an electronic synthesizer.

Students Erika Donley, Avery Rains and Susanna Wiggins were awarded an Honorable Mention in the Interactive Design category for their UI/UX design work. They created an app that helps users to understand the concepts and complex structures in human anatomy, specifically focusing on the organs of the body. Their app design was fun and interactive while also allowing students to learn new information and reinforce it with games and quizzes.

Three of Associate Professor Courtney Windham’s students from Design II received Silver Awards. Their assignment was to create a poster design and animate it with AfterEffects techniques to utilize print and motion in a dynamic way. Student Mackenzie King won for her Innovations Creative Coding Symposium poster animation. She worked with a column grid and focused on meshing the robotic qualities of coding with the more fluid qualities of art to promote Iterations, a coding conference in Amsterdam. Camille Ford won for her Tinkerers Studio poster animation that advertised an event at the National Children’s Museum in Washington, D.C., She used simple shapes and bright colors to allude to physics and engineering in a way that was entertaining and childlike. Catherine Moore won a Silver Award for her animated poster promoting the film “Fire of Love,” a National Geographic documentary about husband and wife volcanologists.

Moore was also recognized with an Honorable Mention in the Film/Video Design category for an independent project she did under the guidance of Assistant Professor Mario Bocanegra. She created a title sequence for a fictional film she named “Infinite Ways to Draw the Sun.” Moore utilized geometric shapes, handwritten type, animated textures and application of effects to illustrate artistry and ingenuity.